Global Research

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein made a direct appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters – and the Vermont Senator himself – during a Monday rally near the Democratic National Convention (DNC).

“Forget the lesser evil, fight for the greater good,” Stein said, referring to her Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton while the crowd chanted “Jill, not Hill!” 

“We are the revolution,” she added.

In response to the DNC’s apology to Bernie Sanders for the emails that caused chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down this week, Stein said: “They did much more than say bad things. They sabotaged a revolutionary campaign.”

She later told RT in an interview that her campaign’s fundraising efforts have skyrocketed since Sanders endorsed Clinton ahead of the DNC.

The medical doctor also said she would step down as the Green Party’s candidate if Sanders wanted to run on that ticket.

However, Dr Cornel West – a Bernie backer and former member of the DNC’s platform committee who went on to endorse Stein over Clinton after he was disillusioned by the process – told RT that he was disappointed by Sanders’ decision to endorse the former secretary of state.

The Jill Stein rally of hundreds of people spilled out of a large tent set up in the so-called “Free Speech Zone” in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, located next to the convention venue. A ferocious thunderstorm forced Stein and several supporters to a safety area under a freeway overpass.

Stein used the opportunity to make a second speech, this time with a bullhorn, for those waiting out the storm.

A recent poll taken after last week’s Republican Convention shows Stein in fourth place behind Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson with three percent of the vote, according to a RealClearPolitics aggregator.

She requires 15 percent to be included in the upcoming debates. Stein and her 2012 running mate Cheri Honkala were detained when trying to debate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012.

“I think our arrest and holding in a blacksite was just one piece of evidence of the many ways we are not a democracy,” Stein told RT. “We basically silence political opposition and we keep people off the ballot, out of the debates, and out of the media. The kind of collusion that you saw revealed in the emails that were released reveal what’s going on here with the corporate press, the Hillary campaign, and the DNC. So if that was going on with Bernie Sanders, might there also be something going on [with] other political opponents? We are a very inconvenient truth, as another woman who is actually a progressive candidate.”

The Greens will hold their convention in Houston, Texas next weekend, where Stein is expected to officially receive the nomination. Although she has yet to pick a running mate, West said he would not accept an offer if extended by Stein, since that’s “not his calling.”

Speaking during a live Periscope after Bernie Sanders’ speech, one of his delegates from New Mexico said she is now backing Stein over Sanders, while another is still undecided and will consider backing the Green Party. Neither of them said they would back Trump.

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A major confrontation is in the making at Canada Post. On the one hand, post office management is seeking to extract a series of far ranging concessions from its workers. On the other, those workers and their union, Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), are not simply prepared to resist these demands, but are determined to use the opportunity to negotiate a new collective agreement to pursue an agenda that advances equality within the workplace and the expansion and renewal of vital public services. The importance of this struggle lies in the fact that its outcome will be of enormous significance not only to the lives of postal workers, but to all public sector workers and indeed to future workers as well.

Canada Post has once again taken an aggressive approach to the current negotiations, tabling a long list of demands for significant concessions in work rules and benefits that would roll back many of the advances made by postal workers over the past two decades. Indeed, they applied for conciliation, the first step toward putting themselves in position to lockout CUPW before all these demands were even tabled.

The Issues

The most striking concession demanded was to call for a two-tier pension system where current workers would continue to have a defined benefit plan, but new hires would merely have a defined contribution plan [really just a glorified RRSP], effectively dividing postal workers along generational lines. While the shift to defined contribution plans – in whole or just for new workers – has become fairly common in the corporate sector, they are rare in the public sector and then have only involved small groups of workers. Canada Post’s rationale is that meeting the new legal requirement that all pension plans within federal jurisdiction be ‘fully funded’ [i.e. have enough funds to cover all liabilities in the event they totally ceased operations entirely] would be unaffordable. However, the requirement itself is unrealistic as the post office, like other public organizations is not about to disappear and the post office should join CUPW in opposing it. This demand, together with demands for changes in the collective agreement to allow for the greater use of part-time and casual labour reflects the permanent austerity imposed on the public sector and is intended to ensure the public sector labour market tracks the spread of precarious work in the private sector.

Canada Post’s demands for concessions aren’t the only issues involved in the dispute. The back-to-work legislation in 2011 that brought an end to the previous round of negotiations saddled CUPW members with an iniquitous contract and postal workers have some demands of their own. Understandably, they are looking for a reasonable pay increase, but they are also demanding pay equity for CUPW’s rural mail carriers, mostly women, who earn almost 30 per cent less than urban mail carriers. Canada Post had long insisted that rural mail carriers were independent contractors who had no right to unionize. In 2003 CUPW managed to get Canada Post to agree to recognize the rural mail carriers’ right to unionize but had to acquiesce to their existing lower pay rate. Since then, they have struggled to eliminate it. It was a major issue in the last round of negotiations but progress was derailed by the Tories’ 2011 back-to-work legislation which referred the dispute to binding arbitration under terms that were extremely unfavourable to postal workers.

Underlying these issues is a deep disagreement over the future direction of the post office. Due to technological changes associated with the internet, letter mail volumes have been falling, although parcel volume has grown. While the post office has earned a ‘profit’ virtually every one of the last 15 years, revenue growth has been quite modest, threatening its ability to meet the requirement to be self-sustaining. But whereas Canada Post’s strategy for dealing with this is to place the burden of adjusting to change on the backs of postal workers, and the citizenry by searching for ways to reduce labour costs and services [i.e. replacing door-to-door mail delivery with Community Mail Boxes], possibly in a lead up to privatizing mail delivery, CUPW is urging the post office to expand services.

Initially, this centred on calling for the creation of a postal bank using the post offices throughout the country as local branches as is common in many countries in the world from England to Japan. They argued that a postal bank would be a new source of revenue for the post office as well as providing desperately needed banking services in the many towns, reserves and poorer areas of cities that commercial banks have abandoned. Even where banks remain physically present, exorbitant fees and other requirements make them inaccessible to many poor people.

Recently, this vision has been substantially expanded. Working with ACORN, the authors of the LEAP Manifesto, the Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association and Friends of Public Services among others, they have developed a view of the post office as playing a central role in building a more ecologically sustainable and more equal society. Titled Delivering Community Power, it envisions transitioning the post office to a green public institution that employs a fleet of renewably powered vehicles, provides charging stations for electric vehicles, serves as an innovation hub, and provides expanded services to the ill and elderly, with much of the financing coming from the revenues generated by a postal bank. This is probably the most imaginative proposal to come out of the labour movement in the west since the 1976 plan developed by Lucas Aerospace workers in England to counter the threat of layoffs due to technological change and spending cuts by converting the arms manufacturer to peaceful production. DevelopingCommunity Power is still a ‘work in progress’ that holds out the prospect of becoming a larger conversation about the future of Canada Post and other public services, as well as union bargaining strategies.

State of Negotiations

On July 5th, the 21 day ‘cooling off’ period that is part of the conciliation process under the Canada Labour Code ended, and the post office promptly gave the requisite 72 hours’ notice of its intent to lockout CUPW members – on July 8. It looked as if we were headed for a repeat of 2011 when Canada Post locked out CUPW and the government promptly followed with back-to-work legislation. However, 2016 is not 2011 and the Trudeau Liberals are not the Harper Conservatives. It’s not just that the nasty divisive rhetoric of the Harper era, not least the constant vilification of the public sector and public sector workers, [except for the police and prisons] has ceased. There have also been some concrete advances such as the reinstatement of the long form census as well as a long overdue expansion of the Canada Pension Plan.

That said, it is important not to overstate the magnitude of the changes or to ignore the many critical continuities. As the Liberals’ support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) makes clear, the government remains committed to sustaining the neoliberal politics of freer markets that increase the power of capital and impose permanent austerity for the public sector and public sector workers. This pattern of modest positive changes together with continued fealty to an austerity agenda is evident in the Liberals’ approach to the post office as well. They have left the existing management regime headed by the Harper appointed CEO, Deepak Chopra, in place, and despite promising to restore door-to-door mail delivery, they only halted further cuts pending the completion of review of options for the future of postal services. It is likely that Canada Post’s rush to lockout CUPW partly reflected the regime’s desire to pre-empt any unwanted outcomes from that review.

But, this time around, the government was not so anxious for a work stoppage and/or prepared to legislate an end to one if it happened at this point. This is partly connected to the Ontario Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the Harper government’s 2011 back-to-work legislation ending Canada Post’s lockout of CUPW violated the union’s freedom of association and interfered with the “balance of collective bargaining.” It also seems reluctant to mar the ‘sunny ways’ aura surrounding it. Nor could it ignore the impact of CUPW’s well-conceived bargaining and messaging strategy. As a result, Canada Post was forced to back track. First, it extended the deadline by 3 days and then on July 11, it withdrew the notice of its intent to lockout CUPW and announced a renewed commitment to negotiations.

This is not to suggest the government has much sympathy for CUPW’s demands. In this respect, Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk’s suggestion that the parties consider binding arbitration is telling. It is common parlance that no arbitrator would issue a ruling in favour of people who are not yet employed by Canada Post. Further it is quite shocking that the Labour Minister would even suggest binding arbitration on the issue of the wage discrepancy between rural and urban letter carriers. As CUPW PresidentMike Palecek pointed out: “Paying women equally for work of equal value is the law of the land; it’s not something that can be awarded or withheld by an arbitrator.”

Looking Ahead

It would appear that we are in the midst of the ‘calm before the storm’. Evidently, Canada Post is committed to extracting concessions from its workforce and there is little likelihood that CUPW will acquiesce to Canada Post’s demands without a fight – not least to the demand for an inferior pension plan for future, younger, workers. Two-tier pay systems that require workers with different pay and/or benefits to work side-by-side offends most workers’ sense of justice and solidarity and many will go to great lengths to avoid this situation. In 2009, for example, steelworkers in Sudbury and Port Colborne struck for almost a year in an unsuccessful bid to block Vale Inco’s imposition of a two-tiered pension system. [Ed.: see Bullet No. 253 and Bullet No. 395.]

CUPW, with its commitment to equality between male and female workers, as well as full and part time workers, that goes back to the 1970s, is unlikely to act any differently. Indeed, when faced with an attempt by management to create a new lower classification in conjunction with the introduction of new technology back in 1974, they struck illegally to block it. For the same reason, CUPW is unlikely to simply abandon its demand for equal pay for rural carriers.

In this respect, the grassroots coalitions of union, student, anti-poverty and environmental activists that have already sprung up in cities such as Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, Toronto and Vancouver are encouraging, and no doubt there will be many others. However, it will be necessary to engage the major public and private sector unions with their much greater resources and potential mobilizing capacities – all of whose members have a real stake in the outcome. This is so clearly the case for unions in the federal public sector whose members will be next in line if Canada Post succeeds in imposing a two-tier pension system on CUPW. But it is also the case that unions in the private sector, many of whom are struggling to overcome the divisiveness created by having accepted two-tier wage and benefit systems, have a real stake in the outcome. A CUPW defeat would only strengthen the forces pushing them into the race to the bottom which is inimical with their members’ interests.

It is urgently necessary that the union leaderships take the initiative in building the requisite mobilization, in concert with CUPW. Unfortunately, past experience reveals that this can by no means be taken for granted. For example, meaningful efforts by USW, let alone the CLC to build support for Vale Inco workers in 2009 were noticeably absent. As for the PSAC, its efforts to build support for a strike by a small group of its members working for the OLG [Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, operates gambling in the province of Ontario] near Ottawa where pension issues were central to the dispute were inadequate and failed to prevent a significant defeat.

Activists need to find ways to put pressure on the leaders of both public and private sector unions, insisting that they go beyond perfunctory statements of support, and even promises of financial assistance, to communicate the importance of the issues to their members and to commit significant resources to mobilizing concrete solidarity with postal workers.

We also need to communicate support for postal workers to the government. Messages from individuals and groups to the government and individual MPs should not only call on the government to press the post office to drop its demands for concessions and respond positively to CUPW’s demands, but also express support for CUPW’s proposals for the future of the postal service. For details see www.CUPW.ca/CanadaPostReview. Equally importantly, we should also communicate support for expanding postal services directly to the Task Force on the future of Canada Post at www.Canada.ca/CanadaPostReview •

Evert Hoogers is a former CUPW National Union Representative. Donald Swartz and Rosemary Warskett both taught at Carleton University for many years.

A senior French police officer has claimed that the interior ministry “harassed” her into altering a security report from the deadly terrorist attack in Nice.

Sandra Bertin, the officer in charge of Nice’s CCTV control room, told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper on Sunday that an unnamed interior ministry official contacted her after the attack and pressured her into altering her report for the night of the incident.

On July 14, a truck driver plowed through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, killing 84 people and wounding 200 others.

Bertin claims that she was “harassed for an hour” by the official who wanted her to detail the presence of local and national police at the fireworks event where the carnage took place.

“The national police were perhaps there, but I couldn’t see them on the video,” she said, adding, “He ordered me to put in (the report) the specific positions of the national police which I had not seen on the screen.”

She also said that the person from the ministry told her to email her report in a “modifiable form … so they didn’t have to type it all out again.”

France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (seen below) has dismissed the claims and has announced that he will sue Bertin for defamation.

“It will be very useful if Madame Sandra Bertin could be questioned by the investigators and could give them the names and positions of the people she is accusing, the emails she is talking about and their contents,” he said in a statement.

“Unworthy accusations are part of the virulent polemic that certain elected representatives in Nice have wanted to encourage and feed every day since the terrible July 14 attack,” he added.

The 31-year-old Franco-Tunisian assailant in the attack, who was later shot dead by police, was identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.

The Daesh Takfiri terrorist group later claimed responsibility for the deadly attack in Nice. But, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said that no direct evidence has been found to link the attacker to the terrorists.

The European country has been in a state of emergency since last November, when assailants struck at least six different venues in and around the capital Paris, leaving 130 people dead and over 350 others injured. Daesh claimed responsibility for the horrendous assaults.

On Wednesday, the French parliament extended the country’s state of emergency for another six months.

Since last autumn we have seen a stream of volunteers coming to Samos to ‘help’ the refugees. It has been a new experience for us although we are aware that this type of humanitarian tourism has been around for some years and is said to be one of the fastest growing areas of the global tourist industry. (Guardian November 14 2010, ‘Before you pay to volunteer abroad, think of the harm you might do’.)

On Samos at least, the term ‘volunteer’ now has a specific meaning referring to those from outside the island who sign up to work with an NGO called Samos Volunteers. The term volunteer for example does not include the many local people who over the past 12 months did so much to support and sustain the thousands of refugees who landed here. Nor does it include the refugee activists who come to work on Samos but refuse to be bound by the rules and regulations of the authorities.

We write about our experience of the Samos volunteers with some care as we are aware that some of our critical observations might be hurtful and discouraging for the volunteers many of whom are passionate about helping the refugees here. It is always been our concern to write in ways which both inform and above all which might benefit the refugees. We make no excuse for wanting to try and make things better by changing the ways in which people think and act. We very much hope that the volunteers will take our words in the spirit in which they are intended which is to think more clearly and act more appropriately when trying to help to the refugees here.

Our Observations and Thoughts

1) The volunteers who come to Samos are very mixed. They are not all young ‘gap year’ tourists although many are students who have just completed some of their higher education. There has also been a significant minority who are older and recently retired. The overwhelming majority are European/North American/Australian middle class Caucasians. We have seen no volunteers from Muslim majority societies and even more surprisingly very few from Greece and none from Samos.

For some, Samos is their latest island. A surprising number can list a string of frontier islands from Lesvos to our north to Kos to our south where they have done some days or weeks of volunteering.

2) Samos Volunteers provides the key contact point and a system for the arriving volunteers. It is an NGO which is part of the network of officially recognised organisations working on the island including the other NGOs and state agencies. It has close ties with the local authority which in the past has provided free accommodation and key resources such as their store house. The downside is that it ties the volunteers into a system that remains part of the problem and not the solution.

3) Many volunteers stay for a very short time, often less than 4 weeks and some for only a few days. They tend to be here today and gone tomorrow. There is very little opportunity for them to engage effectively with the refugees given their stay is so brief. This applies especially to the younger children many of whom have been traumatised by the wars they are fleeing, the terrible journey to get to Samos and then the experience of the Camp. They thirst for stability and safety and many are desperate to learn fully aware that they have missed months and sometimes years of schooling. Many of the volunteers understandably want to work with children but their short stays can be problematic as it exposes the children yet again to a reality which has little stability.

4) We have been surprised by the volunteers’ general lack of curiosity and understanding of the situation they are working in. For example, we can’t recall many asking us about our experiences on Samos and the context here. It is as if it does not matter. They want to do something now. Activity and not understanding seems to be their main concern. Some are very poorly informed and worse, come with negative prejudices especially about young Muslim men which are so widespread in the western media. This week we heard 5 volunteers telling us that the people of Samos are against the refugees. This is not true and insulting to the islanders. Yes, the Samian authorities are antagonistic but not the majority of the islanders.

We suggested to some recent volunteers working in their clothing store that they should involve refugees in managing and organising the place given that the refugees are so stressed by boredom and inactivity. They are crying out to do something. But one responded that she had been warned not to talk to the refugees about the location of the store (which is near to the Camp) otherwise they would raid it and rob it. The volunteer co-ordinator was very concerned when we took a Syrian refugee to the store to choose a suitcase. We had made a big mistake they told us. Refugees were not to come there and certainly not to choose what they needed for themselves. 2 weeks earlier an activist was similarly outraged when she was told she could not bring a pregnant Afghani woman to the store to choose her clothes. We suspect that the rule of keeping refugees away from the store is imposed by the local authority and is a clear example of the kind of difficulties which result from being part of the ‘system’. Nevertheless, the volunteers seem to forget that everything in the store has been sent for the refugees. It is their stuff!

Sadly, many of the volunteers as well as many working for the NGOs here are similar in this respect: they rarely engage personally or deeply with refugees as partners. Some clearly don’t trust the refugees and believe that the refugees need discipline and surveillance when they get near to things they need! Refugees are too often seen as people you do things to even though you may well have no skills or experience yourself. Want to help with the kids? Off you go and do it. It is disrespectful and arrogant and in the main they don’t even think about it.

We have also seen a minority of volunteers behave like trophy hunters such as the 2 young Germans who were here a few weeks ago and did some painting with children. They were with the children for less than an hour (the volunteers wanted to go off to the beach). But still enough time for the kids to make some pictures. Until they were stopped it was their intention to take all these pictures back to Germany and not give them to the children.

Many are keen for photographs of themselves with refugees which are then posted on their Facebook pages to much acclaim from their friends for being such wonderful human beings. These volunteers want to be ‘the story’. Moreover, as with so many aspects of refugee practices and policies there is no transparency at all with respect to the funds which many raise to pay for their time in Samos. It is not clear to us that this is the best use of resources.

Most of the volunteers we meet have ‘good hearts’ even if their own personal self development seems to be the most important issue for them. They genuinely care. But the refugees need them to have good heads too.

5) There is a general lack of any kind of progressive political perspective on the part of most of the volunteers we have met. Samos Volunteers does not make any attempt to address the political orientations of those joining them. It is as if their assumed compassion is sufficient. Imagine having to confront a 21year old medical student from London who insisted that the Syrian refugees must take responsibility for the destruction of their country? Or who believe that the EU is right to deport them back to Turkey?

The contrast with the activists who ran the 2 Open Kitchens earlier this year couldn’t be greater. These activists worked with and built solidaristic relationships with the refugees. They made friends with the refugees, sitting and talking for hours together. You will rarely see a volunteer sitting in a café with a refugee drinking coffee.

Whatever we might write, we are not going to stop volunteers from coming to Samos any more than the EU is going to stop refugees from coming to Europe. There is rarely a week that passes when we don’t get messages on our Facebook page from those who want to come to Samos. We have no wish to stop them from coming here. There are so many opportunities for them to see first hand the cruelties of the system and hopefully, to use this experience ‘back home’ to press for change.

Overall we don’t feel that volunteers damage the refugees and with respect to clothes distribution they have made a difference to many but it could be so much better for it is not just a matter of what you do but how you do it. Some of their recent educational initiatives also look promising and make good use of the longer times the refugees now spend on Samos.

Concluding Thoughts

The questions we pose for the volunteers are ones we regularly ask ourselves. We don’t always have clear answers especially when we feel we are doing things which should be done by the authorities, including NGOs like MSF, Save the Children, Red Cross ….. as well as the UNHCR. Like government agencies these NGOs hold massive budgets but so much seems to be spent on themselves, their staff, their cars, apartments, meals, logos, offices, mini buses and so on and so on. The idea that this money should be passed on directly to the refugees is never considered and yet in our opinion this would be the most beneficial direct aid for most of the refugees. It would also help more people on Samos as with money in their pockets the refugees would spend it in the local shops and cafés, renting rooms and apartments and even starting their own enterprises here.

We all need to remember that we are not the story. We can never hope to get near to the experiences of the refugees but we can at least try and stand in their shoes and make that the starting point of our activity. It will not be enough but it might mean we can help in ways which shames and highlights the system’s inhumanity to our fellow human beings as well as demonstrating our solidarity and providing something however small which makes refugees stronger and not weaker.

The Chilcot Inquiry, set up to look into the British role in the war in Iraq, reported on July 6, and although it was overshadowed by the political fallout from the Brexit vote to leave the European Union, received a largely favorable reception from the media and commentators. It is unclear why those commentators judged it to be “hard-hitting” because in terms of its conclusions all it did was tell us what we already knew.

Then British Prime Minister Tony Blair pursued a war that was arguably illegal has had disastrous consequences, not least for the 179 British servicemen and women killed and their loved ones, but also for Iraq, its people and the fight against terrorism.

I was staggered by the rush to say the report was hard hitting. It wasn’t. It simply laid out the facts in a narrative format and let the reader decide. Those facts were of course damning but I struggle to find anything in the report that a well informed reader of British newspapers wouldn’t already know.

It was a very workmanlike narrative of what happened taken from secret documents and witness testimony and therefore providing far more detail than had been previously available but it was not anything like a proper inquiry in the real sense. It was more like a neutral court report than the solid analysis which was required, and what we actually got from the curiously much derided Butler report.

As a result of the Chilcot’s failure to carry out any detailed analysis of the evidence presented to his inquiry, it completely missed the extensive and conclusive evidence of a ten-month illegal air war by Britain and the U.S. designed to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse to go to war in Iraq.

All modern wars begin with an air war in which the enemy positions on the ground are “softened up” to make them easier to overcome. The Iraq War was no different in many ways. Except there was a difference. George W. Bush and Tony Blair didn’t tell us it was happening.

So why does this matter now?

It matters because the Iraq War didn’t begin on March 20, 2003 as everybody thought, it began ten months earlier on May 20, 2002 when the allies started the secret air war. It was definitely illegal because it started six months before the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441 which Tony Blair’s government later used to claim the war was legal.

(U.S. readers might also care to note that it started five months before Congress passed the so-called Iraq Resolution which authorized military action against Iraq.)

The secret air war, codenamed Operation Southern Force, was carried out under cover of the UN-authorized operation under which U.S. and RAF aircraft patrolled a so-called no-fly zone over southern Iraq to protect the Shia majority from Saddam’s forces.

Lt.-Gen. Michael Moseley, the U.S. Air Force commander of allied air operations over Iraq, told a conference at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in July 2003 that during Operation Southern Force allied aircraft dropped more than 600 bombs on “391 carefully selected targets.”

British and U.S. officials claimed at the time that the reason behind the increased air strikes carried out in the southern no-fly zone, was an increase in Iraqi attacks on allied aircraft. But Lt.-Gen. Moseley said the bombing of Iraqi positions in southern Iraq paved the way for the invasion and was the reason the allies were able to begin the ground campaign without first waging an extensive air war as they had done during the 1991 Gulf War.

Planning for the illegal air war began shortly after Tony Blair attended a summit with George Bush at the U.S. President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas on April 6 and 7, 2002. Chilcot confirmed evidence from a Cabinet Office Briefing Paper leaked to me as part of the “Downing Street Memos” back in the spring of 2005 that Mr. Blair agreed at Crawford “to support military action to bring about regime change” in Iraq.

The British Prime Minister didn’t waste any time sorting out what would happen next. Chilcot records that the very next day, April 8, 2002, Geoff Hoon, the U.K. Defense Secretary, called in Chief of Defense Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce (now Lord Boyce) and the Permanent Undersecretary at the Ministry of Defense (MoD) Sir Kevin Tebbit to discuss “military options” in Iraq.

Ten days later, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, Deputy Commander of RAF Strike Command, was sent to the U.S. to act as liaison with General Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. Central Command, who would lead the invasion force. Now Sir Brian, he told the Chilcot Inquiry that he had a meeting with Gen. Franks shortly after arriving at Central Command’s headquarters in Tampa, Florida, discussing the no-fly zones over Iraq “at some length.”

Nine days later, on April 26, Franks flew to London with Burridge for discussions with the U.K. defense chiefs. The Chilcot Report says they talked about the patrols of the no-fly zones with details of the discussions “circulated on very limited distribution.”

A week later, there was a top secret meeting in 10, Downing St. chaired by Blair and attended by Hoon, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Adm. Boyce. The Chilcot Report notes briefly that “Mr. Blair had a meeting on Iraq with Mr. Straw, Mr. Hoon and Adm. Boyce on 2 May but there is no record of the discussion.”

It’s worth pointing out that the Downing Street note which describes that key meeting in such brazenly bare detail was initially provided to the Butler Inquiry which first looked at the intelligence provided to back the war in Iraq in 2004. So the cover-up goes back at least to then and in reality far beyond.

Three days later after that secretive Downing Street meeting, Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Defense Secretary, flew to London for talks with Mr. Hoon, following which British officials announced changes to the rules of engagement in the no-fly zones making it easier for allied aircraft to attack Iraqi military positions.

Simon Webb, then Mod policy director, told the Chilcot inquiry that the Americans had proposed “changing the nature of the no-fly zone, quite a lot of which we were persuaded about but which a part of we weren’t persuaded about … and stood aside from.”

As one of the Mod’s most senior civil servants, Webb was spouting the sort of doublespeak of which the writers of BBC Television’s Yes, Minister would have been very proud. The key words there are not “stood aside from” but “quite a lot of which we were persuaded about.”

On 20 May 2002, allied aircraft began ramping up the number of attacks on Iraqi positions. Throughout the first few months of 2002, they had dropped barely any bombs on Iraq. But answers to parliamentary questions asked by Liberal Democrat MP Sir Menzies Campbell (now Lord Campbell), reveal that during those last ten days of May alone, U.S. and U.K. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone dropped 7.3 tons of bombs on Iraqi positions.

Far from standing aside, as Webb claimed in his testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry, RAF aircraft dropped more than two thirds of those bombs, a total of 4.9 tons.

Throughout the summer of 2002, both British and U.S. aircraft continued to bomb southern Iraq under cover of the no-fly zone while Blair and Hoon insisted that nothing was happening. The Defense Secretary told a cabinet meeting on 20 June 2002 that “except for continuing patrols in the no-fly zones, no decisions have been taken in relation to military operations in Iraq.”

During defense questions in the House of Commons on Monday 15 July 2002, Hoon told Labour MP Alice Mahon that: “Absolutely no decisions have been taken by the British Government in relation to operations in Iraq or anywhere near Iraq … I can assure the House that any such decision would be properly reported to the House.”

The next day, Blair appeared before the Parliamentary Liaison Committee. Asked if the U.K. was “preparing for possible military action against Iraq,” Blair replied: “No, there are no decisions which have been taken about military action.”

Tony Blair and his Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon were able to claim throughout 2002 that no decision had been taken on military action because the truth of what was taking place in southern Iraq under cover of the UN-authorized no-fly zones was kept on an extremely tight “need to know” basis. Even fairly senior British officials believed the increased air strikes were simply the result of the relaxation of the rules of engagement.

A week later, on Tuesday 23 July 2002, Blair was due to have a meeting with his war cabinet. In preparation for that meeting, the Cabinet Office produced a briefing paper which was one of the Downing St. Memos leaked to me when I was on the Sunday Times. It warned the participants that: “When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the U.K. would support military action to bring about regime change.”

This represented a problem for British policy-makers, the Cabinet Office briefing paper said.

“We need now to … encourage the U.S. Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the no fly zones,” the briefing paper said. “This is particularly important for the U.K. because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action.”

This is all the evidence we need to show that the air war was illegal. Those conditions in which Britain could legally support military action did not yet exist. They had to be created. So although it was clearly not known to the officials who drafted the briefing paper, RAF aircraft and for that matter RAF servicemen were already involved in military action against Iraq which was not legal under the U.K. interpretation of international law.

The minutes of that war cabinet meeting on July 23 became best known for comments by Sir Richard Dearlove, the then head of MI6, who had just returned from a trip to Washington DC to see his CIA counterpart George Tenet. He told the meeting that the intelligence was being “fixed around the policy” in America.

But Hoon said something even more interesting. U.S. aircraft overflying southern Iraq had begun “spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.” He did not mention that RAF aircraft were also taking part in the attacks. Presumably some of his colleagues in the war cabinet were unaware of that fact and the lack of an official record for the May 2 meeting suggests that both Blair and Hoon thought it sensible not to have the British participation on record.

The attacks continued through June, July and August with both U.S. and British aircraft carrying out increased bombing but nevertheless failing to provoke the Iraqis into a reaction which might give the allies an excuse for war.

The attacks needed to be ramped up still further.

On September 5 2002, more than 100 allied aircraft, both U.S. and British, attacked an Iraqi air defense facility in western Iraq on September 5, 2002, in what was believed to be a prelude to the infiltration of special forces into Iraq from Jordan. The RAF saw it as such a success that it was reported on the front page of the official publication RAF News.

During September, allied aircraft dropped 54.6 tons of munitions on southern Iraq of which 21.1 tons were dropped by RAF aircraft. In October, they dropped 17.7 tons of which 11.4 tons, roughly two-thirds, were British.

The Iraq Resolution authorizing U.S. military action against Iraq was not passed by Congress until the early hours of October 11, 2002, five months after the start of Operation Southern Force, the secret air war preparing the way for the invasion.

UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which the U.K. Government would later claim made the war legal, was not passed until November 8, 2002, six months after the secret air war began.

It was not until March 17, 2003 that British Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith formally confirmed that military action was legal on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. A day later, the British parliament backed U.K. military action in Iraq.

Two days, later allied troops invaded Iraq. It was and remains widely regarded as the start of the Iraq War. Only a very few people knew that was not the truth. The war had begun ten months earlier on 20 May 2002 when British and American aircraft began bombing the 391 “carefully selected” targets assigned to Operation Southern Force, the illegal joint British and American bombing campaign that Chilcot completely missed.

Intelligence beast reporter Michael Smith broke the story of the secret “Downing Street Memos” in 2005. This article was originally published on Michael Smith’s blog.

It may not be a post-RNC bounce, but political analyst and statistician Nate Silver’s latest forecast of the presidential election shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton with a shocking 15 percentage point-greater chance of winning if the general election were held today.

After a parade of D-list celebrities and conservative icons yelled that the nation had been overrun by criminals in the cities and murderous undocumented immigrants in border towns, the Republican party’s presidential nominee’s current likelihood of winning stands at 57.5 percent, compared with Clinton’s 42.5 percent.

FiveThirtyEight’s “now-cast,” Silver’s model, considers more than just polling in its forecast and currently predicts the popular vote going 45.4 percent to Trump vs. 45.1 percent to Clinton, with the Electoral College giving Trump 285 votes and Clinton 252.6. This is the first time the “now-cast” forecast has been projected Trump to win.

Silver, who correctly forecast both the 2008 and 2012, has Trump winning in the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire:

The now-cast is super aggressive, and can overreact to small swings in the polls. But it’s useful if we want to get a snapshot of what the election looks like right now. It suggests that in an election held today, Trump would be a narrow favorite, with a 57 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

[…]

It isn’t straightforward to measure Trump’s convention bounce because he was already gaining ground on Clinton heading into the conventions, narrowing what had been a 6- to 7-point national lead for Clinton in June into roughly a 3-point lead instead. For instance, the CNN poll shows a massive 10-percentage-point swing toward Trump, but its previous poll was taken in mid-June, at a high-water mark for Clinton. By contrast, CBS News shows Trump gaining only 1 percentage point, but its previous poll was conducted earlier this month, shortly after the controversy over Clinton’s email scandal resurfaced.

Amid the seemingly perpetual turbulence and chaos of the Middle East and North Africa comes the warning of a Jewish Civil War:

“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.

Isaac Herzog’s words, spoken on Monday 18th July at a Zionist Camp parliamentary bloc session, may strike the unerring observer as alarmist and even fanciful. How on earth could the people of Israel, a state created in the belief that it would provide the best guarantee for the preservation of the Jewish people, be set on a course of fratricidal conflict which would imperil its existence?

