Global Research

Sino/US relations are less than cordial. Beijing justifiably rejects Washington wanting dominion over part of the world not its own – its longstanding imperial agenda, intruding where it doesn’t belong, belligerently at its discretion.

Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the fourth Nuclear Security Summit (NSS). Issues discussed included Beijing’s sovereignty over its offshore waters and territories, notably its rights in the South China Sea.

Obama asserting what he called “significant (US) interests in the Asia-Pacific region” was code language for Washington wanting regional dominance, directly challenging Beijing, including its right to develop and protect its offshore waters and territories.

“China will firmly safeguard the sovereignty and related rights in the South China Sea,” said Xi.

It “respects and safeguards the freedom of navigation and overflight other countries are entitled to under international law, (but does) “not accept any freedom of navigation as an excuse to undermine China’s sovereignty and national security interests.”

Washington uses the pretext of “freedom of navigation” to asset its Pacific presence, aggressively advancing its military footprint, risking direct confrontation with China.

Beijing claims sovereignty of the Nansha Islands and surrounding waters. While not intending to militarize them, it maintains the right to install defensive missiles, while expressing serious concern over Washington’s provocative regional military activities.

Xi reportedly told Obama Beijing firmly opposes Washington installing advanced anti-missile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems on the Korean peninsula – on the pretext of countering a nonexistent North Korean threat.

It considers THAAD “a threat to its strategic and security interests,” according to its military spokesman Hong Lei.

Russia’s ambassador to China Andrey Denisov said THAAD “creates considerable challenges to the security of other countries, including” Moscow.

Russia isn’t attending the NSS, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, saying “Moscow considers that working on issues linked to nuclear security demands common and joint efforts and mutually taking into account interests and positions.”

“We faced a certain lack of cooperation during the preliminary stage of working on issues and topics of the summit. That’s why in this case there is no participation of the Russian side.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharov explained “the political agenda of these summits is exhausted. There are no objectively emerging breakthrough solutions in international cooperation on nuclear security that require the involvement of heads of state and government.”

Washington wants this year’s fourth and final NSS to assert greater control over the IAEA, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism and other international agencies.

Zakharova called interfering in their work unacceptable. “In this connection, (Putin) terminate(d) our participation in preparing for the 2016 summit,” she explained.

It concludes on April 1. Expect nothing accomplished to reduce the threat of possible nuclear war.

Major global security differences divide Sino/Russian and US positions. Beijing and Moscow prioritize world peace. Washington threatens 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.

The Syrian Arab Army’s engineering units have started repairing and reconstructing of Palmyra military airport in order to resume its routine activities and operations. The airport will likely become an important air base for the Syrian army’s military choppers and fighter jets, especially, in case of advances on Deir Ezzor and Raqqa.

Meanwhile, Russian and Syrian warplanes continued air raids against ISIS positions at Al-Sukhnah and along the Palmyra-Deir Ezzor road. The oil reach town Al-Sukhnah is a logistical point of the ISIS oil smuggling business.

The SAA and its allies continue attempts to liberate the town of Quraytayn. The Syrian government reportedly decided to deploy additional reinforcements to strengthen 4000-strong military grouping aimed to conduct operations in the area. A new full-scale advance on the town is expected in the nearest future.

ISIS militants attacked Sheikh Hilal on Mar.31. The militants captured few checkpoints in the nearby area but failed to enter the town. Clashes are ongoing there.

Units of the joint detachment of the International Anti-Mine Center of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation arrived at the Hmeimim airbase on Mar.31 to take part in a mine clearing operation in the city of Palmyra.

The Iraqi security forces supported by coalition air strikes and US troops have advanced towards the town of Hit in an attempt to dislodge ISIS militants. Liberation of Hit, strategically located on the Euphrates River near Ain al-Asad air base where U.S. forces are training Iraqi troops, will help to cut the militant group’s logistic in the area leaving ISIS-held Samarra and Fallujah without reinforcements.

World Cup host Qatar and FIFA are in public diplomacy terms back to square one with a just published Amnesty International report that takes the Gulf state to task for failing to implement lofty promises to significantly improve workers’ working and living conditions and the world soccer body for not ensuring that Qatar lives up to international standards.

The report, The Ugly Side of the Beautiful Game, provides a damning assessment of the state of affairs five years after FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Amnesty interviewed more than 200 labourers working on the refurbishment of the Khalifa International Stadium, one of eight planned facilities for the World Cup, and the Aspire Zone sports complex, a pillar of Qatar’s sports infrastructure, who all complained about various violations of their human rights.

The report was published days after the International Labour Organization (ILO) put Qatar on notice that it no longer can delay acting on promises made in the wake of its successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup.

In a rare move, the ILO threatened to establish a Commission of Inquiry if Qatar fails to act in the coming year. Such commissions are among the ILO’s most powerful tools to ensure compliance with international treaties. The UN body has only established 13 such commissions in its century-long history. The last such commission was created in 2010 to force Zimbabwe to live up to its obligations.

Earned goodwill could vanish
The report and the ILO warning are all the more embarrassing for Qatar given that its main competitor, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has already adopted many of the adjustments of the kafala or sponsorship system that puts workers at the mercy of their employers demanded by activists and is stepping up efforts to become the region’s prime sports hub.

The report and the warning further threaten to erase considerable goodwill that Qatar built in the wake of its 2010 successful World Cup bid by breaking with the mould of Gulf states’ refusal to engage with their critics, and holding out the promise of a more constructive relationship with international human rights groups and trade unions, and significant labour reform. Qatar became the only Gulf state to work with its critics rather than imprison them or bar them entry to the country as most of the region’s other countries continue to do.

The Amnesty report constitutes however the first documentation of abuse on a World Cup-related site and punches holes into the assertion by the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, the World Cup’s organizer which is chaired by Qatar emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, that its standards for the living and working conditions of migrant labour guard against abuse on construction sites related to the tournament.

FIFA also under fire

Amnesty takes the committee and the government to task for failing to ensure proper implementation of the standards that are written into all contracts signed by the committee since they were adopted in 2014 in consultation with Amnesty and other human rights and trade union groups.

It also charges that FIFA failed to do proper due diligence to identify and address human rights risks in Qatar in line with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. “FIFA did not put in place any measures to ensure that the people who would build the World Cup infrastructure in Qatar would not be subjected to human rights abuses. None of the publically available documentation on FIFA’s award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar contains any reference to labour exploitation or to ensuring that human rights of workers would be respected… Of even greater concern