The often repeated warnings of Israel being a state surrounded by a multitude of enemies and which has existed under the perpetual threat of being “driven into the sea” by Arab enemies has seemingly provided the basis of an unbreakable communal solidarity whatever the cultural and ethnic differences between the disparate people that comprise it.  To many, the tendency towards fractiousness and vexation; of episodic disputes and divisions arising within the subtext of an often volatile political discourse only lend credence to the old adage of  “two Jews, three opinions.”

Binyamin Netanyahu was able to ruminate over the slaughter of the ongoing Syrian Civil War as follows: “We will never be like them. We will never lift our hands against our brothers with unfettered enmity.”

The matter of fratricidal conflict is, of course, not unknown to Jewish history. The Book of Judges records a civil war fought between the tribes of Gilead and Ephraim in which over 40,000 lives are claimed to have perished. The Battle of Gibeah pitted the tribes of Israel against that of Benjamin in which 25,000 Benjaminites were slain while the narrative of Hanukkah is one that recounts the violent overthrow of Jewish Hellenists via the Maccabean revolt that was led by Mattathias. The Talmud says that rebellion against the Romans failed because of the “needless enmity between brothers”.

The modern age of Zionism has also provided episodes of violence although they have all fallen short of developing into full-blown communal conflicts. The assassinations of the anti-Zionist Jacob de Haan by the Haganah and Chaim Arlosoroff by Revisionist Zionists in pre-Israel Palestine as well as the murder of Yitzhak Rabin by an orthodox settler extremist in 1995 provide examples of the killings of prominent people which occurred during periods of deep discord.

Israel is not a monolithic society and the divisions of ethnicity as well as those based on religious and political values could provide fertile ground for the development of serious social confrontation.

While the contrasts offered between the Sabra and Diaspora Jews -the former being those who were born within the pre-state Mandate era and the latter those who made Aliyah- is arguably one that was overstated and, perhaps, an often superficial one in the grand scheme of things, divisions within Israeli society are readily discernible from the ethnicities that make it up as well as in the differences between those who are religious and those who are secular.

A starting point of any consideration of fundamental divisions existing within the society can be found in the nature of its constitutional settlement. Israel is one of only three countries in the world that functions without a ‘written’ constitution. One reason for this relates to the compromise reached about the legal status of religion between Israel’s secular founders and the representatives of orthodox Jewry. The ‘Status Quo’ Compromise was an attempt to provide a working arrangement for the role that Judaism would play in the governmental and judicial system. Tensions have existed between secular and religious communities over the decades with one centred on exemptions given to Haredis studying in yeshivas and anti-Zionist Hasidic groups.

There are of course divisions in ideology. Israel was dominated at the time of its founding by Labor Zionists, European Jewish socialists who wanted to develop a state through the manpower of a rural Kibbutzim and an urban proletariat. However, the rise of the Likud Party, which first came to power in 1977, has reflected a shift in the national balance of power to that of the political Right. In the time since elapsed, Likud has held power for a longer period than Labor or other Left parties. Further, Likud’s adoption of neoliberal economic policies in place of earlier ones predicated on a populist orientation has markedly transformed Israeli society -and not necessarily for the better.

For while the Israeli economy, globally renowned for its high-tech component, has experienced continual growth for over a decade, the National Insurance Institute released a report in 2014 detailing a finding that one in five of families in the country live below the poverty line.

Soon after, the Taub Center, an economic and social policy think tank based in Jerusalem issued a state of the nation report which found that four out of five Israeli households spent more than they earned each month. The following year, the National Insurance Institute found that the poverty rate had increased with one in three children living below the poverty line. Israel, which is a member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has the highest level of poverty among developed nations.

Although levels of gross disparities in wealth have often formed the basis for social discord which have led to civil insurrections and revolutions, class conflict as the pathway to an Israeli civil war is unlikely.

For many observers of Israel, the only serious basis of a war breaking out among its population is rooted in the matter of Jewish settlement on the occupied Palestinian West Bank which many believe to be the ancient regions of Judea and Samaria. A survey conducted this year by Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys and the University of Tel Aviv found that 71.5 per cent of the Israeli Jewish public did not consider Israel’s presence in the West bank as an occupation. The considered view has long been that the larger in population size these settlements get and the longer they endure, the less likely it increasingly becomes for the settlers to be evicted as part of a final peace settlement with the Palestinians. It has always been understood that any attempt by a serving Israeli government to dislodge the settlers would risk provoking a Jewish Civil War.

While the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 evoked bitter protests and much acrimony on the part of the Israeli political Right, it did not lead to a serious conflict with military overtones. A large scale withdrawal from the more significantly colonised West Bank and dismantling of the settlements  would be an altogether different enterprise. There is evidence that in 1980, Ariel Sharon, by then a retired army general but one with continuing influence, convened a secret meeting of higher echelon figures from the military and security services in which the attendees signed a blood oath under which they pledged to make common cause with settlers on the West Bank in resisting to the death any such move.

The source of the information of such a meeting having taken place came, according to the English journalist Alan Hart, from Ezer Weizman, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force, when he was serving as the minister of defence.

The oath is one which is believed to have been taken by subsequent generations of generals. It strongly underpins the notion that no Israeli Prime Minister could ever countenance the idea of ordering the army to shoot settlers, many of whom among their ranks are permanently armed religious Zionists who would be prepared to initiate an a rebellion.

The threat of a civil war in the Jewish state was a real one in the months soon after its creation in 1948. In fact, bullets were fired and fatalities resulted. The belligerents were the army of the newly created Israeli Defence Force and the terror group, Irgun which was led by Menachem Begin.

Begin, a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky who was the creator of New Revisionist Zionism, wanted the nascent Israeli state to continue fighting its Arab neighbours until the whole of Eretz Yisrael was conquered. This included not only the West Bank but the rest of the British Mandate territory that had been east of the River Jordan.

Prime Minister David Ben Gurion preferred not to pursue such a course and demanded that Irgun as with other paramilitary organisations be absorbed into the IDF. Begin resisted this and when his group attempted to bring in a cache of arms from a ship berthed off the coast of Tel Aviv a fierce firefight erupted between both sides leading to 16 Irgun dead and 3 from the IDF.

Begin was the founder of the Likud Party which is merged with Herut, the Right-wing nationalist party he had formed in 1948 to serve as a successor to the defunct Irgun. The formation of Herut was met with great dismay by many Jewish intellectuals including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt who took it upon themselves to write an open letter to the New York Times to warn that Israel would head down a path which legitimized “ultranationalism, religious mysticism and racial supremacy”.

Herzog has pointedly blamed the present leadership of Likud, headed by Netanyahu, for allowing the political discourse to slide into a hate filled atmosphere. “This way,” he said, “the seeds of the uprising of hatred are planted, which will lead to a civil war.”

And he is not the only high-ranking Israeli political figure to express profound disquiet at the direction in which Israel is heading. Moshe Yaalon, a former IDF chief of staff resigned as minister for defence after hearing that his position would be offered to Avigdor Lieberman, a hardline figure from the political Right. Yaalon claimed that he was “fearful for Israel’s future”. A few weeks earlier, the deputy chief of the Israeli military, Major General Yair Golan compared contemporary Israel to Nazi Germany of the 1930s.

The rise of Likud, some critics have argued, signified the coming to power of the terror gangs of the Mandate era. And with this they argue has come a more uncompromising position regarding the possibility of a two-state settlement with the Palestinian people. With the expansion of settlements on the West Bank having reached a stage where they are essentially irreversible owing to the certainty of a Jewish Civil War in the event of an attempt to have settlers evicted, the only course left to effect a lasting solution to the ‘Palestinian problem’ is a purge of the Arab population under the cover a serious military conflict with an external enemy.

Herzog’s strongly worded remarks no doubt reflect what many consider to be an entrenched pattern in Netanyahu’s often polarizing and incendiary style. His comments during the last elections regarding the Israeli political Left busing Arab voters “to the polling stations in droves” typified this as did his statements regarding illegal immigrants from Black Africa who he described as “infiltrators” and who he claimed were threatening the “identity of the Jewish state.” Netanyahu’s  rhetoric at a rally in which he criticised Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts at effecting a peace with the Palestinians -one in which people in the crowd held aloft signs bearing Rabin’s image in an SS uniform- is remembered with lasting repulsion by many who consider him at least partly responsible for inciting an atmosphere that led to the assassination of Rabin by Yigal Amir.

It is clear that the statements made by Herzog, Yaalon and Golan point to the increasingly extremist drift of Israeli politics, but whether they reflect a state of affairs capable of metastasizing into an internecine civil conflict remains doubtful. That of course is little comfort for those such as Herzog who observe what he describes as “the budding fascism that is rising and flourishing in Israeli society”; a state of affairs predicted by the aforementioned Einstein and Arendt who had urged American Zionists not to support Begin and what they termed the “latest manifestation of fascism”.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has now confirmed publicly what we said previously: the talks in Moscow with US Secretary of State John Kerry were a failure.

This is what we said about the proposal Kerry took with him to Moscow:

“…….it seems that the US offered to join with the Russians in a joint military campaign in Syria against Al Qaeda and Daesh.  Prior to going to Moscow Kerry also let slip that some of what he called “subgroups” affiliated to Al Qaeda would be targeted as well.  However in return the Russians were apparently expected to accept US leadership of the military campaign, cease bombing rebel groups in Syria aligned with the US, and agree to the eventual removal of President Assad.”

What we said about this proposal was

“If that is in outline what Kerry was proposing then it is not difficult to see why the Russians would reject it. Essentially what Kerry seems to have offered them was yet another plan to overthrow President Assad, this time with their assistance, in return for a place in a US led military coalition.”

Lavrov has now confirmed that that is exactly what happened.  Speaking at a Russian national youth education forumSputnik reports him saying the following:

“They say that we could join their efforts in the fight against terrorism […] but first we need to agree that we remove Assad from power.”

Sputnik reports Lavrov saying that Kerry told the Russians that Assad had lost the support of the “vast majority of Syria’s population”.  According to Lavrov, the Russians responded that it was for the Syrians – not the US or the Russians – to choose Syria’s leader in a democratic way.

In other words the Russians rejected Kerry’s offer.  To underline the point Sputnik reports Lavrov condemning the whole US regime change policy as it has been applied to the Middle East:

“What is happening in the Middle East, in North Africa is a direct result of a very incompetent, unprofessional attitude to the situation. In an attempt to maintain their dominance, our Western partners have acted like a bull in a china shop.”

This has been the consistent Russian position since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011.

In truth the story of the diplomacy of the Syrian conflict has been a continuous repetition of the same happening:  the US pushes the Russians to agree to have President Assad removed.  The US make various offers or threats to the Russians to buy or force their agreement.  The Russians respond that President Assad’s future is a strictly Syrian internal matter, which they will not involve themselves in.  The US walks away, baffled and angry.

The same thing happens again and again, Kerry’s talks in Moscow with Putin and Lavrov being just the latest example.

The US are not the only ones to have made the same pitch to the Russians only to get the same result.  In July 2013 the head of Saudi intelligence Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud flew secretly to Moscow where he also made various offers and threats at a private meeting with Putin to get the Russians to agree to the removal of President Assad.  To his bafflement and anger the Russians said no – as they always do.

In truth the inability of the US and its Western and Arab allies to accept that Russian opposition to their regime policy in Syria and elsewhere is for real, and that the Russians cannot be bullied or bribed to change it, is one of the oddest things about the whole Syrian conflict.  Despite the fact the Russians have gone repeatedly out of their way to explain their policy, the US and its allies seem incapable of believing that the Russians are really serious about it.  They always seem to think that the Russians are really just playing some cynical game, and that if they are made the right sort of offer, or put under the right sort of pressure, they can be brought round and made to agree to let Assad go.

By now – five years after the conflict began – it ought to be obvious that that isn’t going to happen.  Kerry’s trip to Moscow and the long hours of fruitless negotiations he had there however shows that the US still can’t bring itself to accept the fact.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) discovered at least 4,000 bags of Turkey-made chemicals used for making bombs by the ISIL terrorists in the town of Manbij in Northeastern Aleppo.

“These 25 kg bags contain a special kind of agricultural chemicals which are allowed to be used by the governmental bodies not by private centers in Turkey. A sentence in Turkish language is written on these bags that this chemical should be used only by relevant government organizations,” the SDF said.

“The SDF’s engineering units have thus far defused over 6,000 landmines and 25 bomb-laden suicide vehicles,” the SDF added.

“The Turkey-made chemicals can simply used in making landmines,” the SDF pointed out.

On Saturday, the SDF found further proof of the Turkish army’s weapons supplies to the ISIL terrorists after capturing militants’ positions in Manbij.

The SDF found Turkey-made arms after its crushing victory in battle against the ISIL terrorists in different districts of Manbij in recent days.

They also found highly powerful explosive devices that could be used to detonate buildings and armored vehicles.

Late in June, the secret reports of the Turkish police indicated that the al-Nusra Front and ISIL terrorists use Turkey’s both legal and illegal border crossings to transfer weapons and ammunition to Syria.

“Certain elements linked to terrorists in Syria are still shipping weapons and supplying their logistics from Turkey,” the Turkish-language daily, Karshi, cited a police report to the country’s public prosecutor about its operations in the city of Diyarbakir.

The newspaper, meantime, said that certain communities also provided financial supports for the terrorists fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

The daily also said the Al-Nusra and ISIL terrorist groups established bases in Turkey to train recruits, adding that many explosive devices were even manufactured and assembled on Turkish soils.

Clinton Cash, a feature documentary based on the Peter Schweizer book, has been posted to YouTube for all to view free just in time for the DNC.  Clinton Cash investigates how Bill and Hillary Clinton went from being “dead broke” after leaving the White House to amassing a net worth of over $150 million, with over $2 billion in donations to their foundation.  This wealth was accumulated during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State through lucrative speaking fees and contracts paid for by foreign companies and Clinton Foundation donors.

The New York Times hailed the book as “The most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle” while MSNBC described the documentary as devastating for the Hillary campaign.

The Clinton camp has, of course, dismissed the documentary as a right-wing smear campaign filled with unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.  That said, perhaps the most shocking aspect of the release is that many of the biggest bombshells revealed in the documentary have been vetted and confirmed by various mainstream media outlets.  More recently, some information uncovered in the Panama Papers has echoed some of Schweitzer’s allegations in the movie and book.

Just to highlight a few of the scandals detailed in the documentary:

• Russian Purchase of US Uranium Assets in Return for $145mm in Contributions to the Clinton Foundation – Bill and Hillary Clinton assisted a Canadian financier, Frank Giustra, and his company, Uranium One, in the acquisition of uranium mining concessions in Kazakhstan and the United States.  Subsequently, the Russian government sought to purchase Uranium One but required approval from the Obama administration given the strategic importance of the uranium assets.  In the run-up to the approval of the deal by the State Department, nine shareholders of Uranium One just happened to make $145mm in donations to the Clinton Foundation.  Moreover, the New Yorker confirmed that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in speaking fees from a Russian investment bank, with ties to the Kremlin, around the same time.  Needless to say, the State Department approved the deal giving Russia ownership of 20% of U.S. uranium assets

• Lucrative Haiti Gold Mining Permit Awarded to Hillary’s Brother – The Washington Post confirmed claims that Hillary’s brother, Tony Rodham, sat on the board of a mining company that just happened to score a lucrative gold mining permit in Haiti, one of only two permits to be awarded in 50 years, while then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to the island in the wake of the devastating earthquake of 2010
• Keystone Pipeline Support in Return for $2mm in Speaking Fees – After not being engaged to speak by TD Bank during his first 8 years out of the White House, Bill Clinton began a string of speeches for the bank starting just 4 days after Hillary was nominated as secretary of state resulting in over $2mm in speaking fees.  As it turns out, TD Bank happened to be the single largest shareholder in the Keystone XL pipeline which needed State Department approval.  Wouldn’t you know it, Hillary Clinton decided to support the pipeline — a heresy to environmentalists — and delayed the Obama administration’s rejection of it

While these accusations, many of which have been substantiated by multiple sources, would be devastating to mere mortal presidential candidates, we’re certain these are just a few more negative data points that will not stick to the teflon-coated Clinton couple.

Wealthy potential donors to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were courted with promises of access to the president, a Washington Post analysis of internal DNC emailsreleased by WikiLeaks has found. The party insiders’ pitches appear to be in violation of White House policy, the newspaper notes.

On Monday, the Post reported:

The DNC emails show how the party has tried to leverage its greatest weapon—the president—as it entices wealthy backers to bankroll the convention and other needs. At times, DNC staffers used language in their pitches to donors that went beyond what lawyers said was permissible under a White House policy designed to prevent any perception that special interests have access to the president.

Top aides also get involved in wooing contributors, according to the emails. White House political director David Simas, for instance, met in May with a half-dozen top party financiers in Chicago, including Fred Eychaner, one of the top Democratic donors in the country, the documents show.

On at least one occasion, a White House lawyer asked DNC employees to alter the language of an invitation to a high-dollar event so it would not appear to be soliciting donations in exchange for access to President Barack Obama—demonstrating that employees were made aware of the policy.

“Let’s remove the word round table on page 2 at the top (‘$33,400 – Round table discussion guest’). As you know, WH policy restricts the use of language that gives the appearance that contributors can pay for policy access to the President,” Ruthzee Louijeune, an associate at Perkins Coie LLC, wrote to a DNC staffer in reference to a May event featuring Obama.

The Post noted, however, that “the emails show several instances in which DNC fundraisers pitched donors with promises of a ’roundtable’ chat with Obama. On May 6, the southern finance director emailed ­Cockrum, [a] Tennessee donor, about packages available for the Philadelphia convention.”

The newspaper continues:

“If [you] were willing to contribute $33,400 we can bump you up a level to the Fairmont,” [the southern finance director] wrote, referring to a luxury hotel. “Additionally, your generous contribution would allow you to attend a small roundtable we are having with President Obama in DC on May 18th or a dinner in NYC on June 8th.”

On the afternoon of the event, the place of honor, at Obama’s side, went to New York philanthropist Phil Munger. Kaplan noted to Shapiro in an email that Munger was one of the largest donors to Organizing for Action, a nonprofit group that advocates for Obama’s legislative agenda.

“It would be nice to take care of him from the DNC side,” Kaplan wrote, adding: “He is looking to give his money in new places and I would like that to be to us.”

The Democratic Party collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single dinner with the president. On May 24, an email with the subject line “Daily Number” gave the donation tally at that point for a June 8 dinner in New York, hosted by venture capitalist andHuffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer, with the president in attendance:

Guests
48

Committed
$143,400

In Hand
$576,113

Total
$719,513

Not only does the DNC appear to be pitching access to the president in exchange for donations, a McClatchy investigation on Thursday also revealed that large-ticket donors often demand such special favors. It also found that DNC insiders attempted to find ways to appease such donors—occasionally arguing about which donor deserved a reward more.

McClatchy reports:

In one exchange, National Finance Director Jordan Kaplan and Mid-Atlantic Finance Director Alexandra Shapiro argue which contributor should be allowed to sit next to Obama at a DNC event.

Kaplan told Shapiro to move Maryland ophthalmologist Sreedhar Potarazu and give the seat to New York philanthropist Philip Munger because he is the largest donor to Organizing for America, a group that pushes Obama’s policies. “It would be nice to take care of him from the DNC side,” Kaplan wrote.

But Shapiro explained that the Potarazu family had contributed $332,250 while Munger had only donated $100,600.

Both the DNC and the Republican National Convention (RNC) have “stepped up their hunt for huge checks since a series of legal changes in 2014 gave them leeway to collect expansive contributions for new accounts to pay for building, legal and convention expenses,” the Post observes.

The Post reports that in addition, in 2015 “the DNC, in consultation with Clinton’s campaign, also decided to reverse a ban on donations from the PACs of corporations, unions and other groups.”

Former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who announced her resignation on Sunday after the leak revealed the DNC favoring Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign over Bernie Sanders’, actively solicited large donations from super PACs and lobbyists after the new rules were established.

“After those limits were lifted,” the newspaper continues, Schultz “and other top party officials showered corporate lobbyists with calls, emails and personal meetings seeking convention support and PAC contributions to the party, according to a spreadsheet logging the contacts.”

And the resulting donations have been quite significant—particularly when it came to funds solicited to pay for the party convention in Philadelphia. The Post writes:

The top-tier donor package for this week’s Democratic National Convention required a donor to raise $1.25 million or give $467,600 since January 2015, according to a document in the emails. In return, a contributor got booking in Philadelphia at a premier hotel, VIP credentials and six slots at “an exclusive roundtable and campaign briefing with high-level Democratic officials,” according to the terms.

Those perks were aggressively pushed to donors this spring as DNC staffers worked to try to pay for the party’s share of the convention, a tab that had been covered by public funds in previous years.

The DNC also appeared to look for ways around the remaining rules that limited donations, in search of more contributions: “When Pietrzak, who had already given his annual maximum to the party, expressed interest in attending the May 18 event with Obama,” thePost notes, “a party staffer responded to her colleague: ‘No chance of getting more $ out of them, is there? Push the convention packages as an incentive?'”

Such revelations appear to confirm the argument that relying on large donations from wealthy individuals and large corporations inevitably leads to corruption of the political process. Indeed, both Bernie Sanders and Green Party presumptive presidential nominee Jill Stein have condemned the DNC’s fundraising practices and called for campaign finance reform:

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.

Times editors, correspondents, columnists and contributors portray Hillary as being “left-leaning…on social, economic and political issues.” Her agenda, if elected, assures dirty business as usual, likely elevated to an unprecedented level – notably risking global nuclear war by recklessly challenging Russia and China, along with exclusively representing monied interests at the expense of popular ones.

Times editors claiming Hillary “adopt(ed) elements of the Sanders program” is willful deception, failing to explain his “political revolution” was smoke and mirrors demagoguery, illusion substituting for reality.

“Hillary Clinton’s new Democrats,” as Times editors call them, aren’t democratic, progressive, anti-war, or anti-America’s imperial agenda.

According to the WSJ,

 “Hillary Clinton to Take Command of a Changed Democratic Party: Presumed nominee’s party is more liberal than the one that helped elect her husband in 1992”

They’re polar opposites on steroids, a neocon/war goddess-led scourge – the greatest threat to world peace, stability, and fundamental freedoms crucial to oppose.

Endorsing Clinton is further proof of The Times representing wealth and power interests over all others.

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 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 rebel group accused the boy of being a member of the Liwa al-Quds (Jerusalem brigade), an armed Palestinian group that supports the Syrian government. Liwa al-Quds released a statement stating that the boy was not a fighter however, and was merely an innocent, ill child called Abdullah Issa, who lived in an impoverished area, according to an Al Jazeerareport.

US Supplied al-Zenki with TOW Missiles

Al-Zenki has received military aid and TOW missiles from the US, a fact that even Reuters admitted in an October 2015 article. Earlier this month, Amnesty International released a report which detailed how the al-Zenki group was involved in abducting and torturing various individuals, including humanitarian aid workers.

This rebel group is just one of the numerous legions in Syria who have received arms and financing by various countries who have been supporting the ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition, with the US being one of the largest proponents of this strategy. As many critics of this policy have been warning, flooding Syria with arms and mainly foreign terrorists was only going to lead to atrocities of this nature.

This latest abhorrent act is certainly not the first committed by rebel fighters either; a video which surfaced in 2013 showed a rebel biting into the heart of a dead Syrian soldier.

Deliberate Empowerment of Terrorists

Unknowingly supporting extremists is one thing; but deliberately empowering terrorists is a completely other situation.  The US has been fully aware of the nefarious nature of the forces fighting against Bashar al-Assad for years.

As a declassified US military intelligence report from August 2012 clearly states:

“The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [Al-Qaeda in Iraq], are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The report added that “AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media,” and that “events are taking a clear sectarian direction.”

Despite this warning, the US and their allies intensified their support for the opposition. A December 2012 article by Business Insider reported that the US was sending heavy weapons – including anti-tank missiles, rocket propelled grenades and anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles – from Libya to the Syrian rebels. A 2013 article by the Washington Post details how the CIA and State Department were sending weapons, munitions, vehicles, communications equipment and medical kits to the rebels.

Of course, the US was playing a critical role in arming the rebels before late 2012. A June 2012 article by the New York Times titled: C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition, reported that CIA agents were in southern Turkey helping to funnel arms to the rebels.

US-led Coalition Bombs Civilians

Also this week, US and French airstrikes killed over 140 civilians near the Syrian-Turkish border. The Syrian Foreign Ministry sent letters to the United Nations (UN), demanding that the international body takes action. The US-led coalition is operating illegally in Syria – unlike the previous legal Russian campaign – as the Syrian government has never authorized the US-led bombing campaign.

Hopefully the beheading of an innocent child will spark a real commitment by the US to seriously defeat the terrorists in Syria, by working alongside the Syrian Army, Russia, Iran, and other important players in the region.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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”. 

Four Star US Army General Campbell and Vice Chief of Staff (March 2013-August 2014) assumed command of  ISAF from August to December of 2014. He was then appointed Commander of NATO’s Afghanistan Operation Resolute Support, “a training, advisory, assistance, and counter-terror mission” from which he retired in March 2016, four months prior to Turkey’s failed coup. 

It should be noted that the Turkey based news media does not fully acknowledge its sources of information. The report remains to be fully corroborated.

According to Yeni Savak:  

General John F. Campbell was one of the top figures who organized and managed the soldiers behind the failed coup attempt in Turkey, sources close to ongoing legal process of pro-coup detainees said.

Campbell also managed more than $2 billion money transactions via UBA Bank in Nigeria by using CIA links to distribute among the pro-coup military personnel in Turkey.

The ongoing investigation unveiled that Campbell had paid at least two secret visits to Turkey since May, until the day of the coup attempt.

The report intimates that General Campbell operated in tandem with  the Fethullah Gülen organization. It also intimates that US intelligence and military were behind the failed coup.

Military sources said Campbell, who was the commander of ISAF between August 26, 2014 and May 1, 2016, had made some top secret meetings in Erzurum military base and Adana İnicrlik Airbase.

İncirlik Airbase has been used by the U.S. Military for conducting the anti-Daesh campaign in Syria.

Military sources said that Campbell was the man, who directed the process of trending / blacklisting the military officers in the base.

If the coup attempt was successful, Campbell would visit Turkey in a short time, according to the sources.

The report also examined the alleged money transactions focussing on the role of  The Nigeria branch of the United Bank of Africa (UBA), which allegedly constituted “the main base for the last six-months of money transactions for the coup plotters”. The report also underscored the role of the CIA in implementing the money transfers

Millions of dollars of money has been transferred from Nigeria to Turkey by a group of CIA personnel.

The money, which has been distributed to an 80-person special team of the CIA, was used to convince pro-coup generals.

More than 2 billion dollars were distributed during the process leading to the coup.

After taking money from their bank accounts, the CIA team hand delivered it to the terrorists under the military dresses.

The money was distributed to military officers who were favorable to the Gullenist cause, according to the report.

“They investigated the soldiers’ trends, their personalities and family background. All soldiers were categorized in three groups: opponents, neutrals, and supporters.”  …

The military personnel who were in a neutral position received a difference in the amount of money, according to the importance of their position and ranks.

The supports who also were categorized as “those who will move with us,” were provided a huge amount of money.

All soldiers and officers in this category were considered as the devoted members of the FETO terror group.

To read the full Yeni Savak article click here

Michel Chossudovsky contributed to this report

The following is an articled written by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya and republished by Global Research from the Strategic Culture Foundation on August 14, 2012. Its original title is “The Push to Ignite a Turkish Civil War Through a Syrian Quagmire.” What is explained in the text is that the policy of Turkey in Syria will have self-destructive results that will ultimately hurt Turkey by weakening and dividing it in the future. The failed July 15, 2016  coup in Turkey is to a great degree an accumulation of Ankara’s regional isolation, internal polarization, and “blowback” —ranging from terrorism to reviving problems with the Kurd — from Syria that the 2012 article foretells. 

The Push to Ignite a Turkish Civil War Through a Syrian Quagmire

Turkey itself is a major target for destabilization, upheaval, and finally balkanization through its participation in the US-led siege against Syria. Ankara has burned its bridges in Syria for the sake of its failing neo-Ottoman regional policy. The Turkish government has actively pursued regime change, spied on Syria for NATO and Israel, violated Syrian sovereignty, supported acts of terrorism and lawlessness, and provided logistical support for the insurgency inside Syria.

Any chances of seeing some form of Turkish regional leadership under neo-Ottomanism have faded. Turkey’s southern borders have been transformed into intelligence and logistical hubs for the CIA and the Mossad in the process, complete with an intelligence “nerve centre” in the Turkish city of Adana. Despite Turkey’s denials, reports about Adana are undeniable and Turkish officers have also been apprehended in covert military operations against the Syrian Arab Republic. The Turkish Labour Party has even demanded that the US General Consul in Adana be deported for “masterminding and leading the activities of Syrian terrorists.” Mehmet Ali Ediboglu and Mevlut Dudu, two Turkish MPs, have also testified that foreign fighters have been renting homes on Turkey’s border with Syria and that Turkish ambulances have been helping smuggle weapons for the insurgents inside Syria.

Turkish Regional Isolation

If the Syrian state collapses, neighbouring Turkey will be the biggest loser. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government are foolishly aligning Turkey for disaster. Aside from Ankara’s historically bad relations with Armenia, Erdogan has managed to singlehandedly alienate Russia and three of Turkey’s most important neighbours. This has damaged the Turkish economy and disrupted the flow of Turkish goods. There have been clamp downs on activists too in connection with Turkey’s policy against Damascus. The freedom of the Turkish media has been affected as well; Erdogan has moved forward with legislation to restrict media freedoms. Prime Minister Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have even both attacked “reporters who quoted President Assad’s statements in Cumhuriyet, accusing them of treason, because they had questioned the official Turkish account of the Turkish jet shot down by in [sic.] Syria [for spying].”

To Turkey’s eastern flank tensions are building between it and both Iraq and Iran. Baghdad is reviewing its diplomatic ties with the Turkish government, because Ankara is encouraging the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq to act independently of Iraq’s federal government. Erdogan’s government has done this partially as a result of Baghdad’s steadfast opposition to regime change in Syria and in part because of Iraq’s strengthening alliance with Iran. Tehran on the other hand has halted the visa-free entry of Turkish citizens into Iran and warned the Turkish government that it is stoking the flames of a regional fire in Syria that will eventually burn Turkey too.

Growing Internal Divisions in Turkey

Despite all the patriotic speeches being made by the Turkish government to rally the Turkish people against Syria, Turkey is a much divided nation over Erdogan’s hostilities with Damascus. A significant portion of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey or Turkish Meclis and Turkey’s opposition parties have all condemned Erdogan for misleading the Turkish people and stirring their country towards disaster. There is also growing resentment amongst the citizens of Turkey about Erdogan’s cooperation with the US, NATO, Israel, and the Arab dictatorships – like Qatar and Saudi Arabia – against the Syrians and others. The majority of Turkish citizens oppose Turkish ties to Israel, the hosting of NATO facilities in Turkey, the missile shield project, and cooperation with the US in the Middle East.

The Republican People’s Party, Turkey’s second largest political party and its main opposition party, has condemned the government in Ankara over Syria. Their leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has openly accused Prime Minister Erdogan of interfering in the internal affairs of Syria. Kilicdaroglu has been joined by Turkey’s other political parties in the condemnations of Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party. Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, has warned the Turkish government not to drag their country into a war with Syria through intervention. “Some Western countries have put pressure on Turkey for an intervention in Syria. Turkey should not fall into this trap,” Bahceli, who leads the third largest Turkish political party, has warned Erdogan according to the Turkish press. The Peace and Democracy Party, which is the fourth largest Turkish political party, has also clarified that it is against war with Syria. The politician Selahattin Demirtas, who is one of the leaders of the Peace and Democracy Party, has warned that any military intervention by Ankara in Syria would drag Turkey into a broader regional war. Hasan Basri Ozbey, the deputy leader of the Turkish Labour Party, has announced that his political party will file a complaint against Turkish President Abdullah Gul with the Turkish Meclis and the Turkish Higher Court to prosecute Gul, because the Labour Party “has clear evidence that [Gul] incited terrorism and war on Syria and signed a secret agreement with the United States, which alone is groundsfor trial.” Mustafa Kamalak, the leader of the Felicity Party, has even led a Turkish delegation to visit Bashar Al-Assad to show their support for Syria and opposition to Erdogan’s policies.

The mobilization of the Turkish military on the Syrian border as a show of force is a psychological tactic to scare the Syrian regime. Any large-scale military operations against the Syrians would be very dangerous for Turkey and could fragment the Turkish Armed Forces. Segments of the Turkish military are at odds with the Turkish government and the military itself is divided over Turkish foreign policy. Erdogan does not even trust half of Turkey’s own military leaders and has arrested forty of them for planning to overthrow him.  How can he send such a force to even attack neighbouring Syria or think that he can control it during a broader war?

The Dangers of “Blowback” from Syria

While Turkey is trumpeting that it will not allow Kurdish militias to establish bases in northern Syria, the Turkish government is actually facilitating this itself.  There is a real risk of “blowback” from Syria for Turkey. Like Syria, Turkey is a kaleidoscope of various peoples and faiths. The people of Turkey are held together by the primacy of the Turkish language and a shared citizenship. Turkey’s minorities constitute at the very minimum one-third of the country. A significant proportion of Turkey’s minority communities have ties to Syria, Iraq, or Iran.

The Kurds and other similar Iranic peoples alone form about 25% of Turkey’s population, which means one out of four Turkish citizens are of Kurdish and Iranic stock. Other ethnic minorities include Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Azerbaijanis, Bulgarians, and Greeks. No exact figures have ever been available about Turkey’s Shiite Muslims, because of the historical persecution and restrictions on Shia Muslims in Turkey from Ottoman times. Anywhere from 20% to 30% or more of the Turkish population may be categorized as Shiite Muslims, which includes Alevis, Alawites, and Twelvers. Turkey also has a small Christian minority, some of which have historic or organizational ties to Syria like Turkey’s Alawites and ethnic Arabs. Turkey will be consumed too, one way or another, should a broader sectarian conflict spread from Syria and should the Syrians be violently divided along sectarian fault lines.

The Self-Destructive Nature of Turkish Involvement in Syria

All the factors discussed above are a recipt for disaster. Civil war in Turkey is a real possibility in an increasingly polarized Turkish state. Should Syria burn, Turkey will ultimately burn too. This is why a whole spectrum of Turkish leaders have been warning their country and people that the consequences for the fire that Erdogan, Davutoglu, and Gul are stroking in Syria will have disastrous consequences for Turkey and all the countries bordering Syria.

Erdogan’s government has managed to alienate Turkey from its most important neighbours, hurt the Turkish economy, and destabilize their country’s own borders. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg compared to the damages they could unleash on Turkey. The Turks have been walking into a trap, where they are slated for a self-destructive kamikaze operation against Syria. The US-led siege on Syria intends to create chaos across the entire Middle East and ignite multiple regional conflicts. Violence and conflict from Syria is intended to consume Lebanon and Iraq too. Within this mêlée, Turkey has been slated to be weakened and divided – just as the US, NATO, and Israel have envisaged in their project to create a “new Middle East.”

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an award-winning author, an interdisciplinary sociologist, a geopolitical analyst, and a professor of social sciences. He is the author of The Globalization of NATO (2012) and a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Geopolitica.

To consult the original publication please click here. 

This is an interview I conducted with Professor Yakov M. Rabkin of the Université de Montréal, author of the recently published What Is Modern Israel.

Professor Rabkin’s earlier book on the subject of Israel, entitled A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award and for the Hecht Prize for Studies of Zionism.

Given all of the books that have been published over the years regarding Israel, what compelled you to write What Is Modern Israel?

My Tokyo publisher. Impressed by the success of the Japanese version of my earlier book, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, in his country (it was listed as the best non-fiction book by the prestigious daily Asahi Shimbun), he asked me to write about modern Israel. It was to be a shorter and more accessible book, aimed at young readers.

In A Threat from Within, I had examined the reasons why Zionism was initially rejected not only by rabbis but also by the vast majority of Jews. In the present book I had to go further. I had to spell out the origins of Zionism, including religious ones, to look at the evolution of Israeli society and its relations with world Jewry, as well as at the roles played by Jews from Russia. The Russian dimension explains many aspects of contemporary Israel that remain otherwise puzzling.

What exactly do you mean by “the Russian dimension”?

While Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was meeting kings and ministers, Jews from the shtetls in the Russian Empire formed the backbone of Zionist settlement in Palestine at the turn of the 20th century. Subsequently they entrenched themselves in positions of leadership. Even though the Soviet Union did not allow emigration from the 1920s on, over 60 per cent of the members of Israeli parliament in the 1960s were of Russian origin. There has never been a prime minister in Israel who was either not born in the Russian Empire, or whose parents were.

Moreover, a million Russian-speaking Jews settled in Israel in the late 20th century. They are mostly estranged from Judaism; they consider themselves of “the Jewish nationality” and are therefore quite unabashed about ethnic nationalism and the use of force to impose it. Most of them vote for the right and the extreme right parties. Their success in penetrating the highest echelons of power and moving Israeli politics to the nationalist right has been impressive. The recent appointment of Moldova-born Avigdor Lieberman as minister of defence illustrates this accomplishment quite convincingly.

In your book, you delve into the impact of Christian Zionism on the birth of the Israeli state. Is that impact limited only to the early stages of the Zionist project?

No, the role of Christian Zionism did not end with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 or the unilateral proclamation of independence by David Ben-Gurion in 1948. True, certain interpretations of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans argued for the “ingathering [of] the Hebrews” into Palestine as early as the 17th century. This affected the public imagination in the English-speaking countries, particularly those with anti-Semitic prejudices who wanted to get rid of local Jews. This mind-set is clearly reflected in the Balfour Declaration.

This Christian motivation for the Restoration of the Jews in the Promised Land lent a powerful practical impulse to a group of assimilated Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in search of a collective “solution of the Jewish question.” The Judaic hope of Return had been traditionally characterized by an entirely different sensibility and ultimate goal. Jewish tradition holds that this return must be a part of a messianic project rather than a political and a military enterprise. In fact, there was little room for Jewish tradition in the Zionist scheme, which not only originated among Protestants, but was sustained by individuals of Jewish origin who were mostly atheists or agnostics.

A recent Pew poll shows that 82 per cent of white Protestants in the United States believe that “Israel was given to the Jewish people by God.” Only 40 per cent of Jews do. This is why Christian Zionists constitute a much more reliable source of political and financial support for Israel than Jews. Recent Israeli governments and settlers in the territories, which Israel conquered in 1967, have developed close ties with major organizations such as Christians United for Israel. Its leader, Pastor John Hagee, claims that his organization represents 50 million people. This is nearly four times more than the entire Jewish population of the world, which is estimated at 14 million. And one should also take into account the millions of Christian Zionists in Latin America, South Korea, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

What do you make of Israel’s claim that it represents all of the world’s Jews? Can you elaborate on the distinctions between Judaism and Zionism?

The Jews of Israel constitute about one half of the world’s Jewish population. But Israeli leaders have consistently claimed that they speak on behalf of all Jews since, in their view, the Zionist state somehow belongs to Jews around the world, even though these Jews exhibit no desire to move to Israel and are citizens of their respective countries. The claim to represent all Jews is politically empty, but is an effective tool to blur fundamental differences between Judaism and Zionism, and between Jews and the state of Israel. This claim therefore holds Jews hostage to Israel’s political and military behaviour.

It is quite clear that anti-Jewish violence in Europe and elsewhere is fuelled by the conflict in Israel/Palestine. For the Zionists, this is a win-win situation because this violence breeds insecurity and destabilizes Jewish communities. This, in turn, results in emigration, some of it in the direction of Israel, a country that needs Jews in order to ensure a non-Palestinian majority there. Currently, Palestinians constitute a majority on the land controlled by Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

What can bring about a just peace in Israel/Palestine, given the steady rightward trend of the Israeli electorate?

Outside pressure. This is the consensus of Israeli peace activists. The Israeli government also understands this and is behind unprecedented legislation in several Western countries forbidding boycotts of Israel and its exports. Western governments permit Israel to act with impunity, but this policy suffers from a serious democratic deficit: citizens of most countries in Europe and North America view Israel very critically and consider it a threat to world peace. It is this grassroots pressure that may help Israel decide to embrace decency and peace.

These viewpoints are not widely known here. Who published and who distributes your book?

The publisher, Pluto Press of London, takes care of Europe; the University of Chicago Press distributes my book in the United States; and in Canada it is Brunswick Books. Whereas my previous book– A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism–has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, the new one has so far appeared in Japanese, French, Russian, and, finally, in English.

Articles 1 of the UN Charter of 1945 gives the purpose & principles of the UN – maintain international peace & security, take effective collective measures to prevent & remove threats to peace, suppress acts of aggression or other breaches of peace, bring about by peaceful means in conformity with principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which may lead to breach of peace. UN bound to develop friendly relations among nations, strengthen universal peace, achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of economic, social, cultural or humanitarian, promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction of race, sex, language or religion & be the centre for harmonizing the actions of nations to attain these common ends.

Article 2 declares that the UN is based on the principle of sovereign equality to all Members, that all Members shall settle international disputes by peaceful means so that international peace is not endangered. All Members shall refrain from threat or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The most important of which is ‘Nothing contained in the Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially with the domestic jurisdiction of any state’.

 Now ask yourself has the UN abided by the clauses of the UN charter and have the US, UK & NATO nations honoured these clauses.

The answer is a sad NO.

Since 1945 the UN has ignored all of West’s state sponsored terrorism while allowing the West to charge other nations and even endorsed sanctions leading to further deaths and suffering.

What is the use of a UN that ignores the bulk of crimes that exist in the world because of West’s incursions resulting in the exodus of internally displaced people, refugees, asylum seekers and a host of issues which invariably open up opportunities for West’s mercenaries and missionaries in the form of NGOs and corporations to enter the very nations they have destroyed claiming to offer solutions.  This hypocritical nature of world domination needs to stop. As we can all see it is fairly evident that the Islamic jihadists themselves are well trained mercenaries tasked to do an objective and using Islam in lieu of the ‘Communist’ tag the West used to destroy nations of Asia including the USSR. A West that boasts equality, transparency and justice has been ousting every leftist thinking political leader branding them as ‘communist’ ‘dictator’ while totally ignoring the state terrorism inflicted by them.

The following list is taken from an article by James Lucas “US has killed more than 20million people in 37 victim nations since World War 2” should give readers a fair idea of what the UN has been ignoring and what the West has been committing and this should suffice to say it is time for UNexit and time for UN to wind up for it has failed the rest of the World by becoming an appeasing puppet to Western neo-colonial politics.

Afghanistan 

• US lured Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan
• US armed the Mujahideen from which Osama bin Laden & Al Qaeda was later created
• US spent $5-6billion for this exercise
• US-CIA has since captured the heroin market and is one of the core reasons for US presence in Afghanistan
• 9/11 was an excuse to invade Afghanistan so that the West could tap its natural resources and build a commercial pipeline – all corporate interests satisfied in the name of America
• Over 1million people have died to date

UN FAILS AFGHANISTAN

Cambodia

• Bombed on orders of US Presidents
• Villages destroyed, internal displacement, refugees
• US & UK helped Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot to power.
• 2.5m were killed

UN FAILS CAMBODIA

East Timor

• 1975 – US President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger arrive in Indonesia and give Suharto permission to invade East Timor
• 1991 – 217 East Timorese protested at memorial in Dili (many were children) US trained Commando Subianto (son-in-law of Suharto) gunned them and threw bodies to sea
• 200,000 out of 700,000 population killed

UN FAILS EAST TIMOR

Indonesia

• Gen. Sukarno replaced by Gen. Suharto in 1965 coup helped by US
• CIA gives Indonesian Army 5000 names to kill
• US provided Indonesia $400m in economic aid and sold tens of millions in weaponry from 1993-1997.
• 500,000 – 3million killed

UN FAILS INDONESIA

Korea (North & South)

• US propaganda showcase Soviet ordering North Korea to attack South Korea to enable US to attack North Korea even before UN resolution passed
• US uses Napalm
• John H Kim, US veteran “the U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about three million civilians – both South and North Koreans – at many locations throughout Korea…It is reported that the U.S. dropped some 650,000 tons of bombs, including 43,000 tons of napalm bombs, during the Korean War.”(The Korean War)
• 1.8m – 4.5m dead (South Koreans, North Koreans & Chinese)

UN FAILS NORTH KOREA

Laos

• During 1965-73 Vietnam War, US dropped 2million tons of bombs on Laos (This was more than what both sides in World War 2 used)
• US military intervention in Laos started in 1950s with US recruiting 40,000 Laotians to oppose leftist political leader Pathet Lao who came into power in 1975
• 200,000 dead

UN FAILS LAOS

Nepal

• Civil war increased after arrival of 8400 American M-16 submachine guns and US advisors
• 2002 another civil war – George Bush passes Bill authorizing $20m military aid
• US helped draft Nepals new constitution
• 8000-12,000 killed since 1996

UN FAILS NEPAL

Angola

• US oppose UN recognition of Angola in 1977
• US approves material support to UNITA to overthrow govt in 1986
• US intervenes using intervention of Cuban troops to Angola
• Prof. Gkleijeses of John Hopkins University says Cuban intervened as CIA financed covert invasion via Zaire (Congo)
• 300,000-750,000 deaths

UN FAILS ANGOLA

Chad

• CIA helps Hissen Habre come to power in 1982 and rule till 1990
• Belgium opens case (allowing victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities abroad) against Habre in 2003 – US response was to threaten Belgium it would lose status as NATO headquarters if proceedings were allowed.
• 40,000 killed – 200,000 tortured

UN FAILS CHAD

Democratic Republic of Congo (Formerly Zaire)

• King Leopold of Belgium murder of Congolese began in 1879 killing 10m in over 20 years.
• Congo gained independence in 1960
• Patrice Lumumba became first Prime Minister
• Lumumba was assassinated by US UK
• West funds civil war supporting mercenaries. US gave $15m military supplies to Zairian President Mobutu to defend himself against rival operating in Angola inspite of US State Dept condemning him for human rights violations.·   Congressional report of 2001 linked an American company to George Bush Snr for fanning war in Congo for monetary gains. Over 125 companies are out to loot the resources in Zaire/Congo (Coltan is one resource needed to manufacture cell phones)

UN FAILS CONGO

Bolivia

• 1970s – Bolivia nationalize 10 mines and distributes lands
• US responds by training Hugo Banzer at US School of the America’s in Panama to stage a coup and came to power with US assistance in 1971

UN FAILS BOLIVIA

Chile

• CIA intervened in 1958-1964 elections
• 1970 – Socialist Savador Allende becomes President – US wanted military coup before inauguration. Chile’s Army Chief Schneider refused. CIA attempted to assassinate Schneider and succeed
• President Nixon sponsored guerilla warfare and in 1973 Allende was assassinated
• US replaced with puppet Pinochet who ruled for 17 years.
• 3000 Chileans killed – many more disappeared

UN FAILS CHILE

Colombia

• US state sponsored terrorism – Refer HRW report 1994 & 1996 HRW report “Assassination squads in Colombia’ revealing CIA agents helped train undercover agents in anti-subversive activity in 1991.
• 67,000 deaths since 1960s

UN FAILS COLOMBIA

Cuba

• Bay of Pigs invasion 18 April 1961, 114 of invading force was killed. 1189 taken prisoners other escaped to waiting US ships.
• Other estimates 1800 killed by napalm.
• 2000-4000 Cuban forces killed.

UN FAILS CUBA

Dominican Republic

• Juan Bosch became President in 1962 and began land reforms & public works
• 7 months later CIA deposed him
• Bosch planned a comeback in 1965, CIA invaded using 22,000 soldiers and marines – the excuse given was to protect the foreigners!
• 3000 Dominicans died from US invasion

UN FAILS DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

El Salvador

• Civil War 1981-1992 financed by $6b in US aid.
• US military advisors taught methods of torture on teenage prisoners.
• Government soldiers were graduates of US School of the Americas.
• The 1993 UN Truth Commission revealed that 96% of human rights violations were by Salvadoran army (who had been trained by US)
• 75,000 people killed

UN FAILS EL SALVADOR

Grenada

• US destabalizing of Grenada began in 1979 when Maurice Bishop became President.
• He was overthrown in 1983 for not joining anti-Cuba calls
• Excuse given was Grenada building airport that would be used to attack UK and lives of American students in Grenada was in danger.

UN FAILS GRENADA

Guatemala

• Jacobo Arbenz became President in 1951 he took over land used by United Fruit Company, the company hired mercenaries and a CIA coup in 1954 ousted him from office.
• Military government of 1981-83 financed by US that destroyed 400 Mayan villages
• Over 200,000 killed from civil wars

UN FAILS GUATEMALA

Haiti

• Papa Doc Duvalier ruled from 1957-1986.
• His son took over – both influenced by CIA and popular movements suppressed.
• 30,000-100,000 killed

UN FAILS HAITI

Honduras

• CIA supported Battalion 316 which kidnapped, tortured & killed hundreds of Hondurans in 1980s.
• Shock and suffocation devices used for interrogations, prisoners kept naked, killed & buried in unmarked graves. (declassified documents are evidence)

 UN FAILS HONDURAS

Hungary

• US radio helped in raising Hungarians against the Soviets in 1956 giving tactical advice on how to fight the Soviets.

UN FAILS HUNGARY

Iran

• US provided military support for Iraq during Iran-Iraq war 1988 firing missiles on a civilian flight that killed 290.
• 262,000 dead (1980-88)

UN FAILS IRAN

Iraq

• 1980-88 : 105,000 dead – US provided Iraq billions including biological agents to defeat Iran. US did not want either side to win
• 1990-2003 : 200,000 Iraqis died in vain – US-Iraq war – Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 believing it was what US wanted. Iraq had fallen into trap and US imposed sanctions. To win over American public the Kuwait ambassador to US falsely testified to Congress that Iraqi troops were pulling plugs on incubators
• US air assault on Iraq in 1991 lasted 42 days. US dropped 400 tons of depleted uranium – US and NATO bombs targeted civilian infrastructure
• The 1991 Gulf War was to save Kuwait from Iraq. That was the official story sold to the world. Saddam Hussein however believes the US cajoled him into invading Kuwait. (Iraq claims that Kuwait was part of the Ottoman Empire) In 1991 – 120,000 sorties were launched and 265,000 bombs were dropped in Iraq. The great majority of the Coalition’s military forces were from the U.S., with Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Egypt as leading contributors, in that order. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid around US$32 billion of the US$60 billion cost to bomb a fellow Muslim nation.
• UN sanctions responsible for deaths of over 560,000 children (FAO) / 1999 – 5000 Iraqi children died monthly from sanctions (UNICEF)
• 2003 – to date – 654,000 deaths
• 9/11 was the excuse to attack Iraq claiming WMD and to save Iraq from dictator Saddam
• In 2003 – US launched ‘shock & awe’ on Baghdads 5million populace. Iraq was subjected to 41,000 sorties and 27,000 bombs dropped

UN FAILS IRAQ

Israel-Palestinian War

• US supports Israel and uses its veto powers to stop resolutions against Israel.
• 100,000-200,000 from both sides

UN FAILS ISRAEL AND PALESTINIANS

Nicaragua

• 1981-1990 about 25000 Nicaraguans died from armed struggle between Sandinista government & Contra rebels using CIA assassination manuals
• CIA armed Contras

UN FAILS NICARAGUA

Pakistan

• 1971 US helped West Pakistan invade East Pakistan and led to India invading East Pakistan (creating Bangladesh)
• Estimates are that 3 million died
• US supplied $411m to create West Pakistan’s armed forces – during war US supplied $15m in arms

UN FAILS PAKISTAN

Panama

• 1989 US troops invade Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega (former CIA agent)
• 500-4000 people killed

UN FAILS PANAMA

Paraguay

• Operation Condor was a secret intelligence and operations system created in the 1970s to destroy the “subversive threat” from the left and defend “Western, Christian civilization.” – U.S.-led counterinsurgency strategy to pre-empt or reverse social movements demanding political or socioeconomic change.
• Operation Condor employed a computerized database of thousands of individuals considered politically suspect and had archives of photos, microfilms, surveillance reports, psychological profiles, reports on membership in organizations, personal and political histories, and lists of friends and family members, as well as files on all manner of organizations. Several sources indicate that the CIA provided powerful computers to the Condor system

UN FAILS PARAGUAY

Philippines

• US has been controlling Philippines for over 100 years
• 1969 Symington Committee in US Congress revealed how war material was sent for counter-insurgency with US Special Forces and US Marines playing active role.
• 100,000 are said to have been executed or disappeared under President Marcos

UN FAILS PHILIPPINES

Sudan

• 1955 Sudan gained independence
• 1978 Sudan discovers oil & Sudan became 6^th largest recipient of US military aid.
• Over 2million people killed from ongoing wars
• US supporting efforts to overthrow central government
• August 1998 US bombed Khartoum with 75 cruise missiles claiming to target a chemical weapons factory owned by Osama bin Laden (it was actually a pharmaceutical supplies plant leading to tens of thousands dying for lack of medicines – this was the real US objective)
• 1999 US Secretary of State Madeline Albright met Sudan Peoples Liberation Army leader and offered food supplies in exchange for him to refuse peace plan sponsored by Egypt and Libya
• Foreign oil companies have been accused of complicity in depopulation of villages.

UN FAILS SUDAN

Vietnam

• US opposed agreement to unify North & South Vietnam and brought Catholic Ngo Diem to power in South Vietnam in a country of majority Buddhists.
• 1964 CIA fabricated story of Vietnam attacking US ship in Gulf of Tonkin to justify US action against Vietnam
• US Operation Phoenix terrorized South Vietnam – 1968 My Lai massacre is just one of America’s gruesome murders
• 7.8million deaths Vietnam War
• Estimated deaths of Cambodia & Laos was 2.7m

UN FAILS VIETNAM

Yugoslavia

• After USSR was dissolved US & Germany wanted to convert Yugoslavia’s economy to a capitalist one but ethnic and religious differences stood in between.
• The answer was to create independent nations run by West
• Over 107,000 estimated deaths from conflicts in Bosnia, Krajina, Croatia, Kosovo

UN FAILS YUGOSLAVIA

Libya

• Since when did a UN allow nations with blood on hands to remove dictators after the lies of Iraq?
• A leader of a nation was killed mercilessly and the world just looked on
• Lies & distortions were all part of another useless intervention that has destroyed Libya and the people.
• Today Libya is a devastated nation thanks to the West and UN

UN FAILS LIBYA

Syria

• It is very clear that Syria’s rebels just like Libya’s are hired mercenaries trained, armed and financed by the West to oust Syria’s leader.
• The appeals by the Syrian government to the UN has failed.
• UN has been accused of bias against Syria
• Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) says U.S. drones kill hundreds of innocent civilians
• A 12 year boy was recently beheaded by the ‘moderates’ that the US are arming.

UN FAILS SYRIA

Since 1945 while the UN was tasked to overlook world peace – the US and fellow Western nations have been responsible for – covert operations, using depleted uranium, napalm, intervening in elections, overthrowing democratically elected leaders & replacing them with puppets, arm twisting Third World leaders to sell national assets to Western corporates, arming, financing and training terrorists, funding terrorist groups,  funding propaganda lies, using mercenaries, enlisting NGOs to do dirty work, creating schools to train in methods of torture, firing at civilian flights, killing civilians from drones and excusing as collateral damage, targeting civilian infrastructure, ruining ancient historical sites (cultural genocide), bogus military interventions on pretext of humanitarian causes – what is even more horrifying is that the US declassified documents boasting of its escapes and CIA and Western intelligence even admits openly to these involvement but no criminal proceedings are taken against the West by the UN. Is the UN the West’s puppet court? And to add to the hypocrisy 8 months after coming into power the US President Obama is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize…. Do we laugh or cry?

Are we to continue with the UN so that the West can now turn its bloody hands on Asia having ruined Latin America, Africa, parts of Eastern Europe & presently the Middle East? Should this Western puppet of racism with welcome hands only for western-worshipping Asian/African sepoys be allowed to do to Asia what they have done to the rest of the world? Let us not forget that we are already carrying the burdens of close to 500 years of colonial legacy do we want to walk into a neo-colonial one too?

Notes

1. Complete report – http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%9314)
3. Timeline of CIA atrocities – http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-timeline-of-cia-atrocities/5348804

We are pleased to announce that excerpts from the Chilcot Report by the British Iraq Inquiry Committee have been submitted to the Ninth Circuit in support of the plaintiff’s case in Saleh v. Bush, et al.

What is the current status of the case?

Currently, Saleh v. Bush is on appeal before the Ninth Circuit.  Ms. Saleh’s lawsuit in federal court against US government leaders named as Defendants — George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz — was dismissed in December 2014 after the district court immunized the Defendants, ruling they were acting within the lawful scope of their employment when they planned and executed the Iraq War.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair shaking hands with Defendant-Appellee George W. Bush.

Ms. Saleh is arguing on appeal that the Defendants should not be immunized. She alleges that the Defendants  were acting from personally held convictions that the US should invade Iraq, regardless of any legitimate policy reasons. Specifically, she is pointing to a record of statements made by some of the Defendants in leading neoconservative outlets in which they called for the military overthrow of the Hussein regime as early as 1997.

She is also arguing that Bush administration officials knowingly lied to the public by fraudulently tying Hussein to Al Qaida and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Such misrepresentations would also make them personally liable for their conduct under relevant law.

The Ninth Circuit has not indicated when it will issue a ruling on the appeal.

What is the Chilcot Report?

The Chilcot Report is the final report issued by the Iraq Inquiry, a committee established by the British Government in 2009 to investigate what happened during the run up to the Iraq War. Composed of British “privy counsellors,” the report was released on July 6, 2016 after more than 6 years of investigation, research, and drafting.

Why is the Chilcot Report important to the Saleh v. Bush lawsuit?

The Chilcot Report contains (i) factual conclusions by the privy counsellors about what happened during the run up to the Iraq War, (ii) actual documentation (including written notes between Blair and Bush) that show a plan to go to war in Iraq as early as October 2001, and (iii) statements of international law by distinguished experts who have concluded that the Iraq War was illegal and constituted aggression against Iraq.

What are some of the pieces of evidence submitted to the Ninth Circuit?

These are some of the excerpts that we highlighted for the Ninth Circuit as evidence that the Iraq War was illegal, and that government leaders were not acting within the lawful scope of their employment authority when they planned and executed the Iraq War:

Conclusions of the Iraq Inquiry Committee:

24. President Bush decided at the end of 2001 to pursue a policy of regime change in Iraq.

68. On 26 February 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, advised that the US Administration had concluded that containment would not work, was drawing up plans for a military campaign later in the year, and was considering presenting Saddam Hussein with an ultimatum for the return of inspectors while setting the bar “so high that Saddam Hussein would be unable to comply.”

74. Mr Straw’s advice of 25 March proposed that the US and UK should seek an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to re-admit weapons inspectors. That would provide a route for the UK to align itself with the US without adopting the US objective of regime change. This reflected advice that regime change would be unlawful.

89. Sir Richard Dearlove reported that he had been told that the US had already taken a decision on action – “the question was only how and when;” and that he had been told it intended to set the threshold on weapons inspections so high that Iraq would not be able to hold up US policy.

Conclusions of the Iraq Inquiry Committee related to the legal analysis of the British government leading up to the war:

289. Despite being told that advice was not needed for Mr Blair’s meeting with President Bush on 31 January, Lord Goldsmith wrote on 30 January to emphasise that his view remained that resolution 1441 did not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the Security Council.

344. Mr Wood had warned Mr Straw on 24 January that “without a further decision by the Council, and absent extraordinary circumstances”, the UK would not be able lawfully to use force against Iraq.

348. Mr Wood wrote that Kosovo was “no precedent”: the legal basis was the need to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe; no draft resolution had been put to the Security Council; and no draft had been vetoed. He hoped there was: “… no doubt in anyone’s mind that without a further decision of the Council, and absent extraordinary circumstances (of which at present there is no sign), the United Kingdom cannot lawfully use force against Iraq to ensure compliance with its SCR WMD obligations. To use force without Security Council authority would amount to the crime of aggression.”

579. Lord Goldsmith recognised that there was a possibility of a legal challenge

Underlying statements and facts relied on by the Iraq Inquiry Committee

15 January 2010 Statement by Foreign & Commonwealth Office legal advisor Sir Michael Wood to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

I considered that the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law. In my opinion, that use of force had not been authorized by the Security Council, and had no other legal basis in international law.

18 January 2010 Statement by Foreign & Commonwealth Office legal advisor Elizabeth Wilmshurst to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

I regarded the invasion of Iraq as illegal, and I therefore did not feel able to continue in my post. I would have been required to support and maintain the Government’s position in international fora. The rules of international law on the use of force by States are at the heart of international law. Collective security, as opposed to unilateral military action, is a central purpose of the Charter of the United Nations. Acting contrary to the Charter, as I perceived the Government to be doing, would have the consequence of damaging the United Kingdom’s reputation as a State committed to the rule of law in international relations and to the United Nations.

12 July 2010 Statement by Carne Ross, First Secretary of the U.K. Permanent Mission to the U.N. to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies.

October 11, 2001 message from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to George W. Bush

I have no doubt we need to deal with Saddam. But if we hit Iraq now, we would lose the Arab world, Russia, probably half of the EU …

However, I am sure we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date. My suggestion is, in order to give ourselves space that we say: phase 1 is the military action focused on Afghanistan because it’s there that perpetrators of 11 September hide. Phase 2 is the medium and longer term campaign against terrorism in all its forms. …

(Mr. Blair was apparently discussing with Defendant-Appellee Bush regime change in Iraq just one month after the attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. Mr. Blair’s suggestion for “phase 1” of the U.S.-U.K. strategy on the war on terrorism to first direct military action toward “Afghanistan because it’s there that perpetrators of 11 September hide,” further supports allegations that U.S. officials used an unrelated terrorist attack to execute a pre-existing plan of regime change in Iraq.  Mr. Blair then went on to discuss a “phase 2” that would include invading Iraq).

December 4, 2001 message from  former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to George W. Bush

Iraq is a threat because it has WMD capability … But any link to 11 September and AQ [Al Qaeda] is at best very tenuous; and at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK, to support immediate military action … So we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time. …

(This note supports allegations that U.S. government leaders were aware that Iraq had no link to the 9/11 attacks or Al Qaeda and support allegations that U.S. government leaders made false statements to the public about the threat Iraq posed, or its connection to Al Qaeda, in order to support a war and satisfy personally-held objectives of regime change that had no legitimate policy underpinning)

July 28, 2002 message from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to George W. Bush:

I will be with you, whatever …

The Evidence. Again, I have been told the US thinks this unnecessary. But we still need to make the case. If we recapitulate all the WMD evidence; add his attempts to secure nuclear capability; and, as seems possible, add on Al Qaida link, it will be hugely persuasive over here.

(This note confirms that U.S. government official’s intent to invade Iraq was well-formed by July 2002. Mr. Blair’s July 2002 note to George W. Bush observed that U.S. officials thought evidence supporting regime change was “unnecessary” and that an “Al Qaida link” could be simply be tacked onto government messaging in order to sell the war).

Statements by legal experts who have concluded that the Iraq War was illegal

10 September 2010 Submission by Philippe Sands QC to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

Distinguished members of the legal community in the United Kingdom have also concluded without ambiguity that the war was unlawful.

9 September 2010 Statement by Professor Nicholas Grief to the Iraq Inquiry Committee (emphasis added).

A second Security Council resolution specifically and unambiguously authorising military action was required. The vague warning of ‘serious consequences’ in resolution 1441 did not suffice, and to interpret resolution 678 as granting the necessary authority was not ‘good faith’ interpretation as required by international law. Without such a resolution, the invasion of Iraq constituted an act of aggression, contrary to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

What happens next?

The Department of Justice has indicated that it will oppose the filing of these portions from the Chilcot Report with the Ninth Circuit. We will circulate the DOJ opposition once it has been filed.

Over the past few days, Feronia Inc., a Canadian-based company majority-owned by European and US development banks, has been pressuring local communities to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would endorse the company’s continued operation and expansion of oil palm plantations within their territories.

Despite severe pressure and intimidation, the communities have rejected the MOU and are appealing for international support to demand that Feronia respect their decision.

They are calling especially on the development banks or funds, which have a combined control of over 80 per cent of Feronia’s shares, to respect their own internal guidelines regarding the free, prior and informed consent of communities. The development institutions with investments in Feronia include: the CDC of the UK; the AFD and Proparco of France; the AECID of Spain; OPIC of the US; BIO of Belgium; DEG of Germany; FMO of the Netherlands; and SECO of Switzerland.

The order of events

On 8 March 2015, over 60 customary chiefs and other community leaders from across the district of Yahuma, where 90 per cent of Feronia’s Lokutu plantations are located, gathered in the town of Mozité to call for the resolution of their longstanding grievances against Feronia. In a declaration, they stated that the company had never consulted them about the use of their lands and had no right to be there.

“We demand, first and foremost, the start of negotiations to reclaim our rights over the lands that have been illegally taken from us over the past 104 years”, they stated in the declaration. “We want to be compensated, and only afterwards can we proceed to discussions over a memorandum of understanding”.

Since then, several conflicts with Feronia have occurred, as the company has tried to send surveyors into the territories of the communities without their consent.

On 18 July 2016 a delegation of high level provincial authorities and elected officials was dispatched to Mozité to get the communities to agree to an MOU. One of the elected officials participating in this delegation was present during the 8 March 2015 meeting in Mozité and received a copy of the community’s declaration.

Sources within the delegation confirm that the objective of the delegation was to secure community consent to allow Feronia to resume with its land surveying activities. The sources also confirmed that the mission was paid for by Feronia and that the delegation was sent on orders from Kinshasa.

At the initial meetings with the delegation in the village of Mozité, the communities categorically rejected the proposed MOU. The delegation continued to pressure the communities to sign an MOU over the next days until 21 July 2015, when the communities once again refused to sign an MOU and the delegation finally abandoned its mission.

DFIs violate their guidelines

The development finance institutions that effectively own Feronia have guidelines that the companies they invest in must follow in their negotiations with local communities over lands. The current efforts to pressure the communities in Lokutu to sign an MOU are in direct violation of these guidelines.

The development finance institutions should therefore take immediate measures to force Feronia to respect the rights and demands of the local communities and to stop pressuring the communities to sign an MOU. The DFIs must also take measures to ensure the security of community leaders who have been intimidated because of their opposition to the signature of an MOU with Feronia.

Feronia has yet to respect the community’s clear demand that the company provide them with evidence of the legal rights that it claims to have to operate on their lands.

International support

RIAO-RDC and its international partners support the demands of the communities for the return of their lands.

RIAO-RDC and its international partners call on the Government of the DRC to fulfil its responsibilities and ensure the security of the affected communities and their leaders who are now under threat of disappearance and other acts of intimidation and call on the provincial assembly in Kisangani to leave the communities to freely and peacefully seek their rights and to refrain from pressuring communities to sign agreements with companies that affect their control over their lands.

RIAO-RDC and its international partners are calling for an international fact finding mission to investigate and report on the situation of the communities living within the areas affected by the operations of Feronia Inc in the DRC.

For more information please contact:

Jean-Francois Mombia Atuku, RIAO-RDC, +221 773 469621

Ange David Baimey, GRAIN, +233 269 089432

Meanwhile At The Democratic National Convention In Philly…

By Tyler Durden, July 25 2016

As LA Times reporter Matt Pearce tweeted…

Just walked through a crowd of at least a couple hundred liberals and still haven’t seen a single Clinton sign.

DNC Chairwoman Caught Red-Handed, Rigging Electoral Process for Clinton, Resignation Not Good Enough

By Stephen Lendman, July 25 2016

DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was caught red-handed, rigging the electoral process for Clinton, assuring she’ll be party standard bearer in November. She’s stepping down after this week’s party convention, continuing to represent Florida’s 23rd district – facing no criminal charges, despite committing a serious racketeering offense.

Donald Trump Supporters and Opponents Agree: Candidacy is About Race and Racism

By Jon Hecht, July 25 2016

Make America Safe Again!  Make America Work Again!  Make America First Again! These were the official themes of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention. From the podium the newly anointed GOP standard-bearer focused on law and order, on boosting the economy, on an American foreign policy based on limiting foreign entanglements, and on further restricting immigration.

Hillary Clinton’s Vice President Tim Kaine: A Match Made on Wall Street

By Eric Draitser, July 24 2016

This article was first published on May 31st, 2016 and on Global Research on June 2nd. Eric Draitser’s analysis is outstanding and incisive Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders warned that Hillary Clinton’s eventual vice presidential pick must not be someone from the milieu of Wall Street and Corporate America. And while Sanders is still fighting to win the Democratic Party nomination in what many have argued is a rigged system with a foregone conclusion, it appears that Sanders is also intent on influencing the course of the Clinton campaign and the party itself.

Trump, Trade and US Working Class Discontent

By Jack Rasmus, July 23 2016

With the Republican and Democrat party conventions in progress or upcoming, it has now become clear that the 2016 USA presidential election is unlike preceding elections in recent decades. Large percentages of those who consider themselves members of either party do not approve of their presidential candidates, for one thing. That includes more than a third of both Republican and Democrat voters. For another, both candidates have assumed positions on issues that in previous elections would have been considered anathema to the dominant ruling economic and political elites.

Clinton had to know and be actively complicit with former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with other top party officials, in rigging the electoral process in her favor – handing her the nomination Tuesday night.

The traditional roll call of state delegates is pro forma pomp and circumstance, a tedious exercise, boring to watch, the outcome predetermined last year.

Hillary is called the most powerful woman in America, selected last year before announcing her candidacy to be Democrat party standard bearer.

It’s inconceivable for massive fraud on her behalf to have happened without her full knowledge, support, encouragement and complicity. She had to know and be actively involved – calling the shots as Democrat party leader.

Add another racketeering charge to her rap sheet. Her criminal history since the 1990s makes her the most villainous aspirant for president in US history.

How any thinking person can support her is beyond comprehension. A simple review of her despicable criminal record as me-first lady, US senator and secretary of state is easily accessible online, in literally dozens of articles I’ve written about her and husband Bill, along with what other reliable independent sources have reported.

Avoid cheerleading media scoundrels – the New York Times most prominent in praising her despicable record, suppressing her high crimes, inventing her nonexistent qualifications for president.

However short Trump falls as someone worthy of the nation’s highest office, at least he’s not Hillary. Some national polls now show him ahead – though with over three month’s before November’s election, a lifetime in US politics, anything can change many times between now and election day.

Preventing a Clinton presidency is top priority in US electoral history. Trump could win and still lose – Bush v. Gore and Bush v. Kerry perhaps the two most notorious examples. In 2000 and 2004, the winner lost and loser won, accomplished by massive fraud.

Electoral rigging handed Clinton the Democrat nomination – perhaps the process to be repeated to make her president.

With it, she becomes commander-in-chief of America’s military – a ruthlessly dangerous war goddess with her finger on its nuclear trigger, nothing preventing her from squeezing it.

Voting for Clinton is a crap shoot for global war with nuclear weapons – perhaps with loaded dice assuring 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

In a historic ruling, Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice U.U. Lalit of the Hon’ble Supreme Court have spoken out in favour of democracy. The judgment came on a plea by hundreds of families in the north-eastern State of Manipur for a probe by a Special Investigation Team into 1,528 cases of alleged fake encounters involving the Army and the police.

In particular, by saying: “It does not matter whether the victim was a common person or a militant or a terrorist, nor does it matter whether the aggressor was a common person or the state. The law is the same for both and is equally applicable to both…This is the requirement of a democracy and the requirement of preservation of the rule of law and the preservation of individual liberties”, the Hon’ble Supreme Court took a step in the direction of equality before the law, and reaffirmed Article 21 that no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.

The judgment has been welcomed especially among people in the “disturbed areas” of our northeastern states and Kashmir, and is surely in partial vindication of Irom Sharmila’s principled, 12-years-long on-going fast demanding repeal of AFSPA.

This writer, with his Army background, is the first to point out that no soldier (the term refers to all ranks of the Armed Forces – Army, Navy and Air Force) will defend wrong doing of any sort, leave alone heinous crimes like murder and rape, by another soldier whether he is “on-duty” or “off-duty”. The reason is not merely that such should be the attitude of any good citizen, but because a known offender in the team is a threat to the coherence, man-to-man trust and fighting efficiency of the military team, and to the survival of the individual soldier in high-risk situations, at all levels from the section, platoon, company and battalion upto the highest formations.

The Hon’ble Supreme Court’s ruling will not find dissonance within the Armed Forces (hereinafter Army, for short). However, without in any manner questioning the wholly welcome order of the Hon’ble Supreme Court and with all due respect and humility, this writer would like to make some points on the larger issue of AFSPA and deployment of the Army on internal security (IS) duties.

Disempowerment of the soldier

The plea by the families of Manipur concerns alleged fake encounters involving both the Army and the police. While a faked encounter is reprehensible, a murder is a murder and a rape is a rape, it is necessary to examine the differences between the Army soldier and the armed policeman, and see why the Army and the AFSPA take a beating.

Under Article 246 of the Constitution, Parliament makes laws concerning the deployment of the Armed Forces “in aid of the civil power”, prescribing the powers, jurisdiction, privileges and liabilities of soldiers during deployment. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA) is one such law. Others are, the Army Act 1950, the Navy Act 1957 and the Air Force Act 1950, and associated Rules and Regulations, to administer military law to all ranks of the three Armed Forces.

These laws abrogate a soldier’s constitutional rights under Art.19(1)(a), (b) and (c), of freedom of speech and expression to communicate with the media, freedom of assembly, or the right to form or be members of associations or unions for collective bargaining. Besides this, the Army Act (AA, for short) and the Acts for the Navy and Air Force are strict by any standards, and in fact their “excessive” strictness has been commented upon in legal circles. Thus, because of the nature of duties performed by them and the strict laws in force for maintenance of strict discipline among them, soldiers are by law, uniquely disempowered citizens. This is not the case with members of the bureaucracy, state policemen or armed policemen (CAPFs), on whom restrictions by law and administrative rules are far less stringent. This (necessary) disempowerment is a stumbling block for the Army when called in aid of the civil power. The reasons are discussed hereunder.

Government can function in the interest of people when there is peace and order in society, functionaries in power use people-oriented politics, and the rule of law prevails among all sections of society. Providing security and public order by fair and just enforcement of extant laws, and maintenance of supplies and services essential to the public, is the primary task of governance by the civil administration, which is the combination of the powers, roles and functions of people’s elected representatives, bureaucrats and integral police forces.

Disturbance of law and order usually happens because of conflict of interests within civil society, caused by inappropriate laws and/or unfair policies and/or poor or ill-motivated implementation – in short, mal-administration or mis-governance. When law and order, and peace in society is disturbed and is beyond political resolution, governance calls for using the force of the state and/or central police (CAPFs). When law and order cannot be restored despite deploying state and central police or because of their misuse, it can only be restored by deployment of the Armed Forces (Army) on IS duties in aid of the civil power as permitted by the Constitution. Government has no other option; the Army is its instrument of last resort.

When government calls the army for IS duties as for example, to quell rioting, the army may confront a violent mob. The army officer commanding the sub-unit is obliged to take the written permission of a magistrate who accompanies the sub-unit, before opening fire if the situation so warrants according to the discretion of the magistrate, because the soldier cannot use firearms against civilians without permission from civil authority. But when law and order breaks down in a large area, government cannot provide magistrates to day-and-night accompany every army sub-unit, and it therefore empowers the Army to handle such situations by means of AFSPA.

The AFSPA

The AFSPA is an enabling legislation. It legitimises deployment of the Army in large areas which the civil administration may notify as “disturbed areas”. AFSPA is applicable only to the Armed Forces (under the Ministry of Defence), and not to CAPFs or state police forces under central or state Ministries of Home Affairs respectively. The Constitution of India makes a distinction between “the members of the Armed Forces” (Art.33(a)) meaning soldiers, and “members of the Forces charged with the maintenance of public order” (Art.33(b)) meaning police personnel. Thus the term “Armed Forces” (proper noun) should not be applied to just any body of uniformed persons bearing firearms such as police or CAPFs who may be authorized and trained to use firearms, but only to the soldiers of India’s military. But, often unable to distinguish between the Army and civilian forces that bear arms, media persons often use the catch-all term “security forces” or “armed forces” (common noun) to include the military, CAPFs and state police.

The confusion is exacerbated because CAPFs and police forces wear camouflage uniforms that are virtually indistinguishable from Army uniforms. In tense situations where a journalist takes risks, it can be risky for him/her, and even more so for any member of the public, to ask an armed man to which force he belongs. Thus often enough, the media and the public straightaway blame the Army for incidents involving CAPFs or police, because of AFSPA being in force. Even if subsequent inquiry by civilian authority in a particular case finds that the Army was not involved, the negative “Army-AFSPA” image persists in public opinion.

According to AA Sec.69 “Civil offences” and AA Sec.70 “Civil offence not triable by court-martial” read together, a soldier who commits rape, murder or culpable homicide not amounting to murder of a civilian, will not be tried by a court-martial unless he is on active service, or at any place outside India, or at a frontier post. In any case, AFSPA being in force is not the cause for his committing crime, and cannot be viewed as a facilitator for crime. But repealing AFSPA would cause AA Sec.70 to become inapplicable, making the soldier liable for trial by criminal law – and this is really the cause for the public demand to repeal AFSPA.

AFSPA Sec.3 confers upon a state or central government, powers to declare the whole or some part of the state as a “disturbed area” … “in such a disturbed or dangerous condition that the use of Armed Forces in aid of the civil power is necessary”, by issuing a notification to that effect. The assessment of the condition of society and the discretion to notify it as “disturbed” is the sole prerogative of government. The Armed Forces have no role in this whatsoever. AFSPA Sec.4 confers special powers upon members of the Armed Forces in the notified disturbed areas to arrest, enter and search, or open fire.

Demand for repeal of AFSPA

Notwithstanding the constitutionally permissible last-resort necessity of using military force for internal security when the political-administrative tools of governance fail, there is little justification for an elected government to use even police force for day-to-day governance continuously over decades.

People in our northeastern states and Kashmir, for decades trapped in the crossfire between government police and military forces on the one hand, and the bullets, grenades and IEDs of militants on the other, want nothing more than peace and democratic freedoms. Irom Sharmila, a national icon of courageous non-violence, who has been on fast for 12 long years demanding repeal of AFSPA, stated it squarely and unequivocally in 2013: “I am against a government that uses violence as a means to govern”. [Jiby Kattakayam; “I am against a government that uses violence to govern”; The Hindu, March 5, 2013].

She goes further to say that “the government and the army are colluding to cheat the people” . Her stating that the people are being cheated of peace, social order and meaningful development is understandable and correct. But her accusation of army’s colluding with government, suggesting that the army has an institutional interest or stake in IS deployment, is unfounded. It bears repetition that the army comes out of barracks at the specific call of government and not of its own accord. Therefore, “cheat the people” refers to government cheating the people through abject failure of the politics of development, and monumental political-bureaucratic corruption of ideology and principles. Decades-long continuous violence through the instrumentality of police and military for governance is antithetical to peace and social order essential for development of the sort that people crave for and need. This legitimate craving of the people is reflected in their demand for repeal of AFSPA.

Continuous use of AFSPA

Hearing several petitions challenging the constitutional validity of AFSPA, the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 [Naga People’s Movement of Human Rights v Union of India [1997] ICHRL 117 (27.11.1997)] that the powers given to the army by AFSPA were not arbitrary or unreasonable and did not violate constitutional provisions. However, the Supreme Court went further to rule that (#) declaration of an area as disturbed should be reviewed every six months, (#) central government sanction or refusal to prosecute army personnel should be accompanied by reasons in writing, and (#) army personnel operating under AFSPA would do so under legally binding safeguards or guidelines in the form of a comprehensive list of DOs and DONTs before, during and after operations, in dealing with civil courts, and when providing aid to civil authority. [Note below].

The restriction that government should review the declaration every six months is cosmetic, since it merely calls for bi-annual bureaucratic paperwork. It has not prevented governments from maintaining entire states as disturbed areas continuously for decades. To limit army deployment on IS duties, the continuity of AFSPA needs to be broken. This writer suggests amendment by inserting a final sentence in AFSPA Sec.3 as follows: “Provided that the Governor of the State or the Administrator of the Union Territory or the Central government shall not declare an area as disturbed for more than an aggregate of 90 days in any calendar year.” The period (of 90 days or less or more) suggested can be finalized after wide public discussion and cross-party consultation.

End note

The use of the military in aid of the civil power is an option that no government, howsoever liberal, will discard especially since it has constitutional sanction. The military on IS duties is to civil society what an ICU is to a critically ill person. A patient cannot remain for years in a hospital ICU, because he/she would be effectively dead. The patient needs treatment for the disease and right nutrition to regain normal health. Likewise, the military remaining deployed on IS duties over decades makes civic life in society effectively dead, without assuring peace or security. India’s societies need the “treatment” of honest political effort by transparent dialogue and engagement with people, and “nutrition” of good governance for their growth. Society does not need the army, except to guard the country’s borders against external aggression and protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

While no government may ever propose to Parliament to repeal AFSPA, it would certainly be open to amending it. An amendment to cap the applicability of AFSPA to a total of say, 90 days in any calendar year, will allow governments to retain their (albeit undoubtedly coercive but unavoidable) option of military deployment when civil administration fails to maintain law and order. This will make governments accountable to the people, to rediscover ways of providing a deeply troubled society with honest politics and good governance. It will also enable the Army, one-third of which is engaged in IS duties, to focus more on securing India’s borders.

S.G. Vombatkere is a Indian major-general  who was the additional director general for discipline and vigilance at the headquarters of the Indian Army. He retired in 1996 from the Indian military and is a member of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).

ANNEX

List of DOs & DON’Ts as directed by the Supreme Court in NPMHR v. India in 1997, that are legally binding

DOs

1. Action before Operation

(a) Act only in the area declared ‘Disturbed Area’ under Section 3 of the Act

(b) Power to open fire using force or arrest is to be exercised under this Act only by an officer/JCO/WO and NCO

(c) Before launching any raid/search, definite information about the activity to be obtained from the local civil authorities

(d) As far as possible coopt representative of local civil administration during the raid.

2. Action during Operation

(a) In case of necessity of opening fire and using any force against the suspect or any person acting in contravention of law and order, ascertain first that it is essential for maintenance of public order. Open fire only after due warning

(b) Arrest only those who have committed cognizable offence or who are about to Commit cognizable offence or against whom a reasonable ground exists to prove that they have committed or are about to commit cognizable offence

(c) Ensure that troops under command do not harass innocent people, destroy property of the public or unnecessarily enter into the house/dwelling of people not connected with any unlawful activities

(d) Ensure that women are not searched/arrested without the presence of female police. In fact women should be searched by female police only

3. Action after Operation

(a) After arrest prepare a list of the persons so arrested

(b) Hand over the arrested persons to the nearest police station with least possible delay

(c) While handing over to the police a report should accompany with detailed circumstances occasioning the arrest

(d) Every delay in handing over the suspects to the police must be justified and should be reasonable depending upon the place, time of arrest and the terrain in which such person has been arrested. Least possible delay may be 2-3 hours extendable to 24 hours or so depending upon a particular case

(e) After raid make out a list of all arms, ammunition or any other incriminating material/document taken into possession.

(f) All such arms, ammunition, stores etc. should be handed over to the police station along with the seizure memo

(g) Obtain receipt of persons and arms/ammunition, stores etc. so handed over to the police

(h) Make record of the area where operation is launched having the date and time and the persons participating in such raid

(i) Make a record of the commander and other officers/JCOs/NCOs forming part of such force

(k) Ensure medical relief to any person injured during the encounter, if any person dies in the encounter his dead body be handed over immediately to the police along with the details leading to such death

4. Dealing with civil court

(a) Directions of the High Court/Supreme Court should be promptly attended to

(b) Whenever summoned by the courts, decorum of the court must be maintained and proper respect paid

(c) Answer questions of the court politely and with dignity

(d) Maintain detailed record of the entire operation correctly and explicitly.

DON’Ts

1. Do not keep a person under custody for any period longer than the bare necessity for handing over to the nearest police station

2. Do not use any force after having arrested a person except when he is trying to escape

3. Do not use third-degree methods to extract information or to a extract confession or other involvement in unlawful activities

4. After arrest of a person by the member of the armed forces, he shall not be interrogated by the member of the armed force

5. Do not release the person directly after apprehending on your own. If any person is to be released, he must be released through civil authorities

6. Do not tamper with official records

7. The armed forces shall not take back a person after he is handed over to civil police.

List of DOs and DON’Ts while providing aid to civil authority

DOs

1. Act in closest possible communication with civil authorities throughout

2. Maintain inter-communication if possible by telephone/radio

3. Get the permission/requisition from the Magistrate when present

4. Use little force and do as little injury to person and property as may be consistent with attainment of objective in view

5. In case you decide to open fire

(a) Give warning in local language that fire will be effective

(b) Attract attention before firing by bugle or other means

(c) Distribute your men in fire units with specified Commanders

(d) Control fire by issuing personal orders

(e) Note number of rounds fired

(f) Aim at the front of crowd actually rioting or inciting to riot or at conspicuous ringleaders, i.e., do not fire into the thick of the crowd at the back

(g) Aim low and shoot for effect

(h) Keep Light Machine Gun and Medium Gun in reserve

(i) Cease firing immediately once the object has been attained

(j) Take immediate steps to secure wounded

6. Maintain cordial relations with civilian authorities and paramilitary forces

7. Ensure high standard of discipline

DON’Ts

8. Do not use excessive force

9. Do not get involved in hand-to-hand struggle with the mob

10. Do not ill-treat anyone, in particular, women and children

11. No harassment of civilians

12. No torture

13. No communal bias while dealing with civilians

14. No meddling in civilian administration affairs

15. No Military disgrace by loss/surrender of weapons

16. Do not accept presents, donations and rewards

17. Avoid indiscriminate firing.

Lo mejor que podría hacer el gobierno de Estados Unidos con respecto a Venezuela, independientemente de los resultados políticos, sería dejar de intervenir.

Durante los últimos 15 años, Washington le ha causado un gran daño a Venezuela con su implacable búsqueda de un “cambio de régimen”. En marzo el presidente Obama declaró una vez más, de forma irracional, que Venezuela era una “amenaza inusual y extraordinaria para la seguridad nacional y la política exterior de Estados Unidos”, así que las sanciones económicas en contra del país se extendieron.

Aunque esas sanciones tienen un alcance limitado, acarrean consecuencias importantes en las decisiones de inversión pues los inversionistas saben lo que suele ocurrir con los países que Washington tiene en la mira como una amenaza inusual y extraordinaria para la seguridad nacional de Estados Unidos. Las sanciones, así como la presión por parte del gobierno estadounidense, provocaron que importantes instituciones financieras no le otorgaran préstamos al gobierno venezolano que en otro momento serían de bajo riesgo al estar garantizados con oro.

Washington estuvo involucrado en el golpe militar de 2002 en contra del gobierno electo de Venezuela. El gobierno de Estados Unidos reconoció haber proporcionado “entrenamiento, instalaciones institucionales y otro tipo de ayuda a personas y organizaciones” que participaron en el golpe. Después de eso aumentó la financiación a grupos de oposición y les sigue otorgando millones de dólares.

En 2013, Washington volvió a encontrarse en una posición solitaria en la región y el mundo, al rehusarse a reconocer los resultados de la elección presidencial (incluso cuando no hubo dudas acerca del proceso electoral); Estados Unidos le prestó ayuda a manifestantes violentos que buscaban derrocar al gobierno. Asimismo, le dio apoyo político a intentos similares en 2014.

Todo está bien documentado y se le ha dado a conocer a los periodistas que cubren Venezuela, pero habrá que intentar encontrarse a alguno en los medios importantes que tenga el valor de escribir al respecto. Es un poco como informar sobre Ucrania y nunca mencionar a Rusia.

La intervención de Estados Unidos en Venezuela, como en otros países, ha contribuido a la polarización política y al conflicto que ha durado años, ya que alentó a los elementos de oposición en numerosas coyunturas para que buscaran una estrategia de cambio de régimen, más que un cambio político pacífico.

Implementar una política de no intervención en Venezuela sería un cambio enorme para Washington y sentaría un sano precedente. Después de todo, el mundo está inundado de sangre derramada y refugiados por la búsqueda estadounidense de “cambios de régimen” en Afganistán, Irak, Libia, Siria y otros países. ¿Por qué no intentar algo distinto en Occidente?

Mark Weisbrot

Article in english :

http://www.nytimes.com/es/2016/07/08/mark-weisbrot-y-ricardo-hausmann-debaten-sobre-el-futuro-de-venezuela/

Mark Weisbrot es codirector del Centro de Investigación en Economía y Política (Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR) en Washington, D.C. y presidente de la organización Just Foreign Policy. También es autor del nuevo libro “Fracaso. Lo que los ‘expertos’ no entendieron de la economía global” (2016, Akal, Madrid).

Pauline Hanson came across a racist and incoherent cartoon character on the ABC’s Q&A program on July 18, 2016

But it would be a mistake to think that Hanson, and the more than half a million people who voted for her in the July 2 federal election, can simply be laughed away. They represent, in a distorted way, the deepening contradictions in our society that have to be addressed at their root.

The myth of the egalitarianism of Australia is cracking up after 50 years of Coalition and Labor Party governments helping the super rich get even richer at the expense of the rest.

Fear and insecurity are on the rise and governments of both stripes have implemented policies that encouraged people to blame minority groups for the pain they have inflicted.

Globally, we are in a time of great conflict. But what else can we expect when capitalism has made the richest 1% wealthier than the other 99%?

War has become permanent in a much of the world and this war is spilling over into the richest countries.

There is growing fear and insecurity and, especially in the richest, whitest countries, people are looking for easy solutions and looking to blame people. It’s easy for the Pauline Hanson’s of the world to blame the newest migrants to this country, whether they are Asians or Muslims.

Hanson trades on being sneered at and dismissed as a “bogan” by people who can be seen as part of the “elite” in society.

Yet, notice how she seldom attacks the rich while she goes for members of the “cultural elite” and takes a sideswipe at nameless “multinationals” and “foreigners” of all kinds.

Meanwhile, she remains quietly committed to the bipartisan policy of putting corporate profits first.

Hanson’s cartoon-like character is a political asset: it is a way of getting her supporters to see her as the victim.

But Hanson is not the victim.

Every hate-filled racist outburst of hers results in countless unreported acts of racist violence against children in schoolyards, people perceived to be non-white or of Muslim appearance on public transport, in the streets, shopping centres and workplaces.

It was good to hear this point scored strongly by a crew of First Nations militants at the front of the anti-racist protest outside the Sydney ABC studios when Hanson appeared on Q&A.

Led by Uncle Ken Canning and Aunty Shirley Lomas they forcefully argued that Hanson is not the victim here, so let’s not do anything that helps Hanson claim that she is.

In the 1990s, Hanson made Asians and “Aboriginals” her main target of hate. Today she is focussing her hate speech on Muslims. It was inspiring at the anti-racism protest to hear one First Nations militant after another welcoming Muslims and other refugees to this country.

This small protest was very significant. It followed hot on the heels of Murrandoo Yanner telling Hanson she was not welcome at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair on July 16.

Hanson had showed up with a 60 minutes TV crew in tow, but they were turned away by Yanner.

“Now you are kicking the Muslims around, you are just a racist redneck with your red hair,” Yanner said as Hanson and her media entourage retreated.

“Go away, go back to Ipswich and your fish and chip shop, you’re disgraceful, you are intellectually dishonest and you are not welcome here.”

In the future, we may look back at this time and say, this is where the new movement against the return of Pauline Hanson recognised a First Nations leadership with the wisdom and power to roll it back.

The First Nations peoples of this continent are the most oppressed section of the community that has survived genocide and the most vicious racism for 228 years.

Their leadership in any anti-racist movement has a powerful moral and political authority and brings with it a rich experience in fighting racism.

A movement led by First Nations militants determined to deny Hanson her undeserved victimhood, to rebut her claim to speak for the downtrodden and to demolish her patriotic posturing, could quickly grow broad and strong.

Such a movement can unite communities of all colours and build alliances with militant trade unions and progressive groups to put Hanson and her racist followers back in the dustbin of history — where they belong.

Peter Boyle is a member of the Socialist Alliance. He was a migrant in Malaysia in the 1970s and has had a long involvement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and other anti-racism campaigns.

In an open letter to readers Amy McQuire, Michael Brull, and Samah Sabawi call for strong ties across communities to counter the rising tide of racism, wherever it comes from.

George Fredrikson was the Edgar E Robinson Professor of History at Stanford University, and his academic specialty was racism. He observed that in late 19th century Germany, an anti-Semitic party emerged in the election of 1881. Its “success was engineered from above”, as the Conservatives were “using hostility to the Jews to lure middle-class voters away from the Liberals.”

In the 1890s, a “more spontaneous and populist antisemitism” emerged. This time, the Conservatives decided to “emulate their tactics. The incorporation of an antisemitic appeal into the Conservative program led to the decline and disappearance of the single-issue anti-Jewish parties by the late 1890s.” Fredrikson concluded that, “Like the Democrats in the southern United States,” Germany’s Conservatives “learned that racism could be used, whenever expedient or necessary, to steal the thunder of their populist rivals and keep themselves in firm control.”

This use of racism – by the respectable, mainstream conservatives – sowed a poisonous legacy for Germany. The future was not set in stone, but a dangerous path was paved for future generations to explore.

When Pauline Hanson was kicked out of the Liberal Party in 1996 for offensive comments about Aboriginal people, she was drawing on a long and sordid history.

In 1997, after her election to the lower house seat of Oxley, One Nation released a book: Pauline Hanson: the Truth. The book railed against the millions of dollars supposedly spent on Aboriginal people. Feeding off the racism which has propped up white prosperity for the past 200 years, it claimed that Aboriginal people were getting special privileges.

The central proposition the book used to bolster this bigoted view was that Aboriginal people were cannibals in the 19th century. “They killed and ate their own women and children and occasionally their men,” it read. “The older women were often killed for eating purposes, like livestock.”

These views may seem like an anomaly – racism on the extreme end of the spectrum, to be confined to the fringes of society. But the fact is that Australia’s racist history, its justification for killing Aboriginal men, women and children, for stealing land, children, wages and remains, were all based on racist tropes like this, which Pauline Hanson shamelessly revived. White Australia, and everyone who comes to this country, benefits in some way from the assault on Aboriginal people and culture that Hanson so crudely justified.

Most of these tropes – including the trope of the Aboriginal mother as an infanticidal cannibal – were based around the demonisation of Aboriginal women. Academic Liz Conor, discussing her recent book Skin Deep, told 98.9 FM that this trope was used to dehumanise Aboriginal people, and paint them as savages, to justify the stealing of land and cement the fiction that is “terra nullius”.

“The idea that primitive people were cannibals was everywhere and it was in settlers’ mouths before they arrived here. In Australia we did this especially nasty thing because I think we were especially nasty to be honest. And especially misogynistic. We said Aboriginal people were not only cannibals, they ate each other and etc, but their mothers ate their babies, they ate their newborns.”

“And in Australia we said that not because they were hungry even, but because the meat was especially tasty to them.”

Dr Conor has traced the journey of this demeaning trope through history, showing how and why it was re-circulated.

“(There was this) repeating motif from settlement right through to Daisy Bates” Dr Conor says, but “the last person to say (an incarnation of this) was Pauline Hanson.”

Racism becomes engrained when these tropes are repeated. Of course, you’d never see a mainstream conservative party repeating outrageous claims like this. And yet, much like the German Conservatives, they adopt their own form of racism, even more insidious because it is painted as sensible, and then sold to the public.

f you compare Hanson’s maiden speech to the Howard years, you see the seeds of Hanson’s racist thinking reflected throughout his policies towards First Nations people.

In her maiden speech to Parliament, Hanson called for the abolition of ATSIC. In 2004, the Howard government put that plan into action. In that maiden speech, Hanson led an outright attack on Aboriginal land rights, and on native title. Howard then began his plans to whittle down native title following the Wikdecision in the High Court, spurred on by powerful mining and pastoral interests.

The scare campaigns around Aboriginal land rights and native title from the Hawke era through to Keating and Howard, by mining and industry lobbies helped cement this racism, and paved the way for the acceptance of outrageous views like Hanson’s.

The claims of Hanson – that Aboriginal people get special privileges at the expense of non-Aboriginal people, that there is an “Aboriginal industry” – helped lay the groundwork for the era of “mainstreaming” in Aboriginal affairs, a disastrous policy era which still dominates thinking and policy today.

Ignoring and even trying to explain the racist bigots at the bottom excuses the equally vicious racism at the top – from the likes of both major parties, and sidelines the role of big corporations in promoting racism for their own self-interest.

Likewise with Hanson’s anti-Asian sentiment. It was institutionalised in the White Australia policy as Australia was founded, and continued at the elite level with anti-Asian sentiment in the 1980s, espoused by figures as respectable as the Leader of the Opposition, John Howard. This sentiment was then expressed in cruder form by One Nation. One Nation’s toxic agenda was then absorbed by the Coalition. This included the abolition of ATSIC, and the creation of Temporary Protection Visas for refugees. Just as in Germany 100 years earlier, the mainstream conservatives reclaimed the voters of the smaller racist party.

Equally, anti-Muslim sentiment did not begin with Hanson. A more sophisticated, highbrow anti-Muslim sentiment was used to justify the mandatory indefinite detention of Muslim asylum seekers. It was used to justify the torture of Australian citizens in Guantanamo Bay. It was, and is used to justify wars in Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is used to justify our support for Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians. It is used to justify our support for murderous tyrants in Muslim countries, who oppress their Muslim citizens. A lot of anti-Muslim argument has come from the elite’s need to defend their anti-Muslim policies. As Eric Hoffer observed, “when power is wedded to chronic fear… it becomes formidable”.

One Nation was wiped out for almost 20 years because the Coalition stole their agenda. Since 1996, Hanson has lost eight elections. The lesson of the 1990s was not that being mean to Hanson or her supporters makes her stronger. The lesson was that the real danger came from the mainstream, which was willing to legitimise her views, and lay the groundwork for the Coalition stealing her policies and regaining her voters.

The likes of Pauline Hanson are dangerous not because they are able to provide rational, compelling arguments that may persuade the majority to act in a certain way. They don’t. They present a more subtle menace; an imperceptible process of redefining our values and re-engineering our society.  Pauline Hanson’s rhetoric has pushed the limits on acceptable discourse, and is now delineating new boundaries of racism and hateful speech.

Following her appearance on ABC’s Q&A, radio broadcasters on many talk shows threw open the question of whether Australia should ban Muslim immigration. The very racist nature of such a question was lost on callers who perceived it as part of a legitimate debate. Also lost on these callers was the fact that the majority of ISIS’s victims are Muslims. Recently in Nice, one third of the victims of that horrific attack were Muslims.

Viewed this way, the task for opponents of Hansonism is not to be nicer to Hanson or her voters. It’s to stigmatise racist views, and marginalise them, while we still can.

We don’t have a Muslim problem in Australia. We have a racism problem, and it is an emergency. We urge readers to take this as a wake-up call, to build stronger ties across communities, and to challenge racism, whether it comes from the top or from the bottom.

Attacks on Muslims are attacks on us all.

The Korean people are one of the people that suffered the most during the Cold War, which was a hot war in the Korean Peninsula. The land of the Korean people was divided and ravaged by destruction. Real and imaginary lines divided entire communities and families while the Korean Peninsula saw one of the worst bombing campaigns in the history of humanity.

This is why many of the South Korean people do not want to be embroiled in any type of US tensions or confrontation against China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and many other countries.  In this regard, the National THAAD Countermeasure Council in South Korea has begun a public campaign against the deployment of the US missile shield and THAAD to their country. One of their demonstrations was held in Seoul on July 16, 2016. Trying to obfuscate the facts, most of the media in South Korea overlooked the event or casually mentioned it. The following is a brief article from South Korean news outlet MinPlus about the event.

 Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Asia-Pacific Research Editor, 25 July 2016.

Seoul — The National THAAD Countermeasure Council (preparing committee) held a peaceful gathering that demands to lift the THAAD deployment decision on the 16th at Cheonggye Plaza.

At the gathering, representatives from various civic organizations gave speeches against the THAAD deployment. Despite the heavy rain, the citizens who gathered for the gathering marched to the US Embassy after the gathering, expressing their willfulness to demand the lift of the THAAD deployment decision.

Choi Jong Jin, the acting chairman to the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, said in his speech, “We now are here to show that the opposition against the THAAD deployment is the will of the whole Korean people, not just that of Seongju [where the missile shield is to be deployed] residents. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions will be in the center of the struggle to block up the THAAD deployment which threatens peace in Northeast Asia and makes the conditions of the Korean economy even more difficult.”

Park Seok Woon, the Korean Alliance of Progressive Movements co-chairman, insisted, “It has already been proved that the THAAD cannot intercept the Northern missiles. We do have to block up the THAAD deployment that makes the Korean Peninsula the arena of military competition toward the new cold war.”

The National Countermeasure Council holds ‘the Nationwide Peace Gathering to stop the THAAD Deployment in South Korea’ next weekend.

This article was edited by Asia-Pacific Research.

The Conversation is fact-checking claims made on Q&A, broadcast Mondays on the ABC at 9:35 pm. Thank you to everyone who sent us quotes for checking via Twitter using hashtags #FactCheck and #QandA, on Facebook or by email.

Senator-elect Pauline Hanson faced heavy questioning on Monday night’s Q&A program during a broad-ranging and often heated debate about Islam, radicalisation and terrorism [APR editor’s note, MDN: Hanson was expelled from the Liberal Party of Australia in 1996 for offensive comments about the Aborigine people of Australia. She is the leader and founder of the Australian political party One Nation and has made a career out of controversy. She has been denounced by the indigenous Aborigine community and many other Australians as an ignorant  bigot catering to anti-Aborigine, anti-Asian, and anti-Muslim perceptions by making proposals to discriminate against them and by voicing her opposition to immigration.].

Hanson criticised the Grand Mufti of Australia, a senior Islamic scholar, for not condemning recent overseas terrorist attacks. In response to a question from a Muslim audience member, Hanson said that “your Grand Mufti won’t even come out and condemn the terrorist attacks that’s happened overseas”.

Is that right?

Checking the Source

The Conversation asked Hanson’s spokesman for sources to support her assertion, but did not hear back before the publication deadline.

However, we can test her statement against publicly available evidence.

Who is the Grand Mufti and what has he said about terrorism?

The Grand Mufti of Australia is Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, an Islamic scholar from the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC). ANIC is made up of Imams from across Australia representing their respective communities.

Following the Paris attacks in late 2015, ANIC issued a statement that said the Grand Mufti “mourned the loss of innocent lives due to the recent terrorist attacks in France”. It also said that:

We would like to convey our deepest condolences to the families and friends of the deceased. We reiterate that the sanctity of human life is guaranteed in Islam. These recent incidents highlight the fact that current strategies to deal with the threat of terrorism are not working. It is therefore imperative that all causative factors such as racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention must be comprehensively addressed.

Critics said at the time that this initial response to the Paris attacks didn’t go far enough or appeared to blame Western society for the attacks.

Two days later, ANIC issued a clarification saying that:

We wish to emphasise it is incorrect to imply that the reference to causative factors provides justification for these acts of terrorism. There is no justification for the taking of innocent lives. The sanctity of human life is guaranteed in Islam. Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed and ANIC have consistently and unequivocally condemned all forms of terrorist violence. The Grand Mufti on 15th September 2014 said about ISIS that: “These criminals are committing crimes against humanity and sins against God.”

Previous and subsequent statements issued by ANIC and the Grand Mufti have condemned terrorist acts and other forms of violence committed overseas.

The Grand Mufti also used Facebook to condemn the July 2016 attacks in Nice:

More generally, the Grand Mufti has supported a fatwa (or Islamic legal ruling) against joining Islamic State.

“Your Grand Mufti”

It is worth noting that the phrase “your Grand Mufti” is also misleading. It may convey the idea that the Grand Mufti of Australia represents all Muslims in Australia. That is not the case. In Australia, Islam has no easily defined hierarchy and ANIC is not the only body representing Muslims or Islamic scholars in Australia.

According to my research, many Muslims in Australia support and respect the position of the Grand Mufti; however, they do not always support the person in the position or respect their religious credentials.

Australian Muslim communities are not homogeneous and are made up of many different culturally diverse groups. A 2015 report on the demographic and social profile of Muslims in Australia, prepared by Professor Riaz Hassan from the University of South Australia, noted that:

According to the 2011 Australian Census there were 476,290 Muslims in Australia, of whom about 40% were Australian born. The rest came from 183 countries, making Australian Muslims one of the most ethnically and nationally heterogeneous religious communities.

There are also significant divisions in faith. The same report said that while most Australian Muslims are Sunni, there is a significant minority of Shi’ite Muslims and smaller numbers of Bektashis, Ahmadis, Alawis and Druze.

Lastly, many commentators and observers have advanced the view that it is unfair to expect Muslims and Muslim public figures to repeatedly publicly condemn every incident involving Muslims around the world.

Verdict

Pauline Hanson’s statement that “your Grand Mufti won’t even come out and condemn the terrorist attacks that’s happened overseas” was not correct.

Clarke Jones is the co-director of the Australian Intervention Support Hub (AISH) at Australian National University.

Former US Secretary of Defense William Perry warns that the world is on the knife edge of nuclear catastrophe.  Such catastrophe can result accidentally from electronic failures or glitches in warning systems and from the recklessly aggressive and unnecessary force buildup against Russia.  Conn Hallinan discusses these issues. 

http://fpif.org/may-greater-risk-nuclear-catastrophe-cold-war/

I doubt Hallinan is correct about Washington’s military predominance.  This is Washington’s view, and this view makes Washington confident that it holds the aces.  It is a mistake for Hallinan to encourage Washington in this view.  Nevertheless, Hallinan makes it clear that we could all be vaporized at any minute.  This extremely high risk has been created entirely by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes in which zionist neoconservatives have controlled foreign and military policies.

It is tiresome to hear the argument that nuclear war won’t happen because it makes no sense.  William Perry points out that the failure of a 49-cent computer chip resulted in NORAD’s computers signaling that the Soviets had launched 220 nuclear missiles at the United States.  Just think about all the failures and glitches in our own personal computers, even the best ones.

Human miscalculation is also an enormous risk.  Miscalculation is a dominant human trait.  Consider that 50 percent of Americans’ choices of marriage partners are miscalculations as established by the divorce rate.

The mere existence of nuclear weapons means the nonexistence of life on earth.  It will happen sooner or later.  To raise the risk as the crazed American government is doing with irresponsible provocations of the Russians and Chinese is the ultimate criminal act.

There is no greater threat to human rights than to endanger all life, and that is what Washington and its two-bit punk NATO vassals are doing by increasing tensions between nuclear powers.

Have we Europeans been indoctrinated to not question the original puppet masters of the “War on Terrorism” beyond repair?  Will we soon see the same shut downs of Independent Media as President Erdogan is enforcing right now?

This morning, as I walked to my office in a Brussels where we now have sub-machine gun toting soldiers on every street-corner, I reflected on the lockdown that Münich experienced yesterday, even considering to cancel their famous Oktober Fest.

As a society, since we have politicians who join into imperial war conquests with impunity, it is not surprising that young deranged citizens are beginning to pull off more and more atrocious acts of mass violence. It seems to me they are often numbed in their humanity by Prozac-like drugs, and conditioned to kill in first person on-line warrior games, or caught up in the nauseating “Clash of Civilization” terror meme that our Main Stream Media totes on an everyday basis. These people are sick, in a very sick society.

Our politicians tell us that we need to get used to these security measures. For some reason, the same threat that formerly was perceived only by the Israeli Embassy, and with the “coalition of the willing” Iraqi invasion, then of course also the US Embassy, now hangs over every citizen in the big cities of Europe. Upon arriving at my office, I took a moment to watch an interview of “Syrian Girl” by ‘Paul Joseph Watson’ on infowars.com :

http://www.infowars.com/how-europe-is-causing-its-own-collapse

It is refreshing to listen to this young Syrian geo-political analyst give her non scripted interview on recent developments in Europe, because it is so removed from the controlled information we get from our politicians and Corporate Western Media who seem to adhere to a crippling creed to tell “The Politically Correct Truth, only the Partial Truth, and as little as possible about those darned politically disturbing truths” : Listen to her for example from the 20 minute mark : ( Below a text version, trying to respect her very special ‘Syrian Girl’ casual style of expressing herself in English) :

‘Syrian Girl’ : “Nothing is changing in Europe: all we have is “Pray for ‘INSERT COUNTRY/CITY IN EUROPE’ “; that’s it, that is all!! Or the solutions that they are giving are ludicrous, like “We need to topple Assad, then terrorism will stop.” It is ridiculous: we need a campaign to focus on the real criminals, and what their agenda seems to be, because for some reason, they don’t just want to destroy Syria, now they also want to destabilize Europe, and I said in 2012, and I said it then on InfoWars, and we were one of the few people then who were trying to warn about the stuff that is now happening, that, you-know, they want instability in Europe as well.

They want it, because they need it, because the economic situation isn’t to their liking, and also because it is a controlled threat: they can control people with it, they can cause clashes between people, and ignore the real target, which is the globalists. It is the people in Bilderberg who are making all those decisions. Brexit was something that occurred, that totally threw them off, and the coup in Turkey has everything to do with what happened in Brexit. And France, the thing that happened in France, with Nice, had everything to do with what happened with Brexit and the Turkish coup.”

‘Paul Joseph Watson’ : ( shortened version of his intervention) “Was the coup against Erdogan an inside job to root out the insubordinates within the military and within the Government?”

‘Syrian Girl’ : “I don’t believe it is, the man had to go on FaceTime to tell his people to come out in the streets and protest, it was quite humiliating! The reason I don’t believe it was, it’s because a few days before the coup, about 4 days, Turkey started making statements that they were sorry for shooting down the Russian jet, and they wanted to re-affirm their alliance with Russia, and they wanted to get closer to their regional allies. This was like a few days or weeks after Brexit. Basically, the EU wasn’t the same EU anymore.. and the Turkey wasn’t desperate to join it any-more, so Turkey decided to maybe come up with a different Foreign Policy,  and Turkey is also unhappy with the agenda to create a Kurdish state in Syria, because that is going to create a Kurdish state in Turkey as well, and of-course, it is going to displace the Christian and Syrian population in Syria as a result, but I guess those people don’t matter, as long as the agenda is pushed.

But, Erdogan is / has been a criminal for the last 4 years, and there is no doubt that he has supported terrorism up until this day, but, he is not the biggest criminal: the biggest criminals were his puppet masters which were in the White House, because, obviously, those people are far more powerful, and those people – there is a lot of indication that it was actually the CIA that was behind it. There were reports that came out that Russia actually tipped off the Turks : the leader behind the coup is in Washington, and Washington has refused to extradite him.

If you look at the Media, the Main Stream Media, for some reason, even though we have been calling Erdogan a terrorist supporter for ages, only now have they decided: “Yep! Oh yea, yea, he is a terrorist supporter.”

France, just before the Nice attacks, or – I’m not quite sure but at-least before the coup, they shut down their Embassy in Turkey. I mean, France has made statements now that Erdogan can no longer be a partner against terror. It’s a joke, cause France itself has been openly arming terror for the last 4 years, and, of-course, so has Turkey : so what’s really going on is France is angry that Turkey is choosing to go a different way now, it’s leaning now towards trying to reverse the disaster it has created for itself, with this instability, with economic problems with Russia, taking advice and shooting down a Russian jet, all because they wanted to join the EU – which is on its way to collapsing.

This is how I read the situation, and I think that *the idea that they did it to themselves.. uhm, I think it comes from a hate and distrust of Erdogan, like a lack of understanding as to why sometimes puppets are just thrown away when they are no longer doing what they are told, or they are no longer useful – which – you know, it’s a confusing situation, but no, many people died, people are in exile, coup leaders are in jail, I don’t think he did it to himself, I think that Russia tipped him off about a CIA agent to get rid of him, and put in some-one else that was gonna maintain the status-quo, and not try to make friends with Russia.”

On her youtube site, Syrian Girl explains more about how the West is intervening in Syria to create a “Kurdistan”, just like Israel was also created by the West :

https://www.youtube.com/user/SyrianGirlpartisan

*For a fun flash back on how Erdogan brought this predicament upon himself, it is nice to revisit the article that Kevin Barrett wrote on Thanksgiving 2015 :  Kevin Barrett VT 11-25-15… “This Thanksgiving, Erdogan is the turkey”

For some more ‘up to date’ speculations on how the possible help that Erdogan could have gotten from the Russians complicates matters for the Europeans, read also this article, written by John Chuckman July 22 2016 : Turkey Right Now Is a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma, to Paraphrase Churchill

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/07/22/turkey-right-now-is-a-riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery-inside-an-enigma

‘Russia Insider’ writer Nikolai Starikov also argues there is good reason to believe that Erdogan was helped by the Russians : (July 21^st 2016)

Why Russia Revealed Coup Plans to Erdogan http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-russia-revealed-coup-plans-to-erdogan/5537259

Read also how International Free-Lance Journalist Pepe Escobar resumed the Turkish coup on sputniknew.com, only hours after it happened: “Hell Hath no Fury Like a Teflon Sultan” :

http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160717/1043158581/erdogan-turkey-coup.html

I pray for that our European Citizens will stand up for their values of free speech and a free press, with more and more reader-supported journalists like Pepe Escobar and ‘Syrian Girl’. When we take this precious human-felt information to heart, and start cleaning up the harm we have done to ourselves, by never confronting our politicians and institutions to the deeper criminal lies that lie beneath the whole concept of the “War on Terror”, then I think we will be able to start enjoying living in Europe again. Let us all get behind this effort.

Thank-you also, GlobalResearch.ca, for providing us with a consistent independent analysis of what has been going on, ever since the Summer of 2001 !

My name is Wiaam. I am a young woman who lives in Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza.

I attend the Islamic University and I have lived in this city for the entire 22 years of my life. I wish to be buried in this pure land.

I wish to talk to you about the suffering of the occupied Gaza Strip, especially in the field of education.

I lived the happiest years of my life in this neighborhood, as well as the worst imaginable moments during the last war.

We lived through a tough situation but did not lose our spirit.

Despite the fear in the hearts of our schoolchildren, as soon the assault was over, they resumed their education.

We are an unarmed people: education, and the power of justice are our weapons to liberate our land.

As a university student, I suffered enormously after the war. Unemployment soared and I could not afford to buy schoolbooks. I had to save on transportation and started walking half the way to college to save half of the cost for the following day.

Through this war, I developed an addiction to education.

I became protective of my university books. I kept them in a bag so that whenever we were forcibly displaced from our home, I could carry the bag on my back.

I am grateful I have not lost any books. Still, many of my friends lost books – and worse, family members who were killed in Israel’s attacks.

Nevertheless, my friends continued their education- but they need more support, such as scholarships.

My friends and I call the Gaza Strip “the education tsunami” because of the high number of educated people who cannot find jobs.

Unemployment rises, poverty spreads across Gaza, and average daily incomes drop.

As a student, I wish to pursue my education and learn more. But, under this situation, with the siege and lack of funds, I cannot.

I hope you continue to learn about the suffering of my people and to understand it.

DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was caught red-handed, rigging the electoral process for Clinton, assuring she’ll be party standard bearer in November.

She’s stepping down after this week’s party convention, continuing to represent Florida’s 23rd district – facing no criminal charges, despite committing a serious racketeering offense.

The Clinton campaign announced she’ll remain honorary chair to help elect Democrats in November. She’ll likely receive other rewards for faithful service to a corrupted system, a mockery of democratic fairness.

An RNC tweet said Schultz “out after rigged system exposed.” Democrat convention “off to a good start.”

Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort issued a statement, saying “Clinton should follow Wasserman Schultz’s lead and drop out over her failure to safeguard top secret classified information both on her unauthorized home server and while traveling abroad.”

Obama praised Schultz, saying “(f)or the last eight years, (she) has had my back. This afternoon (Sunday) I called her to let her know that I am grateful.”

Bernie Sanders shockingly said Schultz “deserves thanks for her years of service,” while saying she “made the right decision for the future of the Democratic (sic) party.”

Hillary Clinton issued a statement, “thank(ing) my longtime friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her leadership…over the past five years.”

She’ll stay on “as honorary chair…to serve as a surrogate for my campaign nationally…I will need fighters like Debbie in Congress who are ready…to work for the American people” – a deplorable perversion of truth.

All politicians are self-serving, Clinton in a class of her own – the most recklessly dangerous choice to lead America in its entire history.

Critics called Schultz’s leadership controversial, claiming she “spends more energy tending to her own political ambitions than helping Democrats win,” according to Politico.

Trump tweeted “(t)oday proves what I have always known, that (RNC chairman) @Reince Priebus is the tough one and the smart one, not Debbie Wasserman Shultz…The Dems Convention is cracking up…”

A change.org petition collected almost 65,000 signatures calling for Schultz’s resignation before she stepped down, expressing “the utmost sense of contempt and disdain for the Democratic (sic) party, its principles, and the democratic process.”

The Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity filed a racketeering lawsuit against the DNC. It’s seeking funds to cover expenses.

Electoral fraud in America is longstanding, the process notoriously corrupt – no one in high places held accountable for crimes too serious to ignore.

Are things rigged for Clinton to succeed Obama? Will a war goddess/racketeer be handed the nation’s highest office? Will WW III follow?

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.htmlVisit 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.

As LA Times reporter Matt Pearce tweeted…

The US and Saudi Arabia have been conspiring with one another to engineer a series of crises that could prompt Iran to pull back its troops in Syria and redeploy them back to the homeland. The modus operandi has been to encourage peripheral insurgencies inside the Islamic Republic’s borderland regions concurrent with a terrorist threat to the interior, all while stirring up Color Revolution commotion. In short, Washington and Riyadh are working hard to wage a multidimensional Hybrid War on Iran, and all indications point to each respective component of this campaign intensifying in the coming months as the US turns up the heat against its decades-long Mideast rival.

The Kurdish Crisis That Nobody Talks About

The international media – both Western and alternative – has paid a lot of attention to the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, but practically no established outlet or reliable mainstream media network is focusing on the Iranian Kurds. For those readers who understandably aren’t aware of what’s been unfolding over the past month, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) has been waging a vicious insurgency against Tehran on the pretense that the government has reneged on a previous ceasefire and political guarantees. The reality, though, is that the militant Kurdish nationalism that’s been sweeping the Mideast over the past couple of years has finally infected Iran, just as the author predicted would inevitably happen in the scenario forecasting portion of his 2015 book about Hybrid War theory. Furthermore, this group isn’t fighting for independence, but openly wants a regime reboot that transforms the entire Iranian system from an Islamic Republic into an Identity Federation.

“Political Incorrectness”:

The reason that this conflict isn’t being talked about a lot is because it’s “politically incorrect” for both the Western and non-Western outlets to report on. For example, unipolar-supporting information networks seem to have an unspoken agreement to not gloat about this occurrence, despite it obviously being to the US and Saudi Arabia’s strategic interests. It’s uncertain exactly why this peculiarity is in force, but it might have something to do with Washington signaling to its proxies that it would prefer to wait until a forthcoming moment to fully publicize everything that’s happening, perhaps wanting a significant victory or alleged “human rights (false flag) violation” to take place first. There’s also the political sensitivity of still abiding by the nominal ‘détente’ between the US and Iran, and not wanting to feed into Tehran’s well-grounded accusations that the Kurdish combatants have international support. All of these considerations are of course only temporary and relevant for as long as the US refrains from permitting its mainstream information allies from going all-out in their coverage of this conflict.

From the other side of things, the alternative multipolar-aligned media is hesitant to report anything that presents the Kurds in a negative light, having fallen so deep down the rabbit hole in glorifying them for their anti-Daesh struggle that it seems almost impossible to ‘reverse the script’ and talk about the truth of their treachery (whether in Syria or Iran). The previous narrative of the Kurds being ‘brave freedom fighters’ was an overly simplistic one which failed to take into account documented human rights abuses by this group’s leading militias or the Syrian Kurds’ own hate-filled manifesto against Damascus. Instead of investigating who the anti-Daesh Kurdish militias really were and where their international loyalties lay, alternative media broadcasters opted to jump on the bandwagon of calling them “heroes” and implicitly lending normative acceptance to their autonomy/”federalization”/independence demands, especially in the immediate aftermath of Turkey backstabbing Russia, and thereby inadvertently falling into the US’ trap of building geopolitical legitimacy for the same groups that are now fighting to dismantle Syria and Iran.

Foreign Invasion:

To qualify the specifics of what’s been happening in northwestern Iran, it’s not indigenous Kurds that are “revolting”, but Iraqi-based Iranian Kurds that are invading the country from their safe haven in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). These cross-border attacks have become so bad and raised such a military-strategic alarm back in Tehran that the government even said that they’ll launch their own retaliatory cross-border strikes and engage in hot pursuits if they found it tactically necessary to defeat these terrorists. Iran knows that these militant incursions are supported by KRG President Barzani, which is another one of the many reasons that it has for supporting the opposition Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Change Movement (Gorran) against the Kurdish chieftain’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). Moreover, the oil pipeline that Iran plans to build to Iraq will extend to the KRG PUK-influenced city of Koysinjaq, which will eventually give a long-term boost to that party at the expense of the KDP.

The hostile forces behind this anti-Iranian insurgent war are much bigger than Barzani, and Tehran has actually accused its rival Riyadh of being the mastermind behind this war. Both the Saudis and the KRG expectedly denied these claims, but bearing in mind just how intense the regional competition is between Iran and Saudi Arabia right now, it’s completely plausible that the Kingdom would seek to capitalize off of the Kurds’ battle-hardened fighting skills and massive undercurrents of international support as a means of sowing unrest within the Islamic Republic. It would actually be uncharacteristically strange if the Saudis weren’t involved in this plot to some extent or another since they have a long track record of using all means available against their chief international opponent, so employing the Kurds as convenient allies in this larger regional proxy struggle would fully correspond to their previous pattern of strategic behavior. Therefore, despite being vehemently denied by the Saudis and their alleged KRG henchmen, observers have every reason to accept Iran’s claims about Riyadh’s covert military support to the KDPI and thenceforth proceed from this point of reasonable understanding.

“Lead From Behind”:

As could have been expected, the US is playing a very strong “Lead From Behind” role in indirectly funding this insurgency and strengthening its viability. Instead of openly having anything to do with the KDPI and thereby possibly compromising their “independence” and the mythos behind their “organic uprising”, the US chooses instead to syphon money and supplies to the fighters through its KRG proxy. Just the other day Washington clinched an historic deal to provide the KRG with $415 million for ammunition, food, pay, and medical equipment, though it’s highly probable that some of these funds and equipment will be purposely laundered to the KDPI. It’s an open secret among many that the KRG functions as the headquarters of the international Kurdish militant movement, though for reasons of political sensitivity and Great Power politics, this isn’t officially acknowledged by any major players except for self-interested Turkey from time to time.

The KRG first functioned as a safe haven for the PKK, though this has been changing in recent years as Barzani increasingly makes it known that he’s Erdogan’s main capo in keeping control over the region. Therefore, while the PKK has found the KRG to be less friendly of a host than it was before, the same can’t necessarily be said about the YPG, which cultivate such strong cross-border contacts with their brethren in northern Iraq that they even called upon them to ‘save the day’ by helping in the defense of Ayn al-Arab (popularly known in the international media by its Kurdish name “Kobani”). As for the KDPI, their headquarters are located in the KRG and they’re known to be close to Barzani, the recipient of the US’ nearly half-a-billion dollar largesse. For this reason, it’s just as predictable that the KRG will funnel some of its aid to its allied Syrian YPG as it would to its allied Iranian KDPI. Additionally, it’s very difficult to get any information about the KDPI’s activities in the KRG over the nearly past two decades that it’s been sheltering there, but an informed supposition would be that they’ve previously received indirect American assistance via this framework before, if not directly through some of the hundreds of on-the-ground military trainers that are active in the region right now.

Mideast Mischief:

The worst related scenario that could arise with the Kurdish insurgency in Iran is if the KDPI fighters allied with the PKK and began using Turkish territory as a launching pad for their cross-border raids. The two militant groups have previously been at odds with one another, but a mid-2015 meeting was meant to squash their mutual misunderstandings. The only state actors who have an interest in the PDPI attacking Iran from PKK-held territory in Turkey are the US and Saudi Arabia, which would be overjoyed to see observe the deteriorating relations between the two neighbors if Iran reacts by threatening cross-border retaliation and Ankara expectedly vows to defend its sovereignty in response. There’s no guarantee that either of these governments would react in this way, but it would be irresponsible to ignore the grand strategic interests that the US and Saudi Arabia have in working to bring this scenario into fruition.

On a related tangent, if it’s revealed that members of the KDPI are sheltering in the northern Syrian territories presently occupied by their YPG allies, then Tehran might predictably put pressure on Damascus to neutralize them as soon as possible. This in turn could move forward the likely scenario of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) carrying out a disarmament campaign against the YPG, perhaps even advancing it to before the full defeat of Daesh. In that case, it wouldn’t necessarily be to Damascus’ full advantage to initiate its law and order operation in the occupied northern territories until its most pressing domestic foe is vanquished, but conditions such as the ones just described might pop up to give it little choice in choosing the time of engagement. President Assad would obviously have the full and final say over whether and when the SAA  takes on the YPG, but Iranian encouragement and possibly even a Russian-promoted secret deal with Turkey in the context of Ankara’s reported re-engagement with Damascus might press it to do so sooner than many people might expect, especially if a significant KDPI (and PKK) connection can be undeniably proven.

Balochistan Rumblings

Nowhere near as urgent of a crisis as the Kurdish one, and truthfully not yet even at that dire of a stage, the return of Baloch separatism in Iran could force Tehran into a geopolitical siege mentality and herald in the full splitting of its military-strategic focus. Baloch insurgents haven’t been too particularly active in Iran for some time, but they haven’t been invisible, either. They returned to the fore of Iran’s eastern challenges in the mid-2000s when a spree of terrorism jolted the Sistan and Baluchistan Province, and it’s persistentlycarried on ever since. Still, the problems that Iran is facing with this potential crisis pale in comparison that of its Pakistani neighbor, which has accused both India and Afghanistanof aiding the insurgency. Both of Islamabad’s neighbors have a geostrategic self-interest in weakening their mutually adjacent neighbor, though it must be said that they’re very likely doing this with some sort of advisory and/or subtle encouragement from the US.

From Information To Insurgency:

Actually, the US seems primed to fuel the anti-Pakistani Baloch insurgency through its contemplation of a separate Baloch-language “Voice of America” (VOA) service. Although words are literally only just that – words – they could play a powerful role in persuading susceptible and misguided Balochi youth to sympathize with the insurgents and then take up arms alongside these very same fighters that the US influenced them to idolize. Thus, even though the US might not be directly involved or even indirectly have any physical influence on the situation, it could still harness its information services to act as a force multiplier for the efforts of its regional Afghan and Indian allies, both of whom are provoking this conflict with the intent of disrupting the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Rolling Across The Border:

As the conflict in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province heats up – which it’s sure to do if the US makes the decision to launch a Balochi VOA service – then it’s probable that the insurgency will eventually spill over into Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan Province as well, whether or not the US’ allies even intend for this to happen. The fact is that asymmetrical wars rarely go according to plan, and that the probability of the nascent US-Afghan-Indian South Asian axis successfully containing their Baloch insurgency inside of Pakistan’s borders is very low. More than likely, Pakistani-based militants will try to link up with their Iranian brethren, who might also end up encouraged by the VOA’s prospective Balochi broadcasts, and thus create a low-intensity international crisis. Ironically, this would actually be the detriment of Kabul and New Delhi’s grand strategy since they plan to use India’s investments in the Iranian Baloch port of Chabahar to spearhead a trans-Iranian north-south corridor between them, and the destabilization of Sistan and Baluchistan Province would be counterintuitive to their goals.

Geopolitical Cynicism:

The only one of the mentioned actors who would gain some sort of a benefit from this happening is the US, which has an interest in stoking Baloch separatism in eastern Iran so as to geographically split Tehran’s military-strategic focus. It’s not too important to Washington whether this interferes with the Afghan-Indian intermodal corridor through Chabahar (although the sustainable creation of this is also a long-term strategic goal for the US) because at the moment, it appears that the US has placed a much higher priority on destabilizing Iran along both its Western (Kurdish) and Eastern (Balochi) flanks. Earlier this month Iran revealed that terrorists killed four border guards and then fled into Pakistan, proving that the internationalization of the Balochi separatist crisis might have already begun. Just like with the Kurdish one on the other side of the country, the US and its regional allied conspirators are crossing their fingers that this leads to a deterioration of bilateral relations between Iran and its neighbor, which in the Pakistani case would complicate China’s One Belt One Road vision of connectivity between the two, while any prospective Afghani one could be used to justify a prolonged American military presence in the occupied country after the resolution of the Taliban War.

Daesh And Sectarian Drama

Not to be forgotten, the world’s most notorious terrorist group has long had their sights set on Iran, with their foreign backers eager to use the nominally “Sunni” organization to aggravate the sectarian proxy war with the Shiite-majority Islamic Republic. Daesh has yet to strike Iran, but they were accused of plotting one of the country’s largest-ever terrorist attacks late last month that would have seen them bombing around 50 places in and around Tehran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) thankfully foiled the attack before it could be carried out, but Iran still remains one of the group’s most sought-after targets, especially if one accepts the thesis that American and Saudi intelligence agents still hold partial influence over some of the group’s members. Washington and Riyadh are dedicated to undermining Tehran as much as they can, and a large-scale terrorist bombing campaign in the capital would have a tremendous effect in producing panic and making some segments of society susceptible to hostile suggestions that the government “didn’t’ do enough” to protect them or that the state’s response is “heavy-handed” and “dictatorial” (e.g. if they enforce curfews, deploy the IRGC/troops in the streets in response, and/or raid terrorist safe houses in Sunni-inhabited areas of the country).

Prognosticating the most predictable chain of events that could happen in the tragic event that this scenario becomes actualized one day, it’s foreseeable that Iran might launch highly publicized attacks against Daesh in Syria and/or Iraq, which would have near-equal symbolic and substantial value in exacting revenge for what happened. Unfortunately, Iran’s self-defensive actions would instantly be exploited by the US and its Saudi-Qatari allies in triggering an amplified information campaign alleging that Tehran was carrying out a “sectarian attack”. Never mind that it’s highly doubtful that Iran would ever actually do such a thing as militantly foster sectarian hatred, but the social effect of such disinformation would be to aggravate the regional sectarianism that Saudi Arabia has been furiously promoting over the past decade with the intent of producing an indigenous militant reaction inside of Iran itself. Little known among most casual observers is that some of Iran’s borderland minorities are Sunni, and while hitherto unreceptive to the Saudis’ sectarian rhetoric and mostly content with the equality that they enjoy within Iran, a few of them are vulnerable to believing Riyadh’s lie that Tehran is going on a retributive killing spree against Sunnis.

The groups that the Saudis would specifically be targeting with this weaponized disinformation are the Kurds, Balochis, and Arabs in Kurdistan, Sistan and Baluchistan, and Khuzstan Provinces, respectively. Most of these aforementioned minority categories are Sunni, and all three of them have a history of anti-government rebellion, with the first two actively engaged in such activities at the moment. The Arabs were previously reached out to by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (the First Gulf War) and it’s common sense that the Saudis and Qataris have been trying to interact with this demographic for years already, but neither were successful in fomenting significant enough unrest that it truly destabilized the Islamic Republic. Interestingly, Iran’s foreign foes have had a much higher degree of success in doing so with the Kurds and now the Balochis, though the strategic risk can’t be ignored that a major Daesh terrorist attack or series thereof within the country (and the consequent weaponized disinformation that it produces) could push members of this group past the tipping point and inspire them to pick up arms alongside their fellow peripheral militants.

Cooking Up A Color Revolution

The US’ most commonly resorted-to method of regime change in recent years, the Color Revolution, is of course also part and parcel of the plan that it and the Saudis have to prompt an Iranian pullback from Syria. Even though the 2009 “Green Revolution” abysmally failed, the lessons learned from this test run were used to perfect the “Arab Spring” theater-wide Color Revolutions that were unleashed two years later, and they were also applied in modifying the future strategies that would once again be used against Iran, too.

Right now it’s unclear to what extent the population is susceptible to a “Green Revolution 2.0”, though it’s safe to say that the youth – as always – are the group most likely to be influenced to partake in this operation. Iran has a profoundly large youth bulge with around 60% of its population being under the age of 30, so there are more than ample enough recruits for the US’ plans when it finally decides to launch a rebranded version of them. Another thing to add is that this demographic appears to overwhelmingly tilt towards the “moderates”, which also adds another layer of intrigue that the US will probably seek to utilize in inflaming Iran’s inter-elite split between this group and the “conservatives”.

Though some voices have confidently asserted that a Color Revolution could never break out in Iran again, such arrogant statements absolutely dismiss the factual evidence that the US and its allies are actively preparing to repeat this scenario in the future, whether or not it ultimately succeeds. As the most indisputable confirmation that this is the case, one needs to look no further than the streets of Paris last week. The largest-ever “Free Iran” rally was held in the French capital and attracted over 100,000 people. This hostile gathering not only had the tacit support of the French state that allowed it (and whose Ambassador was angrily summoned by Tehran in response), but also the direct encouragement of a Saudi prince who spoke at the event. Perhaps most chillingly, though, was the participation of the “National Council of Resistance of Iran”, an umbrella group of anti-government movements that even includes the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (popularly known by its MEK abbreviation), which was previously on the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organization’s until it was ‘delisted’ in 2012. Seen by many as the most dangerous terrorist group to ever operate within Iran, the MEK has links to the US and Saudi Arabia, and it’s very likely that they’ll play some form of vanguard urban terrorist role in setting off a “Green Revolution 2.0” inside Iran whenever its foreign state sponsors decide that the time is ripe to do so.

Concluding Thoughts

The three interlinked destabilizations enumerated above have the potential to combine in such a way as to generate a serious multidimensional crisis in Iran. At the moment, only the Kurdish Crisis has been visibly activated, though the Baloch Insurgency seems to be gaining ground in recent years. It’s thus most accurate to state that the strategy of externally influenced peripheral destabilization inside of Iran’s borderland provinces is the first step of the three to ‘go live’, and even so, it’s still in its opening stages. Had the Daesh bombings not been proactively dealt with, then the sudden introduction of the second step of sectarian violence could have realistically catalyzed the peripheral conflicts and possibly sped up the implementation of the third step, another Color Revolution or a “Green Revolution 2.0”.

Looking back at the events of the past month and seeing evidence that all three steps are vigorously being promoted in one way or another (the Kurdish insurgent invasion, the attempted Daesh bombings, and the largest-ever anti-Tehran Color Revolution rally in Paris), it should be self-evident to all Iranian decision makers and strategists that their country is explicitly being targeted for Hybrid Warfare and that precautionary defensive actions need to be taken as soon as possible. Just as the US expects, this could realistically take the form of part or all of the IRGC’s redeployment from Syria (and possibly also Iraq) back to the Iranian home front where they’d be much more urgently needed in assisting with internal (border and urban) security. Although ill-intentioned rumors (mostly created by Tehran’s adversaries) have abounded for a while now that Iran will pull some of its troops out from Syria, the recent events expounded upon earlier in this article give credence to the idea that Tehran might actually have a fairly legitimate reason for finally doing so in preemptively defending its own security, even if this means that it’s falling into the US-Saudi trap that was created to induce this very decision. Although there is no evidence that Iran has pulled back its forces from Syria, it could very well be contemplating such a move in the face of what its leadership might consider to be the much more urgent threats afflicting the homeland.

The most ironic aspect of this plot, though, is that it occurs at the exact same time that the US is considering to officially cooperate with Russia in its anti-terrorist operation in Syria through the tentatively proposed “Joint Implementation Group”, though it can be inferred that this possible twist of fate wasn’t at all countenanced by American strategists when they conspired with the Saudis in devising this grand Iranian trap. Instead, it was the surprise Russian-Turkish détente that completely changed the geopolitical dynamics by influencing Ankara to belatedly declare that al-Nusra is a terrorist group and to publicly make outreaches to Syria (despite repeating its ‘face-saving’ refrain that “Assad must go”). This means that while Iran might draw down some of its on-the-ground forces to protect its homeland, Russia might correspondingly increase its own aerospace ones in the battlespace, though Moscow would still be unable to compensate for the strategic withdrawal of Tehran’s much-needed frontline forces unless it takes the very unlikely decision to deploy its own boots on the ground to augment the Syrian Arab Army.

Even without this happening, a recommitted Russian aerospace campaign with the political will of seeing the war out to its logical end could be more than enough to restore the military balance that would be temporarily offset by the partial withdrawal of some of Iran’s highly skilled special forces, though a robust combination of Syrian-Russian-Iranian interservice forces would be necessary to ultimately secure whatever gains are made and assist with the probable post-Daesh liberation campaign against the illegal YPG-occupied areas of northern Syria.

The recently released, previously classified report titled, “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001″ (.pdf), reveals that indeed long-time US ally, Saudi Arabia, had connections to the alleged hijackers who purportedly carried out the 9/11 attacks.

While the US would go on to invade Afghanistan and Iraq predicated on the 9/11 attacks, it should be noted that all of the alleged hijackers were either Saudis or Persian Gulf citizens, or connected to terrorist organizations supported by Persian Gulf states.

The Western media has attempted to downplay the impact of the document’s release, claiming that subsequent investigations found “many” of the allegations in the document “without basis” – even as the US and Saudi Arabia today openly arm and fund terrorists in Syria.

To Whose Benefit? 

Many mistakenly believe on one hand terrorism is simply an inevitable clash of civilizations between “Islam” and the West, while others maintain it is the predictable backlash to flawed or unjust Western foreign policy.

In reality, it is neither.

It is meticulously engineered violence used as a tool for achieving geopolitical objectives around the world – from overthrowing governments and justifying military interventions, to creating paralyzing fear and hysteria at home to garner support for a growing domestic police state and a large military footprint overseas.

In essence, it is a highly conductive medium through which modern day empire can spread.

This can clearly be seen through the use of terrorism today. Some 14 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and as memories begin to fade, the US finds itself partnered with Saudi Arabia once again, arming and funding terrorists to fight their proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and beyond, just as they did in the 1980s when they jointly created Al Qaeda to begin with.

As the pendulum of geopolitical necessity swings from needing heavily armed, fanatical proxy forces to fight abroad, to needing a pretext at home to initiate large-scale military interventions overseas, these terrorist organizations are characterized by Western politicians and the media in a similarly shifting manner. During the 1980s Al Qaeda was portrayed as “freedom fighters.” In 2001 when the United States sought to use full-scale military force to rearrange the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, Al Qaeda was transformed into a villain.

The 2001 terrorist attacks allowed the US to justify over a decade of global-spanning war that it otherwise would have been unable to wage.

The Hijackers Had Ties to Saudi Intelligence 

The 28 pages now declassified depicts a tangled web of connections between the Saudi government, Saudi intelligence agencies, the Bin Laden family, and the hijackers – most of whom were Saudi citizens themselves.

The report states:

While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi Government. There is information, primarily from FBI sources, that at least two of those individuals were alleged by some to be Saudi intelligence officers. 

The report also reveals that the suspected Saudi intelligence officers worked for companies that had ties to both the Saudi government, and Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden (spelled: Usama Bin Ladin throughout the report).

And not only did various Saudi intelligence officers have connections to the alleged hijackers, several are revealed to have known each other as well.

Mentioned also is Osama Bin Laden’s half-brother, Abdullah Bin Ladin, claimed to have worked for the Saudi Embassy in Washington D.C. as an “administration officer,” revealing once again the incestuous ties between the Bin Ladin family, the Saudi government, and through equity firm – the Carlyle Group – the Bush family and other political and business leaders in the United States.

The report also mentions that despite the many apparent links, and attempts by the FBI to investigate them further, many suspects were inexplicably able to “leave” the United States and return to Saudi Arabia.

The report also referred to “mosques” either directly funded by the Saudi government in which various aspects of terrorism were thought to be coordinated, or mosques in which associates of the hijackers met frequently or operated out of.

This illustrates precisely how the US-Saudi terror enterprise keeps its ranks full – through a global network of centers masquerading as mosques, protected by law enforcement and intelligence organizations linked to the West, allowing for both the recruitment and radicalization of terrorists, as well as the planning and financing of terrorism itself.

US Intelligence Community Before 9/11: Incompetence or Collusion? Or Both?  

The US and Saudi Arabia helped create Al Qaeda and for years used the organization to wage proxy war around the world. It’s actions on 9/11 then helped set the stage for a decade of war in which the US toppled governments, occupied nations, while conducting covert warfare against others, expanding US hegemony across the globe, and dividing and destroying nations allied to its rivals in Beijing and Moscow.

It is very clear that Saudi Arabia played a role in the 9/11 attacks, as well as in terrorism of all kinds around the world before and after the attacks.

Clearly the FBI and the CIA both were aware of Saudi Arabia’s role. It is also clear that efforts were made to protect valuable Saudi assets by spiriting them out of the country as dutiful agents attempted to do their jobs by investigating them further. Those who spirited Saudi agents and officials out of the country, protecting them from further investigation regarding their role in 9/11, are likely linked to those Americans who helped their Saudi counterparts organize and carry out the attacks.

And while some FBI and CIA agents attempted to do their job, one comment toward the end of the 28 pages reveals that perhaps agents were not as aware as they should have been regarding the nature of Al Qaeda and its relationship to Saudi Arabia.

The report quotes a former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge, saying:

Basically [redacted]. They were not a country identified by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism. And the theme or the common modus operandi that we saw in San Diego was that if there were [redacted] there, their primary objective was to monitor dissidents in the interest of protecting the royal family. So they were not viewed as an inimical threat to national security.  

The agent’s conclusion is based entirely on the assumption that the State Department’s terrorist designations are meaningful and accurate. If such designations are not accurate, then the FBI would have neglected to fully investigate suspects who were indeed very much an inimical threat to national security.

Today, Al Qaeda and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) are likewise portrayed as enemies of Saudi Arabia. This is despite clear evidence showing both terrorist organizations and their affiliates in Iraq and Syria, are armed and funded by, as well as working in the direct interests of Riyadh – as well as Washington. When terrorist attacks do unfold in Saudi Arabia, despite being portrayed as attacks aimed at Riyadh itself, they are often instead aimed at Shia’a targets throughout the country.

Shia’a in Saudi Arabia, unlike Al Qaeda and ISIS, do represent a threat to Riyadh – not predicated on fanatical extremism – but instead upon self-defense against the brutality and injustice of the Saudi political system which specifically targets Shia’a.

It appears that some agents, despite laboring under faulty assumptions, did attempt to do their jobs, while others appear to have been protecting suspects very likely tied to the 9/11 attacks, and possibly even tied to the attacks themselves. Together, through incompetence and collusion, the attacks unfolded, and the rest – as they say – is history.

Protecting Saudi Terrorism Then and Now 

While the Western media now claims that many of the declassified report’s allegations have been found to be “without basis,” the heavy redaction throughout the report leads one to believe that Saudi Arabia and the various tentacles of its security apparatus reaching into the United States are still being covered up by complicit American agents and interests.

Additionally, despite the very troubling implications of the report’s contents, it should be noted that in the aftermath of 9/11 the US, along with Europe, continued supplying Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars worth of military weapons while politically supporting Riyadh during its own brush with the “Arab Spring” in 2011. Today, despite evidence of Saudi Arabia’s arming and funding of designated terrorist organizations including Al Nusra, the US and Europe continue lending military and political support to Riyadh nonetheless.

Saudi Arabia didn’t victimize the United States on 9/11, nor trick Washington. Riyadh and Washington are partners in crime, at times in lockstep, at other times posing as adversaries when maximum plausible deniability is desired.

Despite attempts to claim Saudi Arabia is blameless in the 9/11 attacks, the hijackers were undoubtedly Saudis, inspired by indoctrination that originated in Saudi-funded networks, allegedly approached and assisted by Saudi intelligence agents, and representative of terrorist organizations Riyadh to this day still arms, funds, and uses to wage it and America’s proxy wars with.

The report is not really a revelation, but instead another piece of evidence that affirms the US and Saudi Arabia are collaborators in terrorism, not partners fighting it. Those who depend on either in a true fight against global terrorism, should be prepared for perpetual failure.

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

Democrats mock the term’s meaning. Exposed electoral rigging anointed Clinton party standard bearer honors – an unindicted war criminal/racketeer belonging in prison, not high office.

DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the convention’s eve – guilty of racketeering for stealing primary and caucuses to assure Clinton’s nomination – yet remaining unaccountable, staying on through the November elections as honorary chairwoman.

Had things been open, free and fair, Sanders would likely be Dem nominee, not Clinton. Despite flagrant fraud depriving him of the chance to face Trump in November, he shockingly continues supporting Clinton – responsible for back-stabbing him.

Asked if Sunday revelations changed his position, he replied “(n)o, no, no. We are going to do everything we can to protect working families in this country.”

“What a campaign is about is not about Hillary Clinton. It’s not about Donald Trump. It’s about the people of this country.” What rubbish from an exposed Judas – supporting what he campaigned against!

He called the most recklessly dangerous presidential candidate in US history a “far, far superior” one to Trump. “We’re going to focus on defeating the worst Republican candidate I’ve seen in a lifetime. We’ve got to elect Secretary Clinton.”

Conveniently he forgot the horrors of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency, their war on humanity after the 9/11 mother of all false flags, continuing throughout Obama’s tenure, virtually certain to escalate if Clinton succeeds him.

Trump justifiably blasted Sanders, calling him “weak…pathetic…Sorry folks, but Bernie Sanders is exhausted, just can’t go on anymore. He is trying to dismiss the new e-mails and DNC disrespect. SAD!”

His political revolution was phony all along – in name only, not real. New York Times Clinton cheerleading throughout the campaign tried downplaying flagrant DNC criminal fraud, saying:

It “threaten(s) to undermine the delicate healing process that followed the contentious fight between” Sanders and Clinton – more a tempest in a teapot as things turned out.

The Times disgracefully suggested “Russia (perhaps) had a hand in the leaks that helped bring down the head of an American political party” – despite clear evidence showing otherwise.

It quickly changed the subject to quoting officials expressing support for a legally challenged woman unfit for any public office, unaccountable despite her high crimes too serious to ignore.

Circus theatrics without substance will unfold over the next four days, the usual array of speakers pontificating plenty, saying nothing, Dems hoping to make voters forget about electoral rigging giving Clinton the nomination she didn’t earn.

Hail to the thief if more of the same hands her the nation’s highest office in November. America’s deplorable state continues reaching for new lows.

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 U.S. has no desire to invade Bangladesh, or take over the country in the name of assisting Bangladesh in fighting terrorism, said U.S. Ambassador Marcia Bernicat on Wednesday. Bangladesh has been a key recruiting ground for Afghanistan fighters during the 1980s and Al-Qaeda linked networks continue to play a role in regional tensions with geopolitical implications.

Ambassador Marcia Bernicat was speaking at a meeting at the American Chamber of Commerce at its office in Dhaka. Her statement was published by the U.S. embassy. The statement quotes Ambassador Bernicat as saying:

“I have been sad to see reports lately of some people who are saying that U.S. offers to provide counter-terrorism assistance are either our effort to invade Bangladesh, or take over Bangladesh, or control Bangladesh in some way, or even to drag you onto a battlefield. … We have no such desire to occupy this country in any way.  I just want to assure you that the types of assistance we provide to you are those of a partner; those of a partner who unfortunately has been fighting terrorism for a long time. … And again, more importantly, we must work on this challenge jointly.  No country today can fight terrorism alone because the terrorists don’t operate within borders.  We are looking to Bangladesh as a partner in this effort. … Our country’s assistance to Bangladesh aims to help the country ride out the crisis.  Bangladesh should create an example that defies the ideology of these groups: Bangladesh is a Muslim majority country, which has adopted a market economy, a great democracy, and you have women in key leadership positions and a woman as head of the government.  You are the very example they wish to crush.”

The Ambassador was thanking the Hasina-government for its efforts to fight terrorism and noted that Bangladesh also needs to conduct a rigorous, open and thorough investigation of these attacks that coordinates closely with the international partners. Bernicat added:

“And there needs to be an openness to accept the findings of the investigations wherever – and to whomever – they lead.  Only this level of commitment will counter the threat in Bangladesh.”

Bangladesh was one of the main regional contributors to “mujahedeen” during the U.S., Saudi, Pakistani and Bangladeshi intelligence linked fight against Soviet troops in Afghanistan via the Al-Qaeda network. One of the products of this period, Harukat-ul-Jihad-al-Islam (HuJI) is active until this day. In 2012 a retired Bangladeshi military intelligence officer informed nsnbc that HuJI still functions as an instrument of Bangladeshi and U.S. intelligence.

The informant, whose name and credentials are known to nsnbc stressed that HuJI, among others, is allowed to infiltrate refugee camps for internally displaced Bangladeshi Rohigya as well as Rohingya refugee camps in neighboring Myanmar’s Rakhine State to destabilize Myanmar and Rakhine State in general. Bangladesh and Myanmar have fought several wars, initiated by Bangladesh, over Rakhine State. The region is the most rich region in terms of natural gas and other resources in the greater Mekong region.

Rivalling energy-security interests over Myanmar’s gas resources, between Bangladesh, Myanmar, China, India, as well as U.S. and British cartels were fueling the use of HuJI as a geopolitical instrument. The transition to a generally more U.S.-leaning government in Myanmar may, as Ambassador Bernicat’s statement may suggest, indicate a change in U.S. and possibly Bangladeshi policy with regard to the use of HuJI and other Islamist terrorist organizations and insurgencies in Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Historians still debate whether President John F. Kennedy would have withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam had he lived to win re-election in 1964. Since President Barack Obama recently announced his intention to keep at least 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan through the end of his presidency, the only debate will be over why he never withdrew but chose instead to bequeath an unwinnable war — the longest in U.S. history — to his successor.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan will officially pass the 15-year mark in a few months. But like Vietnam, where the United States began aiding French colonial forces in the late 1940s, Afghanistan has been the target of Washington’s war-making for more than three-and-a-half decades.

On July 3, 1979, President Carter first authorized the secret provision of aid to armed opponents of the leftist regime in Kabul. A senior Pentagon official advocated the aid to “suck the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.”

When Moscow took the bait and sent troops that December to support the Afghan government against a growing rural insurgency, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski gleefully wrote President Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

Call it blowback, or just an irony of history, but Afghanistan has turned instead into America’s second Vietnam War. The Soviets finally had the good sense to pull out after being bloodied for a decade. The Obama administration envisions staying there indefinitely. Under the Bilateral Security Agreement that President Obama got Kabul to sign in 2014, U.S. troops may remain in Afghanistan “until the end of 2024 and beyond.”

President Obama explicitly rejected any analogy to Vietnam in a speech nearly seven years ago. But like Vietnam, our ongoing conflict in Afghanistan has become a hopeless quagmire, marked by official lies, atrocities, pervasive corruption and poorly led government forces who survive in the field thanks mainly to U.S. bombing. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan represents a staggering waste of lives (more than 300,000 direct casualties through early 2015) and resources (more than two trillion dollars).

Even more than Vietnam, it is a conflict for which no one in Washington bothers to offer any strategic rationale. The best that President Obama could come up with in his July 6 statement on Afghanistan, was “I strongly believe that it is in our national security interest — especially after all the blood and treasure we’ve invested in Afghanistan over the years — that we give our Afghan partners the very best opportunity to succeed.”

The same logic is what keeps gamblers coming back to Sheldon Adelson’s casinos year after year to lose more money.

‘Precarious’ or Unwinnable?

In Vietnam, the United States couldn’t win with more than half a million troops. In Afghanistan, the United States couldn’t beat the Taliban with 100,000 troops. Obama doesn’t really think he can win with a mere 8,400 troops — especially with the Taliban making steady gains.

“The security situation remains precarious,” he admitted. “Even as they improve, Afghan security forces are still not as strong as they need to be. The Taliban remains a threat. They’ve gained ground in some cases.”

As in Vietnam, however, ambitious military officers and armchair civilian warriors claim confidently that victory requires just a modest degree of escalation. Sounding just like Vietnam-era hawks, Retired Gen. David Petraeus and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings — previously a cheerleader for invading Iraq — accused the administration of making “U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan operate with one hand tied behind their backs.” To win the war, they declared, “We should unleash our airpower in support of our Afghan partners.”

In Indochina, of course, all of our furious bombing, which unleashed three times the tonnage dropped in World War II, only hardened enemy resistance. Recent studiesconfirm that the bombing was ineffective and drove civilians into the arms of the Viet Cong, just as U.S. bombs, drones and night raids build support for the Taliban.

President Richard Nixon knew it at the time, though he insisted publicly that American bombing was “very, very effective.” As he wrote despairingly in a note to Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, “We have had 10 years of total control of the air in Laos and V.Nam. The result = Zilch. There is something wrong with the strategy or the Air Force.”

Massive bombing could not make up for the unwillingness of South Vietnamese troops to risk their lives for corrupt leaders. As in Vietnam, which became known as the “dirty war,” Afghan officials have pocketed tens of billions of dollars earmarked for infrastructure and institution building. They also encourage rampant trafficking in opium and heroin, as do the Taliban.

The Taliban, however, use their profits to finance their insurgency, rather than siphoning them off to Dubai, where the families of leading Afghan officials maintain fat bank accounts and luxury villas.

Much of Afghanistan’s army consists of “ghost” soldiers and officers, who draw pay that enriches corrupt Army leaders. In some provinces, nearly half of all police are ghost employees as well.

Meanwhile, real soldiers are busy selling tens of thousands of U.S. weapons to the Taliban. Others fire their weapons at no one in particular so they can sell copper ammunition casings on the black market.

Pakistani Bases

Highly motivated Taliban forces are particularly tough to beat because they get refreshed and resupplied from bases in Pakistan, where their leaders reside. One of the key lessons of the Vietnam War was the near impossibility of defeating a determined insurgency that enjoys neighboring sanctuaries.

In Vietnam, at least, U.S. leaders pursued negotiations with the enemy to end the conflict. In Afghanistan, no one is sitting at the peace table, and the U.S. drone strike that killed Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in May was hardly a welcoming invitation from Washington.

Pakistan blames Afghanistan for the failure of the peace process to go anywhere. A spokeswoman for the Pakistani government cited the “absence of a national consensus in support of the reconciliation process,” as well as the “worsening security situation, corruption and other administrative problems.”

The Taliban and their unyielding allies are to blame as well. In June, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of one militant Islamist faction, demanded that the Kabul government send all foreign troops home and disband itself. Ironically, he was America’s (and Pakistan’s) primary ally during the war against the Soviet Union, despite (or because of) his reputation for pathological brutality and leadership of Afghanistan’s drug trade. So much for grateful allies.

So why doesn’t Obama just get out? That worked in Vietnam, which Washington today is courting as an ally. But like many CEOs today, Presidents think far more about the immediate future than about outcomes long after they leave office.

Again, Vietnam is instructive. President Lyndon Johnson heard plenty of warnings that the war was unwinnable, but remembered all too well how Republicans clobbered the Truman administration after the “fall” of China. As LBJ told Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in late 1963, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

Similarly, President Nixon — who built his career in Congress by playing the anti-communist card to the hilt — said he was not going to be “the first President of the United States to lose a war.”

President Obama knows full well that the Republican attack machine will go after him and other Democrats if he “loses” Afghanistan or Iraq, despite public ambivalence about both wars. So his calculated decision to keep fighting, at minimal cost and without any real hope of winning, makes political sense.

But his policy is also cowardly and immoral. President Obama — and his current secretary of state — should recall the testimony of former Navy Lt. John Kerry before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.

Citing President Nixon’s vow not to be the first president to “lose a war,” Kerry asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books on international affairs, including The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” 

China is fuming. It has obviously had enough, it is reaching the limit. For decades it tried to appease the West, to play by international laws, to be a good and responsible member of the international community. And for decades it never interfered in the internal affairs of other countries, it sponsored no coups and attacked no foreign lands.

Even its counter-propaganda has been measured, polite and mild.

All this has gained China no admiration, not even respect!

It is being constantly antagonized, provoked and encircled both militarily and ideologically. Not far from its territory are deadly US military bases (Futenma and Kadena) located on Okinawa, there are enormous bases on the Korean Peninsula and increasing US military presence in Southeast Asia, particularly in the Philippines. There are constant exercises and naval maneuvers near its shores and just recently, a decision by South Korea (ROK), to allow the US to deploy an advanced missile defense system (THAAD) in Seongju County.

In Nagasaki, my friend, an Australian historian Geoffrey Gunn commented on the situation:

“Well, the fact of the matter is that China is indignant at this encirclement. China is indignant that Washington backs Japan, that Washington is ready to support Japan’s non-negotiation policy over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. So we see, in this situation, a clearly indignant China, and Japan that is taking a basically aggressive position in relation to so-called territorial integrity. So Pacific Asia is increasingly becoming more belligerent, more conflict-prone East Asia.”

The propaganda against China in both Europe and North America is reaching a crescendo. The more socialist (Chinese way) it is once again becoming, and the closer its ties with Russia become, the more powerful the ideological attacks are from Western governments and mainstream media.

The latest decision (over the South China Sea dispute) of the ‘kangaroo’ arbitration court in The Hague appears to be the last drop.

The Chinese Dragon has risen in anger. Tired of receiving punches, mighty and strong, it has sent a strong message to the West: China is an enormous and peaceful country. But if threatened, if attacked, this time the country will be firm and determined. It will defend itself and its interests.

*

Just around the time when the court in The Hague was getting ready to rule, I was driving south from the Russian Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, straight towards the border with China.

Flowing below us was the mighty River Ussuri, which separates two great nations, China and Russia. The modern bridge we were driving on was brand new; it had not even made it onto Google Maps, yet. Now it connects the Russian mainland with the Big Ussuri Island, a substantial land mass hugged from one side by the Amur and from the other by the Ussuri rivers.

In the past, this area used to suffer from great tensions and lived through several conflicts. The island was clearly a ‘disputed territory’, a ‘no go’ area, a military zone.

Still remembering the past, I came armed with my passport and several press cards, but my driver, Nikolai, was poking fun at my precautions.

“It is absolutely peaceful and quiet here now,” he said. “Now Russia and China are great friends and allies. Look there, on the shore, people are just parking their cars and having picnic.”

True, but all around I saw the remnants of the past – abandoned bunkers, as well as military ghost towns and constant warning signs announcing that we are entering a restricted border area. Not far away, I spotted a tall Chinese pagoda. We were really at the frontier.

A man was riding his horse, and close to the road, I spotted a collective farm.

I still couldn’t believe that I was here, in this twilight zone. It all felt like watching an old film by Andrei Tarkovski.

But for the local people, all is ‘quite and normal’, now. Chinese and Russian people are mingling, getting to know and understand each other; tourists and bargain hunters travel by ferries, buses and airplanes, crossing the border in great numbers. The Vladivostok and Khabarovsk museums, concert halls and shopping centers are now overflowing with curious Chinese visitors.

The conflict is over. Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao met in 2004, both leaders harboring clear and good intentions. Negotiations were complex but both sides overcame the obstacles. They signed an addendum to the Agreement on the Russian-Chinese state border, and all difficult disputes were resolved, rapidly.

Now China is investing tens of billions of dollars in the flourishing Russian Far East. Great infrastructural projects are materializing. A Solid friendship has been forged. The anti-imperialist alliance is in place. Both countries – China and Russia – are on the rise; both are full of optimism and hopes for the future.

‘It can be done’, I am thinking, after speaking to several local people who express their admiration for neighboring China. ‘It definitely can be done, if there is a strong will!’

*

A few thousand kilometers south, I drove through the horrific slums encircling Manila, the capital city of the Philippines.

Like Indonesia, the Philippines is clearly a ‘failed’ state, but both countries are known to be staunch allies of the West and therefore, their elites are continuously reaping rewards for their submissiveness and servility. To provoke and to antagonize China is one of the most secure ways to prove allegiance to Washington and to the European capitals.

As early as in 2012, I first decided to write about the ‘confrontation’ over the Spratly Islands for the People’s Daily (one of the most important newspapers in China and the official publication of the Communist Party). I spoke to several of my friends – leading Filipino academics. One of them, Roland G. Simbulan, Senior Fellow and Professor in Development Studies and Public Management at the University of the Philippines, spoke to me about the ‘dispute’, as we were driving through Metro Manila, at the time searching for the remnants of the horrid US colonial rule over the archipelago, for my documentary film:

“Frankly speaking, those Spratly Islands are not so significant to us. What’s happening is that our political elites are clearly encouraged by the US to provoke China, and there is also the big influence of the US military on our armed forces. I would say that the Philippine military is very vulnerable to such type of ‘encouragement’. So the US is constantly nurturing those confrontational attitudes. But to continue with this type of approach could be disastrous for our country. Essentially we are very close to China, geographically and otherwise.”

“China has a stronger claim than Philippines,” explained Professor Eduardo C. Tadem, Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Philippines (UP), two years later, in his home:

“China controlled the Spratly Islands before we even knew anything about them. The only claim we have is their proximity, and frankly, that is not a particularly strong claim.”

Both Eduard Tadem and his wife Teresa S. Encarnation Tadem (Professor at the Department of Political Science College of Science and Philosophy at University of the Philippines and also the former head of ‘Third World Studies’ at UP), agree that the West is continuously provoking China while trying to ensure that the natural resources of the Spratly Islands goes to the weakest players:

“We are totally dependent on foreign companies for the exploitation of our natural resources. The Philippines only gets a share from what is extracted. The international companies hold all the major contracts. Foreign multi-nationals would greatly profit from the natural resources of the China Sea, if a weak and dependent country like this one were to be put in charge of them.”

*

In China, passions exploded right in July 2016, right after the final decision came from The Hague. As reported by Reuters on 18^th July 2016:

“China has refused to recognise the ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague that invalidated its vast territorial claims in the South China Sea and did not take part in the proceedings brought by the Philippines.

It has reacted angrily to calls by Western countries and Japan for the decision to be adhered to.

China has repeatedly blamed the United States for stirring up trouble in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually.

China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have rival claims, of which China’s is the largest.”

A researcher of US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences made this correct observation: “We can see that Washington, which has never ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, encouraged and supported Manila to initiate the arbitration case from the very beginning.”

Many observers, in Beijing and abroad, pointed out that the ruling was clearly political, and that out of five, four judges were citizens of the EU, while one (the chairman) was Ghanaian but also a long-term resident of Europe.

The Chinese response was quick and determined. The official newspaper, “China Daily”, declared on July 15^th: “Beijing said on Thursday that it will respond resolutely if any party seeks to use the ruling in the unilaterally initiated arbitration on the South China Sea to harm China’s interests.”

*

The position of China is clear: it is bound by several bilateral agreements with its neighbors, and it is willing to negotiate further. But not through the West and its institutions that are hostile towards China and towards all countries that are not ready to accept Western dictates.

During a recent meeting in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc met China’s Premier Li Keqiang and declared that “Vietnam stands ready to push for forward bilateral negotiations and properly manage differences with China, in order to contribute to regional peace and stability.” Such approach is welcomed and encouraged by Beijing.

Even in Manila, there are countless voices of reason emerging, calling for further and immediate bilateral negotiations with China.

*

To antagonize China is not only wrong; it is dangerous and shortsighted. Beijing has been backing up and compromising too long, for many decades. It will not any longer. Chinese people demand fairness. The Philippines should realize that the West is using their country as a proxy, for its imperialist goals.

To involve Western courts in internal Asian disputes, as is being done by the Philippines, will only aggravate the situation. To shoot at Chinese fishing vessels in the disputed waters (as was recently done by the Indonesian navy) can only escalate tensions (Indonesia already has a horrid historic track record in relation to China – banning the Chinese language, culture and even names, for decades, after the bloody Western-backed coup of 1965).

For the time being, China will be applying a ‘wait and see’ strategy. Once again, it will use its diplomacy, re-launching bilateral negotiations with the Philippines, Vietnam and other countries.

But if the West refuses to back up, and if some of the Southeast Asian countries continue to act as proxies for the West, Beijing would most likely use one of the tougher options. One would be setting up an air defense identification zone over the South China Sea. Another would be direct military escalation – greater naval and air force presence in the area.

And what is the position of the world? No matter what the Western propaganda is trumpeting, only a handful countries, mainly the US and its closest allies (5 at the time this essay is being written), have publicly supported the Philippines and the Ruling coming from The Hague. Over 70 nations support China and its belief that disputes should be resolved through negotiations and not arbitration. The rest of the world has remained ‘neutral’.

It is possible to negotiate a good deal with China. But one has to approach Chinese Dragon as a friend, never as a foe. And the hand of peace has to be honestly extended. It should never be hiding the sword of Western imperialism behind the back!

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

Make America Safe Again! 

Make America Work Again! 

Make America First Again!

These were the official themes of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention. From the podium the newly anointed GOP standard-bearer focused on law and order, on boosting the economy, on an American foreign policy based on limiting foreign entanglements, and on further restricting immigration. The dangers of immigration were raised over and over again. In his speech Thursday night Trump even implied that illegal immigrants were criminals responsible for harming many Americans.

But for many of Trump’s supporters reached by WhoWhatWhy outside the convention in Cleveland, as well as those protesting against him, riling up white fears of minority encroachment did not need to be so subtle. They were clear that race is the biggest issue in this campaign.

No Problems Being Called Racist

Lawrence, a student in his 20s from Mississippi who requested not to have his last name printed, described himself as a white nationalist, and said he had no problem with being called racist. He feels that many Trump supporters are just hiding their true feelings when they talk about immigration.

“They think that the only way you can be racist is by screaming the N-word at somebody,” he told WhoWhatWhy.

Lawrence felt that most of the Trump supporters were racists as well, but said “I don’t think that they realize it yet.”

Lawrence first got interested in Trump’s campaign through discussions with friends on the online chat-room 8chan. He became excited when he saw Trump “targeting specific groups and not pandering” — specifically regarding his views on Mexicans and Muslims.

He sees America as a “WASP nation,” founded by Europeans, which would be better off not mixing with blacks or Latinos. He feels that the country’s “cultural heritage” is important enough to enforce massive deportations and even violence by the government, since integration between the races only leads to strife anyway.

Trump, to him, is a revelation — a candidate who actively advocates for the white population. And he is not alone.

“I just believe very passionately in the preservation of Western Civilization,” Jeff Jones, a 48-year-old worker for a defense-contractor supply chain from Syracuse, NY, told WhoWhatWhy, after he attended the Citizens for Trump America First rally on Monday. “If someone was to interpret that as some form of racism on my part, then so be it.”

Jones says that he has not personally been affected by illegal immigration in his own life, but is concerned about how it will affect the future.

“I grew up in a traditional America,” he says, and he is unnerved by “these changes that are happening so fast.”

“We have our own culture. We’d like to keep it.”

Fighting Back Against Discrimination and Racism

On Wednesday morning, immigration advocates held a “Wall Off Trump” rally just outside the convention. They marched from the Cleveland public square to the Quicken Loans Arena, where they held up a large banner emblazoned with bricks, yelling chants against the Republican nominee in both English and Spanish.

José Landaverde, 49, an Anglican priest from Quincy, IL, and 27 other activists walked for 37 days to attend the rally and other Trump protests in Cleveland. He came “to send a message to Donald Trump that we will no longer tolerate his message of discrimination and racism, and also his position against our immigrant communities.”

“I’m angry. I’m pissed,” said Sheridan Aguirre, 22, the communications coordinator for United We Dream, an immigrant activist organization that joined the rally’s organizers, the “LatinX” group Mijente, in protesting at the RNC. “Hearing all this foul language, all this hate, every day. Every time that I log on to Facebook or Twitter, I’m seeing people who are getting killed, who are getting murdered, who are being deported, and all of it’s being agitated by this hateful language, by all these ideas of white supremacy, all these ideas that encourage people to go out and marginalize people like me.”

Aguirre is himself an undocumented immigrant — he was brought to Texas by his mother when he was just a year old and has lived there ever since. He has five younger siblings, who, by virtue of being born in America, are American citizens, and therefore only worried about their parents and their brother being deported, not themselves.

Aguirre is not ashamed of his immigrant status. He works as an activist, and says that his fear of personal repercussions is “long gone. When people are aware that they have power and that we’re here to stay, that does a lot to change our perspective on our role here.”

Coded Language

Many commentators have expressed the idea that racial antagonism is central to the Trump campaign’s success. And while some have questioned this characterization, the same view was echoed by many of the Trump supporters reached by WhoWhatWhy.

Many of the Trump supporters were somewhat more subtle about their feelings about race, but still focused on immigration as a major concern.

“‘Racist’ is a crock of crap,” said Brian Bokuniewicz, 52, a designer at Ford from Dearborn Heights, MI, who also attended the America First rally. He felt that Trump’s words were being misconstrued by the media to make him seem racist instead of focusing on security. “The immigration thing — you know that’s a bunch of crap. They’re just twisting it.”

Bokuniewicz nevertheless repeated far-fetched claims about Barack Obama usually considered racially charged: that his Hawaii birth certificate is a lie and he was not born in the United States, that he is secretly a Muslim, that at the US-Mexican border “they’re landing planes, they’re bringing them off, they’re taking them and throwing them in buses, and then they’re going out to all these bus depots and they’re giving them free rides.”

“[Trump] just wants to protect us,” Bokuniewicz told WhoWhatWhy.

When it comes to attitudes about immigration, the divide between these Trump supporters and his most fervent detractors could not be deeper or wider.

“I’m here because I live in a neighborhood in Portland, Maine, that has a lot of Muslim refugees, and my wife works closely with a lot of Muslim refugees,” said Chris Thompson, a 44-year-old writer attending Monday’s Stop Trump rally. “And these are people I see every day and people I have dinner with. The whole idea that they should be under this cloud of suspicion just disgusts me.”

Thompson was one of the few protesters at that rally who saw voting for Hillary Clinton as a necessary action in the face of Donald Trump’s candidacy. He told WhoWhatWhythat although he usually ignores electoral politics, and considered Clinton “corporate,” the Trump campaign was different.

“My daughter goes to a grade school in Portland where 40-50% of the students are Muslim,” Thompson told WhoWhatWhy. “And while those kids were walking downtown one day, this grown man comes up to them and starts yelling in the Muslim kids’ faces, ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’”

“People need to understand that the only way you can stop something like this is to stop it on the early side.”

Some Trump supporters in Cleveland tiptoed around the importance of race in their view of the candidate.

Trump campaign gear for sale at the 2016 Republican National Convention
Photo credit: Jon Hecht / WhoWhatWhy

A Fort Wayne, Indiana, man wearing a Trump t-shirt he got for volunteering for the Trump campaign cited overregulation of his small business as the main reason for supporting Trump. But he also complained that the country was “losing a common language,” and talked about how areas in Indiana had changed quickly to having majority Hispanic populations.

He also brought up security concerns from letting Muslims into the country.

Those sentiments alarm Muslims in Cleveland. The Stop Trump rally on the first day of the convention featured a large group from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil rights and legal advocacy for Muslim-Americans. They came to the rally to make clear their opposition to Trump’s rhetoric blaming Muslims for America’s problems.

“The Republicans have been very exclusive. They really have shunned Islam and Muslims,” said Isam Zaeim, a board member for CAIR in Cleveland. He said the Democrats have been slightly better, but “still have been too quiet against what has been happening in our country.”

“I expect them to treat everybody equally. American Muslims are an important part of the tapestry of the nation and we should not be treated as second or third class citizens,” Zaiem told WhoWhatWhy.

“We shouldn’t feel like we are being attacked on a daily basis. That is not American.”

How much did the military-security complex pay the Atlantic Council to publish this sales pitch to Poland to load up on US weapons systems?  (see image below)

The sales pitch was written by arms salesmen Richard Shirreff, a partner at Strategia Worldwide Ltd., and Maciej Olex-Szczytowski, a “business adviser specializing in defense.”

The sales pitch is titled “Arming For Deterrence.”  The Kremlin is unpredictable, say the arms salesmen, and could at any moment decide to attack Poland. However the Russian regime “respects a show of force” and would back down if Poland has a sufficient inventory of US weapons.

The sales pitch encourages Poland to take many aggressive and dangerous steps toward Russia, such as targeting Russia cities and facilities including RT.  But before provoking the Bear like this, Poland needs “to join the tactical nuclear capability scheme within NATO, so enabling its F-16s to be carriers of tactical nuclear ordnance.”

Poland also needs to be able to strike deep inside Russia and for this needs to purchase American long-range JASSM air-launched cruise missiles, the Navy Strike missile coastal missiles, and the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems.

Poland also needs “offensive cyber operations”  and “more tandem-warhead Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) capable of penetrating reactive armor, and also anti-aircraft (including anti-helicopter) and anti-UAV missiles. “

The bill for this deterrence against non-existent “Russian aggression” comes to “some US $26 billion” on top of planned expenditures of  US $34 billion.  “Poland should move forward expeditiously with procurements,” say the arms salesmen or risk being attacked by superior Russian forces.

The zionist neocons get away with their warmongering because it is profitable for the US military/security complex.  Whereas the crazed neocons want real war, the military/security complex only wants the propaganda threat of war.  The numerous military/foreign policy think tanks funded by the military/security complex provide the propaganda and made-up threat.  This is a dangerous game, because the Russians see a real threat in the hostility that is directed at them.

The anti-Russian propaganda is universal and includes the Olympic Games.  Washington wants Russia excluded based on the allegation that only Russians take performance-enhancing substances.  What extraordinary nonsense.  I have a relative who travels widely to test athletes of every sport, even golf, for the use of performance-enhancing substances.  There are many non-Russian athletes who have histories of using performance-enhancing substances.

It is not the Russians who have corrupted “clean sports.”  It is the money that the corrupt Americans have poured into sports.  To be a champion, to win the Masters at Augusta National, to win a gold medal means to be a multi-millionaire.  Sports that people once played for enjoyment are now a lucrative profession.

Money corrupts everything, and it is capitalism that turns everything into a commodity that is bought and sold.  In capitalist regimes everything is for sale: honor, integrity, justice, truth. Everything is reduced to the filthy lucre.

The response of the Malaysian government authorities to the civil suits filed by the US Department of Justice to seize more than US$ 1 billion (RM 4.02 billion) in assets allegedly linked to 1MDB has been a huge disappointment.   Faced with suits that allege massive embezzlement of funds and one of the worst  money laundering scams in history, Cabinet Ministers and the Attorney-General are determined to absolve “ Malaysian Official 1” of any wrongdoing. They are obsessed with preserving, protecting and perpetuating the Prime Minister’s position whatever the costs and consequences.

It is not just the US Attorney-General that has gone public on this shameful attempt to launder perhaps US 3.5 billion (RM 14.07 billion) from a state investment company established ostensibly for the people’s benefit.  Singapore authorities have also seized assets worth S$ 240 million (RM 717.45 million) in an investigation of 1MDB related fund flows for possible money-laundering.  Switzerland is another international financial hub that has begun to take action. 1MDB’s activities between 2009 and 2013 have now been exposed as utterly fraudulent on a global scale.

The government should face up to this reality. As has been proposed by a number of groups and individuals in the last few days, it should set up an independent tribunal comprising men and women of integrity and credibility which will once and for all establish the whole truth about 1MDB and its activities and recommend appropriate action against the wrongdoers. Apart from individuals with legal expertise, the tribunal should also have members with in-depth knowledge of the intricacies of money-laundering and money flows in today’s world. It should consist of both Malaysians and non-Malaysians. Cooperation with relevant agencies in the US, Switzerland, Singapore and other countries would be crucial. The tribunal should also have unhindered access to all those linked directly or indirectly to 1MDB and its affiliates. All the information gathered and analysis undertaken by the Auditor-General, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), the Central Bank, the Attorney-General’s Chambers and the Police in the last few years should be made available to the tribunal.

Prime Minister Najib should not have anything to do with the appointment of the proposed tribunal. Since 1MDB is wholly owned by the Ministry of Finance and he is the Minister of Finance and was also the Chairman of 1MDB’s Board of Advisers, he should keep his distance from the tribunal. Isn’t it also true that right from the outset he was involved in the creation of the company and was, to all intents and purposes, its principal decision-maker? Besides, in the US Department of Justice’s civil suits he is alluded to as ‘Malaysian Official 1’ 36 times.

To give moral ballast to the formation of the tribunal and its work, Najib should in fact relinquish his position as Prime Minister and Minister of Finance until the tribunal presents its findings to the nation. If the tribunal exonerates him, he can always return to his job. I had suggested on 10 July 2015 that to facilitate investigations into 1MDB he should step aside temporarily.   The situation has now become a lot worse.

What if the government does not want to initiate a tribunal and Najib is determined to cling on to power? The people could through their members of Parliament try to persuade the Speaker to hold an emergency session of Parliament.  Both the proposal on a tribunal and the position of Najib could be resolved through a parliamentary vote. But for the vote to reflect the feelings of the people, the whip should be lifted and members on both sides of the House should be encouraged to vote according to their conscience.

If Parliament fails to act, one hopes the Conference of Rulers which had already expressed its profound concern over 1MDB in October 2015, will assume its moral responsibility to the nation and advice the Cabinet to do what is right on both the tribunal and the Prime Minister. The Rulers’ advice will carry much weight.

The Rulers one hopes will also impress upon everyone that resolving the 1MDB debacle is the nation’s top priority at this point in time. It is a moral issue of tremendous significance and should not be marginalised through inter-party, inter-personal politics and the desire to retain or to attain power. The 1MDB issue is not about ousting or hoisting anyone.

Similarly, legitimate concerns about Daesh terrorism and security should not be manipulated to divert attention from 1MDB. The people should not allow “a security situation” to be created which is then used to suppress the truth about 1MDB. There are many instances in history when the elite’s fear of being exposed for corruption or abuse of power has led to the victimisation of justice and the curtailment of freedom. In this regard, those who are dedicated to espousing integrity through demonstrations and the like must always be cognisant of the danger of their protest being hijacked by others with their own mischievous agenda.

Instead of demonstrating, it is much more important at this stage for more and more groups to speak up. If the voices of concern reach a crescendo, the powers-that-be will not be able to ignore their plea for truth and justice. The alternative media today offer unfettered channels of communication which have not been utilised to the fullest.

A sector of society that has yet to add its moral strength (there have been some isolated voices here and there) to the struggle for accountability and transparency on 1MDB are established religious personalities from the different faiths. They don’t have to be told that at its root 1MDB is about values that lie at the core of religion, values such as honesty, truthfulness and trustworthiness. This is why Muslim, Buddhist, Confucianist, Hindu and Christian theologians should take a stand now for what is at stake is the moral character of the nation itself and its future. Is it so difficult to uphold what is right and denounce what is wrong?

When you take a moment to reflect on the history of product development at Monsanto, what do you find? Here are twelve products that Monsanto has brought to market. See if you can spot the pattern…

#1 – Saccharin

Did you know Monsanto got started because of an artificial sweetener? John Francisco Queeny founded Monsanto Chemical Works in St. Louis, Missouri with the goal of producing saccharin for Coca-Cola. In stark contrast to its sweet beginnings, studies performed during the early 1970s,* including a study by the National Cancer Institute in 1980, showed that saccharin caused cancer in test rats and mice.

After mounting pressure from consumers, the Calorie Control Council, and manufacturers of artificial sweeteners and diet sodas, along with additional studies (several conducted by the sugar and sweetener industry) that reported flaws in the 1970s studies, saccharin was delisted from the NIH’s Carcinogen List. A variety of letters from scientists advised against delisting; the official document includes the following wording to this day: “although it is impossible to absolutely conclude that it poses no threat to human health, sodium saccharin is not reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen under conditions of general usage as an artificial sweetener.” (*Read the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s History of Saccharin here.)

#2 – PCBs

During the early 1920s, Monsanto began expanding their chemical production into polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to produce coolant fluids for electrical transformers, capacitors, and electric motors. Fifty years later, toxicity tests began reporting serious health effects from PCBs in laboratory rats exposed to the chemical.

After another decade of studies, the truth could no longer be contained: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a report citing PCBs as the cause of cancer in animals, with additional evidence that they can cause cancer in humans. Additional peer-reviewed health studies showed a causal link between exposure to PCBs and non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, a frequently fatal form of cancer.

In 1979, the United States Congress recognized PCBs as a significant environmental toxin and persistent organic pollutant, and banned its production in the U.S.  By then Monsanto already had manufacturing plants abroad, so they weren’t entirely stopped until the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants banned PCBs globally in 2001.

And that’s when Monsanto’s duplicity was uncovered: internal company memos from 1956 surfaced, proving that Monsanto had known about dangers of PCBs from early on.

In 2003, Monsanto paid out over $600 million to residents of Anniston, Alabama, who experienced severe health problems including liver disease, neurological disorders and cancer after being exposed to PCBs — more than double the payoff that was awarded in the case against Pacific Gas & Electric made famous by the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

And yet the damage persists: nearly 30 years after PCBs have been banned from the U.S., they are still showing up in the blood of pregnant women, as reported in a 2011 study by the University of California San Francisco; while other studies are indicating a parallel between PCBs and autism.

#3 – Polystyrene

In 1941, Monsanto began focusing on plastics and synthetic polystyrene, which is still widely used in food packaging and ranked 5th in the EPA’s 1980s listing of chemicalswhose production generates the most total hazardous waste.

#4 – Atom bomb and nuclear weapons

Shortly after acquiring Thomas and Hochwalt Laboratories, Monsanto turned this division into their Central Research Department. Between 1943 to 1945, this department coordinated key production efforts of the Manhattan Project—including plutonium purification and production and, as part of the Manhattan Project’s Dayton Project, techniques to refine chemicals used as triggers for atomic weapons (an era of U.S. history that sadly included the deadliest industrial accident).

#5 – DDT

In 1944, Monsanto became one of the first manufacturers of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. Despite decades of Monsanto propaganda insisting that DDT was safe, the true effects of DDT’s toxicity were at last confirmed through outside research and in 1972, DDT was banned throughout the U.S.

This chart illustrates how much dioxin an average American consumes per day

#6 – Dioxin

In 1945, Monsanto began promoting the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture with the manufacture of the herbicide 2,4,5-T (one of the precursors to Agent Orange), containing dioxin. Dioxins are a group of chemically-related compounds that since become known as one of the “Dirty Dozen” — persistent environmental pollutants that accumulate in the food chain, mainly in the fatty tissue of animals. In the decades since it was first developed, Monsanto has been accused of covering up or failing to report dioxin contamination in a wide range of its products.

#7 – Agent Orange

During the early 1960s, Monsanto was one of the two primary manufacturers of Agent Orange, an herbicide / defoliant used for chemical warfare during the Vietnam War. Except Monsanto’s formula had dioxin levels many times higher than the Agent Orange produced by Dow Chemicals, the other manufacturer (which is why Monsanto was the key defendant in the lawsuit brought by Vietnam War veterans in the United States).

(Pictured at left, Anh and Trang Nhan, with their father, when they first arrived at the Hoi An Orphanage; below are the same brothers shortly before Trang’s death. Source: Kianh Foundation Newsletter, Dec. 2011)

As a result of the use of Agent Orange, Vietnam estimates that over 400,000 people were killed or maimed, 500,000 children were born with birth defects, and up to 1 million people were disabled or suffered from health problems—not to mention the far-reaching impact it had on the health of over 3 million American troops and their offspring.

Internal Monsanto memos show that Monsanto knew of the problems of dioxin contamination of Agent Orange when it sold it to the U.S. government for use in Vietnam. Despite the widespread health impact, Monsanto and Dow were allowed to appeal for and receive financial protection from the U.S. government against veterans seeking compensation for their exposure to Agent Orange.

In 2012, a long 50 years after Agent Orange was deployed, the clean-up effort has finally begun. Yet the legacy of Agent Orange, and successive generations of body deformities, will remain in orphanages throughout VietNam for decades to come.

(Think that can’t happen here? Two crops were recently genetically engineered to withstand a weedkiller made with one of the major components of Agent Orange, 2,4-D, in order to combat “super weeds” that evolved due to the excessive use of RoundUp.)

8 – Petroleum-Based Fertilizer

In 1955, Monsanto began manufacturing petroleum-based fertilizer after purchasing a major oil refinery. Petroleum-based fertilizers can kill beneficial soil micro-organisms, sterilizing the soil and creating a dependence, like an addiction, to the synthetic replacements. Not the best addiction to have, considering the rising cost and dwindling supply of oil…

#9 – RoundUp

During the early 1970s, Monsanto founded their Agricultural Chemicals division with a focus on herbicides, and one herbicide in particular: RoundUp (glyphosate). Because of its ability to eradicate weeds literally overnight, RoundUp was quickly adopted by farmers. Its use increased even more when Monsanto introduced “RoundUp Ready” (glyphosate-resistant) crops, enabling farmers to saturate the entire field with weedkiller without killing the crops.

While glyphosate has been approved by regulatory bodies worldwide and is widely used, concerns about its effects on humans and the environment persist. RoundUp has been found in samples of groundwater, as well as soil, and even in streams and air throughout the Midwest U.S., and increasingly in food. It has been linked to butterfly mortality, and the proliferation of superweeds. Studies in rats have shown consistently negative health impacts ranging from tumors, altered organ function, and infertility, to cancer and premature death; click here to find countless study references to support these statements.

#10 – Aspartame (NutraSweet / Equal)

An accidental discovery during research on gastrointestinal hormones resulted in a uniquely sweet chemical: aspartame. During the clinical trials conducted on 7 infant monkeys as part of aspartame’s application for FDA approval, 1 monkey died and 5 other monkeys had grand mal seizures—yet somehow aspartame was still approved by the FDA in 1974. In 1985, Monsanto acquired the company responsible for aspartame’s manufacture (G.D. Searle) and began marketing the product as NutraSweet. Twenty years later, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a report listing 94 health issues caused by aspartame. (Watch a quick video here.)

#11 – Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH)

This genetically modified hormone was developed by Monsanto to be injected into dairy cows to produce more milk. Cows subjected to rBGH suffer excruciating pain due to swollen udders and mastitis, and the pus from the resulting infection enters the milk supplyrequiring the use of additional antibiotics. rBGH milk has been linked to breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer in humans.

#12 – Genetically Modified Crops / GMOs

In the early 1990s, Monsanto began gene-splicing corn, cotton, soy, and canola with DNA from viruses and bacteria in order to achieve one of two traits: an internally-generated pesticide (the corn or soy causes the insect’s stomach to rupture if they eat it), or an internal resistance to Monsanto’s weedkiller RoundUp (enabling farmers to drench their field with RoundUp to kill ever-stronger weeds).

Despite decades of promises that genetically engineered crops would “feed the world” with “more nutrients,” drought resistance, or yield, the majority of Monsanto’s profits are from seeds that are engineered to tolerate Monsanto’s RoundUp—providing them with an ever-increasing, dual income stream as weeds continue to evolve resistance to RoundUp.

Most sobering however, is that the world is once again buying into Monsanto’s “safe” claims.

Just like the early days of PCBs, DDT, Agent Orange, Monsanto has successfully fooled the general public and regulatory agencies into believing that RoundUp, and the genetically modified crops that help sell RoundUp, are “safe.” Despite the fact that NO human testing has ever been done on GMO crops!

Meanwhile, Monsanto has learned a thing or two in the past 100+ years of defending its dirty products: these days, when a new study shows the negative health or environmental impacts of GMOs, Monsanto attacks the study and its scientist(s) by flooding the media with counter claims from “independent” organizations, scientists, industry associations, blogs, sponsored social media, and articles by “private” public relations firms—all endorsed, founded, funded or maintained by Monsanto.

Unfortunately, few of us take the time to trace the members, founders, and relationships of these seemingly valid sources back to their little Monsanto secret. (Read more on this page.)

Fooling the FDA required a slightly different approach: click on the below chart compiled by Millions Against Monsanto to see how many former Monsanto VPs and legal counsel are now holding positions with the FDA. And don’t forget Clarence Thomas, former Monsanto attorney who is now a Supreme Court Justice, ruling in favor of Monsanto in every case brought before him.

A Baker’s Dozen: #13 – Terminator Seeds

In the late 1990s, Monsanto developed the technology to produce sterile grains unable to germinate. The goal of these “Terminator Seeds” was to force farmers to buy new seeds from Monsanto year after year, rather than save and reuse the seeds from their harvest as they’ve been doing throughout centuries.

Fortunately this technology never came to market. Instead, Monsanto managed to accomplish the same thing by requiring farmers to sign a binding contract agreeing that they will not save or sell seeds from year to year, which forces them to buy new seeds and preempts the need for a “terminator gene.” Lucky for us… since the terminator seeds were capable of cross-pollination and could have contaminated local non-sterile crops.

What’s the Result of our Monsanto Legacy? 

Between 75% to 80% of the processed food you consume every day has GMOs inside, and residues of Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide outside. But it’s not just processed food—fresh fruit and vegetables are next: genetically engineered sweet corn is already being sold at your local grocer, with apples and a host of other “natural” produce currently in field trials.

How is it that Monsanto is allowed to manipulate our food after such a dark product history? How is it they are allowed to cause such detrimental impact to our environment and our health?

According to the Organic Consumers Association, “There is a direct correlation between our genetically engineered food supply and the $2 trillion the U.S. spends annually on medical care, namely an epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases.

Instead of healthy fruits, vegetables, grains, and grass-fed animal products, U.S. factory farms and food processors produce a glut of genetically engineered junk foods that generate heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer—backed by farm subsidies—while organic farmers receive no such subsidies.

Monsanto’s history reflects a consistent pattern of toxic chemicals, lawsuits, and manipulated science. Is this the kind of company we want controlling our world’s food supply?

P.S. Monsanto’s not alone. Other companies in the “Big Six” include Pioneer Hi-Bred International (a subsidiary of DuPont), Syngenta AG, Dow Agrosciences (a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, BASF (which is primarily a chemical company that is rapidly expanding their biotechnology division), and Bayer Cropscience (a subsidiary of Bayer). The website Biofortified.org maintains a complete list of companies doing genetic engineering.

Sources for the above embedded links:

Ever since the UK parliament released its long-awaited Chilcot report on the Iraq war in the first week of this month, there have again been heated discussions about the then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s calamitous decision to support US President George W. Bush in his 2003 misadventure. Sir John Chilcot’s 12-volume, 2.6 million-word report explores every detail of the processes and decisions that led to a military folly for which the entire Middle East continues to pay a terrible price.

But intriguingly in America, the report has not evoked interest on a scale the biggest foreign policy disaster of the last quarter century merits. Of course, Senate’s intelligence committee looked into the intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq war and its report was released in 2008.

The Democratic-led committee faulted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for massive intelligence failures and the Bush administration for purposefully manipulating intelligence for public consumption. That is all.

This is all the more puzzling when we know that there were as many as 10 investigations into the attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 that killed four Americans including US ambassador.

Bush went to Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Everybody now knows that everybody in the administration, including Bush knew Saddam had none. If regime change was the real aim, who ordered the disbandment of the Iraqi Army and “de-Baathification” which threw Iraq and the entire region into turmoil? Who drew the best-case scenario in which grateful Iraqis would welcome Anglo-American troops with rose petals? Who should be held responsible if the planning for the aftermath of the invasion turned out to be “wholly inadequate”?

One thought President Barack Obama who opposed the Iraq war would order an inquiry into all aspects of a decision everybody now admits was the largest strategic blunder in American history. No, he did nothing of the sort. Even those who were responsible for Abu Ghraib torture and abuses were spared. What is more, he has scrupulously avoided prosecuting Bush officials for anything related to the “war on terror.”

With the result that no US politician or senior-level official has suffered punishment for his or her support for the Iraq war or their involvement in the decision that led to the war or in its execution. Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, have nominated people who supported the 2003 invasion. Nothing surprising when you remember that Hillary Clinton who supported the war was Obama’s first secretary of state. Her replacement, John Kerry, while contesting against Bush in the 2004 presidential election, said he would have supported the war even if he knew that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.

This leads one to conclude that with few exceptions Democrats were with Bush on the issue of war. The same can be said of the US media. With few honorable exceptions, they served as the echo chambers of an administration that was determined to replace Saddam and was doing everything in its power to influence public opinion in favor of the invasion.

After the publication of the Chilcot report, there have been renewed calls all over Britain to try Blair for war crimes. It’s unlikely that anything will ever actually happen to Blair or any of the other architects of the war in the UK despite the report’s damning strictures. But the British public knows that the decision to invade Iraq was wrong and led to the presence of Al-Qaeda in that Arab country and later contributed hugely to the creation of Daesh (the so-called IS), which is now creating mayhem throughout the region and beyond it. Will the American public ever get a chance to know who was responsible for or behind a war that continues to kill innocent people in hundreds and led to the largest exodus of people in the Arab world after the creation of Israel?

Foreign Service Officer Richard Cabot Howland, who was stationed in Jakarta from 1965 to 1966 at the Embassy in Indonesia, in 1970 published an article in the classified internal journal of the Central Intelligence Agency, Studies in Intelligence (“The Lessons of the September 30 Affair,” Vol. 14, Fall 1970: pp.13–28). The article was approved for declassification and release to the public in 1994 by the CIA. It is available at the National Archives and Records Administration, RG 263, CIA Records, Studies in Intelligence. To date it is only one of two documents from the CIA’s internal journal that have been declassified about the involvement of the US in the 1965 coup and massacres in Indonesia. The other is an article written by John T. Pizzicaro (“The 30 September Movement in Indonesia,” Fall 1969) and the other by foreign service officer Richard Cabot Howland (“The Lessons of the September 30 Affair,” Fall 1970).

There, however, is a problem. Despite admitting its involvement in the mass killings in 1965, the CIA has sought to blame the victims for their own murders. In the words of Prof. John Rossa and Prof. Joseph Nevins, CIA officials tried to blame “the victims of the killings — the supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) — for their own deaths.” The text below is the analysis co-authored by Rossa and Nevins that looks at the data the US and CIA itself released about the involvement of Washington in the 1965 coup in Indonesia.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Asia-Pacific Research Editor, 22 July 2016.

 “One of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” That was how a CIA publication described the killings that began forty years ago last month in Indonesia. It was one of the few statements in the text that was correct. The 300-page text was devoted to blaming the victims of the killings — the supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) — for their own deaths. The PKI had supposedly attempted a coup d’état and a nationwide uprising called the September 30th Movement (which, for some unknown reason, began on October 1). The mass murder of hundreds of thousands of the party’s supporters over subsequent months was thus a natural, inevitable, and justifiable reaction on the part of those non-communists who felt threatened by the party’s violent bid for state power. The killings were part of the “backfire” referred to in the title: Indonesia ­ 1965: The Coup that Backfired. The author of this 1968 report, later revealed to be Helen Louise Hunter, acknowledged the massive scale of the killings only to dismiss the necessity for any detailed consideration of them. She concentrated on proving that the PKI was responsible for the September 30th Movement while consigning the major issue, the anti-PKI atrocities, to a brief, offhanded comment. [1]

Hunter’s CIA report accurately expressed the narrative told by the Indonesian army commanders as they organized the slaughter. That narrative rendered the September 30th Movement ­ a disorganized, small-scale affair that lasted about 48 hours and resulted in a grand total of 12 deaths, among them six army generals ­ into the greatest evil ever to befall Indonesia [2]. The commander of the army, Major General Suharto, justified his acquisition of emergency powers in late 1965 and early 1966 by insisting that the September 30th Movement was a devious conspiracy by the PKI to seize state power and murder all of its enemies. Suharto’s martial law regime detained some 1.5 million people as political prisoners (for varying lengths of time), and accused them of being “directly or indirectly involved in the September 30th Movement.” The hundreds of thousands of people shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, or starved to death were labeled perpetrators, or would-be perpetrators of atrocities, just as culpable for the murder of the army generals as the handful of people who were truly guilty.

The September 30th Movement was Suharto’s Reichstag fire: a pretext for destroying the communist party and seizing state power. As with the February 1933 fire in the German parliament that Hitler used to create a hysterical, crisis-filled atmosphere, the September 30th Movement was exaggerated by Suharto’s clique of officers until it assumed the proportions of a wild, vicious, supernatural monster. The army whipped up an anti-communist propaganda campaign from the early days of October 1965: “the PKI” had castrated and tortured the seven army officers it had abducted in Jakarta, danced naked and slit the bodies of the army officers with a hundred razor blades, drawn up hit lists, dug thousands of ditches around the country to hold countless corpses, stockpiled guns imported from China, and so on. The army banned many newspapers and put the rest under army censorship. It was precisely this work of the army’s psychological warfare specialists that created the conditions in which the mass murder of “the PKI” seemed justified.

The question as to whether or not the PKI actually organized the September 30th Movement is important only because the Suharto regime made it important. Otherwise, it is irrelevant. Even if the PKI had nothing whatsoever to do with the movement, the army generals would have blamed the party for it. As it was, they made their case against the PKI largely on the basis of the transcripts of the interrogations of those movement participants who hadn’t already been summarily executed. Given that the army used torture as standard operating procedure for interrogations, the statements of the suspects cannot be trusted. Hunter’s CIA report, primarily based on those transcripts, is as reliable as an Inquisition text on witchcraft.

The PKI as a whole was clearly not responsible for the September 30th Movement. The party’s three million members did not participate in it. If they had, it would not have been such a small-scale affair. The party chairman, D.N. Aidit, however, does seem to have played a key role. He was summarily and secretly executed in late 1965, as were two of the three other core Politburo leaders (Lukman and Njoto), before they could provide their accounts. The one among them who survived the initial terror, the general secretary of the party, Sudisman, admitted in the military’s kangaroo court in 1967 that the PKI as an institution knew nothing of the September 30th Movement but that certain leaders were involved in a personal capacity. If the movement’s leaders had been treated as the leaders of previous revolts against the postcolonial government, they would have been arrested, put on trial, and sentenced. All the members of their organizations would not have been imprisoned or massacred.

With so little public discussion and so little scholarly research about the 1965-66 mass killings, they remain poorly understood. Many people outside of Indonesia believe that the victims were primarily Indonesian Chinese. While some Indonesian Chinese were among the victims, they were by no means the majority. The violence targeted members of the PKI and the various organizations either allied to the party or sympathetic to it, whatever ethnicity they happened to be: Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, etc. It was not a case of ethnic cleansing. Many people imagine that the killings were committed by frenzied mobs rampaging through villages and urban neighborhoods. But recent oral history research suggests that most of the killings were executions of detainees. [3] Much more research is needed before one can arrive at definitive conclusions.

President Sukarno, the target of the PKI’s alleged coup attempt, compared the army’s murderous violence against those labeled PKI to a case of someone “burning down the house to kill a rat.” He routinely protested the army’s exaggerations of the September 30th Movement. It was, he said, nothing more than “a ripple in the wide ocean.” His inability or unwillingness to muster anything more than rhetorical protests, however, ultimately doomed his rule. In March 1966, Suharto grabbed the authority to dismiss, appoint, and arrest cabinet ministers, even while maintaining Sukarno as figurehead president until March 1967. The great orator who had led the nationalist struggle against the Dutch, the cosmopolitan visionary of the Non-Aligned Movement, was outmaneuvered by a taciturn, uneducated, thuggish, corrupt army general from a Javanese village.

Suharto, a relative nobody in Indonesian politics, moved against the PKI and Sukarno with the full support of the U.S. government. Marshall Green, American ambassador to Indonesia at the time, wrote that the embassy had “made clear” to the army that Washington was “generally sympathetic with and admiring” of its actions. [4] U.S. officials went so far as to express concern in the days following the September 30th Movement that the army might not do enough to annihilate the PKI. [5] The U.S. embassy supplied radio equipment, walkie-talkies, and small arms to Suharto so that his troops could conduct the nationwide assault on civilians. [6] A diligent embassy official with a penchant for data collection did his part by handing the army a list of thousands of names of PKI members. [7] Such moral and material support was much appreciated in the Indonesian army. As an aide to the army’s chief of staff informed U.S. embassy officials in October 1965, “This was just what was needed by way of assurances that we weren’t going to be hit from all angles as we moved to straighten things out here.”[8]

This collaboration between the U.S. and the top army brass in 1965 was rooted in Washington’s longstanding wish to have privileged and enhanced access to Southeast Asia’s resource wealth. Many in Washington saw Indonesia as the region’s centerpiece. Richard Nixon characterized the country as “containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources” and “by far the greatest prize in the South-East Asian area.” [9] Two years earlier, in a 1965 speech in Asia, Nixon had argued in favor of bombing North Vietnam to protect Indonesia’s “immense mineral potential.” [10] But obstacles to the realization of Washington’s geopolitical-economic vision arose when the Sukarno government emerged upon independence in Indonesia. Sukarno’s domestic and foreign policy was nationalist, nonaligned, and explicitly anti-imperialist. Moreover, his government had a working relationship with the powerful PKI, which Washington feared would eventually win national elections.

Eisenhower’s administration attempted to break up Indonesia and sabotage Sukarno’s presidency by supporting secessionist revolts in 1958.[11] When that criminal escapade of the Dulles brothers failed, the strategists in Washington reversed course and began backing the army officers of the central government. The new strategy was to cultivate anti-communist officers who could gradually build up the army as a shadow government capable of replacing President Sukarno and eliminating the PKI at some future date. The top army generals in Jakarta bided their time and waited for the opportune moment for what U.S. strategists called a final “showdown” with the PKI. [12] That moment came on October 1, 1965.

The destruction of the PKI and Sukarno’s ouster resulted in a dramatic shift in the regional power equation, leading Time magazine to hail Suharto’s bloody takeover as “The West’s best news for years in Asia.” [13] Several years later, the U.S. Navy League’s publication gushed over Indonesia’s new role in Southeast Asia as “that strategic area’s unaggressive, but stern, monitor,” while characterizing the country as “one of Asia’s most highly developed nations and endowed by chance with what is probably the most strategically authoritative geographic location on earth.” [14] Among other things, the euphoria reflected just how lucrative the changing of the guard in Indonesia would prove to be for Western business interests.

Suharto’s clique of army officers took power with a long-term economic strategy in mind. They expected the legitimacy of their new regime would derive from economic growth and that growth would derive from bringing in Western investment, exporting natural resources to Western markets, and begging for Western aid. Suharto’s vision for the army was not in terms of defending the nation against foreign aggression but defending foreign capital against Indonesians. He personally intervened in a meeting of cabinet ministers in December 1965 that was discussing the nationalization of the oil companies Caltex and Stanvac. Soon after the meeting began, he suddenly arrived by helicopter, entered the chamber, and declared, as the gleeful U.S. embassy account has it, that the military “would not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies.” Faced with such a threat, the cabinet indefinitely postponed the discussion. [15] At the same time, Suharto’s army was jailing and killing union leaders at the facilities of U.S. oil companies and rubber plantations. [16]

Once Suharto decisively sidelined Sukarno in March 1966, the floodgates of foreign aid opened up. The U.S. shipped large quantities of rice and cloth for the explicit political purpose of shoring up his regime. Falling prices were meant to convince Indonesians that Suharto’s rule was an improvement over Sukarno’s. The regime’s ability over the following years to sustain economic growth via integration with Western capital provided whatever legitimacy it had. Once that pattern of growth ended with the capital flight of the 1997 Asian economic crisis, the regime’s legitimacy quickly vanished. Middle class university students, the fruits of economic growth, played a particularly important role in forcing Suharto from office. The Suharto regime lived by foreign capital and died by foreign capital.

By now it is clear that the much ballyhooed economic growth of the Suharto years was severely detrimental to the national interest. The country has little to show for all the natural resources sold on the world market. Payments on the foreign and domestic debt, part of it being the odious debt from the Suharto years, swallow up much of the government’s budget. With health care spending at a minimum, epidemic and preventable diseases are rampant. There is little domestic industrial production. The forests from which military officers and Suharto cronies continue to make fortunes are being cut down and burned up at an alarming rate. The country imports huge quantities of staple commodities that could be easily produced on a larger scale in Indonesia, such as sugar, rice, and soybeans. The main products of the villages now are migrant laborers, or “the heroes of foreign exchange,” to quote from a lighted sign at the Jakarta airport.

Apart from the pillaging of Indonesia’s resource base, the Suharto regime caused an astounding level of unnecessary suffering. At his command, the Indonesian military invaded neighboring East Timor in 1975 after receiving a green light from President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The result was an occupation that lasted for almost 24 years and left a death toll of tens of thousands of East Timorese. Within Indonesia proper, the TNI committed widespread atrocities during counterinsurgency campaigns in the resource-rich provinces of West Papua and Aceh, resulting in tens of thousands of additional fatalities.

With Suharto’s forced resignation in 1998, significant democratic space has opened in Indonesia. There are competitive national and local elections. Victims of the “New Order” and their families are able to organize. There is even an official effort to create a national truth commission to investigate past atrocities. Nevertheless, the military still looms large over the country’s political system. As such, there has not been a thorough investigation of any of the countless massacres that took place in 1965-66. History textbooks still focus on the September 30th Movement and make no mention of the massacres. Similarly, no military or political leaders have been held responsible for the Suharto-era crimes (or those that have taken place since), thus increasing the likelihood of future atrocities. This impunity is a source of continuing worry for Indonesia’s civil society and restless regions, as well as poverty-stricken, now-independent East Timor. It is thus not surprising that the government of the world’s newest country feels compelled to play down demands for justice by its citizenry and emphasize an empty reconciliation process with Indonesia. Meanwhile in the United States, despite political support and billions of dollars in U.S. weaponry, military training and economic assistance to Jakarta over the preceding four decades, Washington’s role in Indonesia’s killing fields of 1965-66 and subsequent brutality has been effectively buried, thus enabling the Bush administration’s current efforts to further ties with Indonesia’s military, as part of the global “war on terror.” [17] Suharto’s removal from office has not led to radical changes in Indonesia’s state and economy.

Sukarno used to indict Dutch colonialism by saying that Indonesia was “a nation of coolies and a coolie among nations.” Thanks to the Suharto years, that description remains true. The principles of economic self-sufficiency, prosperity, and international recognition for which the nationalist struggle was fought now seem as remote as ever. It is encouraging that many Indonesians are now recalling Sukarno’s fight against Western imperialism (first the Netherlands and then the U.S.) after experiencing the misery that Suharto’s strategy of collaboration has wrought. In his “year of living dangerously” speech in August 1964 ­ a phrase remembered in the West as just the title of a 1982 movie with Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver ­ Sukarno spoke about the Indonesian ideal of national independence struggling to stay afloat in “an ocean of subversion and intervention from the imperialists and colonialists.” Suharto’s U.S.-assisted takeover of state power forty years ago last month drowned that ideal in blood, but it might just rise again during the ongoing economic crisis that is endangering the lives of so many Indonesians.

John Roosa is an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia.

Joseph Nevins is an assistant professor of geography at Vassar College.

NOTES

1. A former CIA agent who worked in Southeast Asia, Ralph McGehee, noted in his memoir that the agency compiled a separate report about the events of 1965, one that reflected its agents’ honest opinions, for its own in-house readership. McGehee’s description of it was heavily censored by the agency when it vetted an account he first published in the April 11, 1981 edition of The Nation. Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square, 1983), pp. 57-58. Two articles in the agency’s internal journal Studies in Intelligence have been declassified: John T. Pizzicaro, “The 30 September Movement in Indonesia,” (Fall 1969); Richard Cabot Howland, “The Lessons of the September 30 Affair,” (Fall 1970). The latter is available online: http://www.odci.gov/csi/kent_csi/docs/v14i2a02p_0001.htm

2. In Jakarta, the movement’s troops abducted and killed six army generals and a lieutenant taken by mistake from the house of the seventh who avoided capture. In the course of these abductions, a five year-old daughter of a general, a teenaged nephew of another general, and a security guard were killed. In Central Java, two army colonels were abducted and killed.

3. John Roosa, Ayu Ratih, and Hilmar Farid, eds. Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir: Memahami Pengalaman Korban 65; Esai-Esai Sejarah Lisan [The Year that Never Ended: Understanding the Experiences of the Victims of 1965; Oral History Essays] (Jakarta: Elsam, 2004). Also consider the massacre investigated in Chris Hilton’s very good documentary film Shadowplay (2002).

4. Telegram from the Embassy in Indonesia to Department of State, November 4, 1965, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. 26, p. 354. This FRUS volume is available online at the National Security Archive website:http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/#FRUS

5. Telegram from the Embassy in Jakarta to Department of State, October 14, 1965. Quoted in Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 283.

6. Frederick Bunnell, “American ‘Low Posture’ Policy Toward Indonesia in the Months Leading up to the 1965 ‘Coup’,” Indonesia, 50 (October 1990), p. 59.

7. Kathy Kadane, “Ex-agents say CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesians,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990, available online at http://www.pir.org/kadane.html

8. CIA Report no. 14 to the White House (from Jakarta), October 14, 1965. Cited in Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise, p. 283.

9. Richard Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs (October 1967), p. 111.

10. Quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham (U.K.): Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation for Spokesman Books, 1975), p. 241.

11. Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 1.

12. Bunnell, “American ‘Low Posture’ Policy,” pp. 34, 43, 53-54.

13. Time, July 15, 1966. Also see Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 123-131.

14. Lawrence Griswold, “Garuda and the Emerald Archipelago: Strategic Indonesia Forges New Ties with the West,” Sea Power (Navy League of the United States), vol. 16, no. 2 (1973), pp. 20, 25.

15. Telegram 1787 from Jakarta to State Department, December 16, 1965, cited in Brad Simpson, “Modernizing Indonesia: U.S.­Indonesian Relations, 1961-1967,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Northwestern University, 2003), p. 343.

16. Hilmar Farid, “Indonesia’s Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion 1965-66,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (March 2005).

17. For information on U.S.-Indonesia military ties, see the website of the East Timor Indonesia Action Network at http://www.etan.org/

Russia and China may create a unified missile defense system for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. That’s the conclusion of experts speaking at a forum dedicated to the US deployment of the THAAD anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea. What would the Russian-Chinese system look like? Sputnik investigates.

In this episode of ‘Behind the Headline,’ host Mint Press Mnar Muhawesh meets Sut Jhally, an expert on media manipulation and propaganda. In the film ‘The Occupation of the American Mind,’ Jhally and others examine how high-paid spin doctors control the media message on Israel.

Following the Holocaust, the world community — led by the United States and Britain — sought to create a European Jewish-only state.

This humanitarian move, though, utterly failed in respecting the humanity of the land’s indigenous inhabitants — Christian and Muslim Palestinians.

Starting in December of 1947, their land and property was seized and destroyed to make way for the state of Israel, where white only European Jews would live . Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and over 10,000 were killed by the British and US armed Zionist militias, and later Israeli forces, during the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.”

Those expelled by the Nakba and their Palestinian descendants who make up the world’s largest refugee population in the world are not allowed to return to their land.

Yet a recent poll found that nearly half of Americans believe Palestine occupies Israel — not the other way around. That’s because the mainstream, corporate-owned media continues to spin a propaganda wheel that dehumanizes Palestinians and paints Israel as a beacon of democracy.

Meanwhile, special interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, buy their way into the hearts and minds of our elected officials. Ever wonder why Israel gets $3 billion in annual military funding from Uncle Sam? Connect the dots from the campaign contributions to the spending bills.

There’s a lot riding on our relationship with Israel: Apart from serving as a proxy for U.S. relations in the Middle East and Africa, Israel is America’s second-top destination for arms exports. Yep — the country’s that’s no bigger than the state of New Jersey is basically a black check for the military-industrial complex.

But not all Americans are on board with the notion of Israel as the victim of Palestinian oppression.

Another study showed that 62 percent of the population now believes Israel gets too much foreign aid, and theBoycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has made waves across the world, imposing a kind of sanction against Israel’s economy by targeting Israeli products.

A new documentary, “The Occupation of the American Mind,” brings attention to how Israel’s public relations campaign has successfully manipulated the narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict — in that, it’s not a conflict at all but a matter of modern-day colonialism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

Today I’m joined by Sut Jhally, executive producer of “The Occupation of the American Mind” and a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts. The film was produced, written and directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp.

I asked Jhally to explain how Americans are being kept in the dark about Palestine, and how that prevents a mass movement against Israeli apartheid from forming in the U.S.

Learn more about the US war in Afghanistan fueling  the worldwide heroin crisis, and Israel’s occupation of American minds:

Mnar Muhawesh is founder, CEO and editor in chief of MintPress News, and is also a regular speaker on responsible journalism, sexism, neoconservativism within the media and journalism start-ups. In 2009, Muhawesh also became the first American woman to wear the hijab to anchor/report the news in American media. Muhawesh is also a wife and mother of a rascal four year old boy, juggling her duties as a CEO and motherly tasks successfully as supermom. Follow Mnar on Twitter at @mnarmuh 

Transcript of  Peter Koenig’s interview with PressTV on the IMF’s anti-BREXIT propaganda in Beijing ahead of the G-20 financial officials’ meeting in Chengdu, southwestern China’s: 

According to the Associated Press,

“The head of the International Monetary Fund called Friday to end uncertainty over Britain’s vote to leave the European Union she says is dampening global economic growth.

The IMF cut this year’s global growth forecast by 0.1 percentage points to 3.1 percent in a report released this week due to the shockwaves of the British vote, said Christine Lagarde.

Lagarde spoke after meeting with the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, and leaders of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and other bodies ahead of this weekend’s gathering of finance officials of the Group of 20 major economies.” 

Interview with PressTV

“Our first and immediate recommendation is for this uncertainty surrounding the terms of Brexit to be removed as quickly as possible so that we know the terms of trade and the ways in which the United Kingdom will continue to operate in the global economy,” said Lagarde at a news conference. Lagarde said that before the British vote, the IMF had been preparing to raise its global growth forecast by 0.1 percentage points due to improvement in Japan, China and the 17-country [19-country- author’s note] euro zone.

“Unfortunately, the United Kingdom decided to go for Brexit,” said Lagarde, a former French finance minister. “This is disappointing.”

Investors are watching the G20 meeting for any sign the United States, Germany, China and other major economies may agree on joint action to accelerate a weak global economic recovery.

A similar meeting in February in Shanghai ended with a joint statement that said coordinated action was impossible because major countries were at different points in their economic cycles. Some investors believe envoys in Shanghai agreed secretly to weaken the dollar to spur trade but there has been no official confirmation of that.

The final statement from this weekend’s gathering in Chengdu in China’s southwest “will be under scanner for any hints of policy coordination — monetary or fiscal,” Citigroup economists said in a report. – U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, speaking to reporters in Athens before flying to China, downplayed the likelihood of joint action. “I don’t think this is a moment that calls for the kind of coordinated action that occurred during the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009,” said Lew. “It really is a moment where we each need to do what we can to ensure that where growth is soft it gets stronger and that prospects for the medium- and long-term are improved.” Lew appealed for close integration of Britain and the EU in the event of a split.

The best outcome is one that maximizes the integration of the UK and Europe and — because it’s likely to be a process that, at best, goes well beyond weeks or months — to have the nature of the discussion to be characterized by amicable, pragmatic engagement where the focus is on maximizing integration and cooperation. (Associated Press)

PressTV Question
What do you make of these IMF statements?

Answer PK
They are foremost an anti-BREXIT propaganda by Madame Lagarde. The IMF was given marching orders by Washington, to do their job in helping to avoid a BREXIT.

BREXIT could endanger ‘globalization’, as it may incite other European Union (EU) countries to do likewise – which would be good for the people of Europe and the world at large – but not for the corporate and financial elitist, of course. The dismantling of the undemocratic, dictatorial EU is a must for the people of Europe to regain their freedom and national sovereignty.

As usual, there is no logical explanation why BREXIT should negatively impact the world economy, none what-so-ever. – Why would it? – the UK is not even part of the Euro-zone and had always a lot of leeway making its own economic and monetary policy. In fact, the English Pound was linked closer to the US dollar than the Euro.

Only speculation and purposeful outside manipulation of currency and security and stock markets using BREXIT as a pretext to sowing financial havoc, initiated by financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, FED and Wall Street might put a negative spin on BREXIT.

When the UK leaves the EU, it will be even freer, becoming a sovereign country again, and make monetary, financial and economic development policy as it best suits British interests.

We can just hope that other EU countries will also see the light.

PressTV Question
Aren’t the leaders of the EU at least in part responsible for BREXIT?

PK
Of course they are. Brussels has gradually swallowed up every bit of independence and sovereignty of EU member nations, with an enormously bureaucratic, corrupt and complex apparatus; and this despite the fact that, both the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties attempt to assure the protection of EU countries’ sovereignty. Unfortunately, the contrary was – and ever more is the case. There is also an uneasiness among the people of all EU nations about the gradual but steady integration of the EU with NATO.

So, what Madame Lagarde says which is followed up by Mr. Lew, US Secretary of the Treasury, of a needed close integration of the UK in the EU, and warning that Brexit might cause enormous problems – is sheer propaganda and mind-manipulation. – What problems could there be? – They are never explained. There is absolutely no foundation for them. None. Such statements are sheer fearmongering, aimed at brainwashing people with warnings and threats without any substance.

They are maneuvers to make people – and even politicians – believe that they could suffer from BREXIT; and maneuvers to influencing the British Parliament to revoke the peoples’ decision. As you know, the Parliament has to ratify the people’s vote to make it effective.

What is behind all this is the empire’s final domination of Europe, through the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). Because if the EU breaks apart, the TTIP breaks apart – which is a must if Europeans want to survive decently, rather than ending up in slavehood to the empire, as a new low-cost / high-tech American colony. This is one good reason why the EU has to be dismantled.

The TTIP is a proposition of uncountable trillions of dollars of profit for foremost corporate America and the related Wall Street mafia, and a legal domination of every EU state, as the private corporate courts imposed by the TTIP would have supremacy over national courts.

If the EU is in danger of breaking up, I would not be surprised if the IMF, World Bank, FED and their related Wall Street banks, would produce another crisis in Europe – as they have done in 2007/2008. Debt is always a good argument – and a good instrument to keep countries in line. Since nobody ever sets parameters of ‘manageable debt’, acceptable debt ceilings can be invented by the creditors. Debt will be fought with more debt and ‘high-risk’ interest, and with severe austerity programs. We know the scenario. Greece is a show case.

Manipulating countries – or the entire European Continent – into crisis mode is easy, as long as the western world depends entirely on the fraudulent dollar system, a pyramid system based on the debt-interest-debt spiral. So- anything the elusive elite wants is possible.

I know first-hand how these handlings of minds and ‘cooking’ of economic indicators work. I have seen it during my many years with the World Bank.

They call it ‘sanctions’ when they address an individual country, like Russia, Iran and so on; and it is an ‘economic crisis’, when an entire continent is being called to order.

I just hope the people will not fall for it.

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

A race to be Democrat nominee never existed, things rigged from the start last year to select Clinton party standard bearer.

The process was like holding a world series or super bowl with only one team represented.

Sanders never had a chance and knew it, enjoying his extended 15 minutes of fame while it lasted – caving in the end as expected, endorsing what he campaigned against, betraying supporters, proving he’s just another dirty self-serving politician.

Last week’s WikiLeaks revelations of thousands of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails showed party support for Clinton, plotting against Sanders, rigging things to make her party nominee.

Assorted dirty tricks were used, including DNC/media collusion (notoriously from the NYT, operating as a virtual Clinton press agent), as well as fundraising on her behalf.

Sanders never had a chance. Party bosses chose Clinton, rigging the process for her, stealing primaries and caucuses, more evidence of a political system too corrupted to fix – fantasy democracy, not the real thing.

The people’s choice” is doublespeak for what monied interests want and get. Elections are farcical. Ordinary people have no say whatever – voting a waste of time.

Trump reacted to WikiLeaks’ dump of DNC emails, tweeting “(l)eaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders. Mock his heritage and much more…really vicious. RIGGED.”

Tim Kaine is, and always has been, owned by the banks. Bernie supporters are outraged, was their last choice.

He was counted out before campaigning began last year. So are independent candidates like Green Party presumptive presidential nominee Jill Stein – excluded from national coverage and party standard bearer debates.

Voters are denied a chance to hear genuine progressive views, representing their interests, not special ones exclusively.

Democrats invade Philadelphia this week, intending circus proceedings like Republicans – lots of pomp and circumstance, no substance.

On Thursday, things culminate with Clinton accepting her party’s nomination – a legally challenged war criminal/racketeer belonging in prison, not high office.

The deplorable truth about America’s political system is it’s too debauched to fix – fantasy democracy masquerading as the real thing, voters with no say on how they’re governed.

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 atsjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

The New York Times(7/15/16), writing about the man who reportedly killed 84 people in a truck attack in Nice, France, provided no evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was motivated by either politics or religion to commit violence—yet still labeled the murders as “terrorism,” as though the definition of that crime were based on ethnicity rather than motivation.

Times correspondent Andrew Higgins wrote that Lahouaiej Bouhlel

was known to his neighbors only as a moody and aggressive oddball. He never went to the local mosque, often grunted in response to greetings of “bonjour” and sometimes beat his wife — until she threw him out….

Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel appeared not to have left behind any public declaration of his motive or indicated any allegiance to the Islamic State or another extremist group….

The New York Times‘ photo of the truck used in an attack the paper labelled “terrorist,” despite admitting that it had no knowledge of the presumed killer’s motives. (photo: Andrew Testa/NYT)

Residents in his former apartment building on a hill overlooking the city said they had never seen him at the local mosque and never heard him mention religion.

Indeed, they said he rarely spoke at all and seemed to be in a permanent haze of anger, particularly after his marriage fell apart.

The militant group ISIS issued a statement praising the attack, but as theTimes story reported,

it remained unclear whether the claim of support was an effort by the Islamic State, also know as ISIS or ISIL, to associate itself with a high-profile attack without having been involved in its planning or having any direct contact with Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

Despite the absence of any evidence of a political motivation, or indeed any motive at all—generally considered to be a key part of any definition of terrorism—the Times story still referred to the Nice killings as “the third large-scale act of terrorism in France in a year and a half.” The killings, Higgins wrote, “raised new questions throughout the world about the ability of extremists to sow terror.”

Why is the Times willing to label the Nice deaths “terrorism”—a label that US media do not apply to all acts of mass violence, even ones that have much clearer political motives (FAIR Media Advisory, 4/15/14)? In part, they seem to be following the lead of French authorities: “French officials labeled the attack terrorism and cast the episode as the latest in a series that have made France a battlefield in the violent clash between Islamic extremists and the West.”

But quotes from French officials made it clear that such claims were little more than guesswork: The story reported that Prime Minister Manuel Valls “said the attacker in all likelihood had ties to radical Islamist circles,” citing Valls’ statement to French TV: “He is a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another.” Later Valls is quoted noting that the attack happened on the French national holiday of Bastille Day:

Why on the 14th of July? Because it is a celebration of freedom. It was, therefore, indeed to affect France that the individual committed this terrorist attack.

French Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, “was more cautious,” the Timesreported: “We have an individual who was not at all known by the intelligence services for activities linked to radical Islamism,” Cazeneuve was quoted.

Why was the Times not similarly cautious about applying the label of “terrorism” to an act whose motives it admitted knowing nothing about? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Times believes that when the suspect is an Arab—Lahouaiej Bouhlel was a Tunisian immigrant—then allegations of terrorism require no evidence whatsoever.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at@JNaureckas.

A coalition airstrike reported on Tuesday that killed at least 85 Syrian civilians—one more than died in the Nice attack in France last week—wasn’t featured at all on the front pages of two of the top US national newspapers, theNew York Times and LA Times, and only merited brief blurbs on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, with the actual stories buried on pages A-16 and A-15, respectively.

According to the London Telegraph (7/19/16), the airstrike killed “more than 85 civilians” after the “coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters.” Eight families were represented among the dead, with victims “as young as three.” The Intercept (7/19/16) reported the death toll could end up being well over 100.

The Pentagon has not denied the reports, saying an investigation is underway, according to Stars and Stripes (7/19/16), a media outlet that operates inside the Department of Defense.

As many on Twitter pointed out, the number of dead was roughly equal to that of the recent Nice attack, yet the airstrike did not garner nearly as much media coverage, nor did news outlets convey an outpouring of grief:

By contrast, the Nice attack garnered multiple front-page stories in the New York Times and LA Times, as well as significantly more than 20-word blurbs in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

For those who see a “false equivalency,” there are two mitigating reasons for this glaring discrepancy: 1) The airstrike deaths were an “accident” and 2) Syria’s a war zone, where civilian deaths are to be expected. Neither of these retorts are satisfactory, and certainly not enough to justify a virtual front-page blackout.

On the issue of accidental deaths having less import than purposeful ones, this doesn’t explain why unintentional natural disaster deaths routinely receive splashing front-page coverage. Intent rarely affects coverage of these events; only death counts do. And this is granting the deaths were actually accidental, which we don’t know for sure at this time, or whether the US military was using tactics, like so-called “signature strikes,” that are known to greatly increase the chances of killing noncombatants.

As for the “war zone” factor, according to Airwars, a Western group that monitors civilian deaths at the hands of the US-led coalition, the total number of civilians deaths since the beginning of airstrikes in September 2014 has been 190. To increase this number by almost 50 percent in a matter of days would indeed be a radical departure from the normal course of events—rendering it more than newsworthy.

Indeed, all of the publications in question ran a story on the “dozens of deaths” at the hands of US-led airstrikes, so we know they deemed it notable. Just not notable enough, for whatever reason, to put in a prominent position for US audiences.

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him onTwitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.

Recently Paul Craig Roberts recounted a conversation he had with James Jesus Angleton, a former head of CIA counterintelligence, in which they discussed strategies that the CIA employs to dupe the American and global public, with a view to perpetrating criminal agendas, cloaked beneath the lie of “national interests”.  Angleton explained to Roberts that, 

intelligence services create stories inside stories, each with its carefully constructed trail of evidence, in order to create false trails as diversions. Such painstaking work can serve a variety of purposes … Then if the official story gets into trouble, the backup story can be released in order to deflect attention into a new false story or to support the original story.

The strategy of “stories within stories”, and using competing narratives to confuse, to distract, and to lead the public down false paths (red herrings) is entirely consistent with the 9/11 crimes, the subsequent “War On Terror”, and the criminal invasion of Syria.

The official stories explaining the 9/11 false flag are bundled with hidden stories, “limited hangouts”, and “distance from accountability” strategies — all serving to daze and confuse North Americans in particular, to the point where we revert to passively accepting the narrative of the day and the overarching lie that supporting the neo-con war agenda is patriotic.

The first 9/11 story – Story A – identified al Qaeda and Bin Laden as the primary perpetrators, but this story is being supplanted by another story – story B – which features Saudi Arabia as the villain.  No doubt Saudi Arabia played a role in the crime and the on-going cover-up, but “Story B” is also a “limited hangout” in the sense that only a limited part of the story is “hanging out”.  It also serves to provide cover or “distance from accountability” for some of the major villains who are still shielded from the glare of the spotlight. Additionally, it serves to lead us down false trails (red herring) that divert public attention from the hidden agenda of global war and poverty.

The Saudi Arabia limited hangout does beg an important question though:  Will the CIA’s Wahhabi mercenary outfits — ISIS, al Qaeda/ al Nursra Front, and all the fraudulently labelled “moderates”, be targeting Saudi Arabia next?

The same strategy of “stories within stories” is occurring with the West’s criminal war of aggression on Syria.

Professor Tim Anderson explains in an interview that

“Washington’s plan for a New Middle East – with compliant states across the region – is failing. Their Plan B is to partition or otherwise divide Syria and Iraq. Their Plan C will be to withdraw while pretending that they have helped bring peace to the region.”

The original Plan A: to quickly destroy democratic, pluralist, non-sectarian Syria with Western and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) backed terrorist invaders — with a view to setting up a stooge Wahhabi-style dictatorship, is failing.  Not only are the terrorists being defeated on the battlefield, but the psy op “strategy of disassociation” is crumbling as well. More and more people are seeing through the lies of the “moderate rebel” story:  the Western/GCC – backed “moderates” (all of whom share the same strategic ambitions as ISIS and the West) are at least as bad, maybe worse than their “comrades in arms”, “ISIS”.

When U.S State Department spokesperson Mark Toner explained that they might put a “pause” on funding the so-called “moderates”, who publically and brazenly chopped off the head of a Palestinian boy, the “strategy of disassociation” was beheaded as well.

Plan B is also failing, at least in Syria, since the “balkanization” efforts at creating ethnically or religiously-based enclaves within Syria is hitting the wall of Syria’s longstanding culture of religious freedom and pluralism.  Syrians identify themselves first and foremost as Syrians, and not according to their religious affiliations.

Hopefully, Plan C is around the corner.  The West will pretend that it has achieved peace, and it will withdraw its disgusting terrorist proxies.

The ugly truth about the genocidal Western designs for Syria – well documented for years by sources including former Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief Michael Flynn, by Generals Dempsey, and Clark, by Vice-President Biden, and by publicly available Defence Intelligence Agency documents, as well as from other open source documents — is increasingly being accepted.

Despite the fake reporting, the fake NGOs, the “stories within stories”, the indolence and criminality of the corporate presstitutes, the ugly truth is imposing itself on Western audiences, whether they like it or not.

Just peace requires a foundation of truth.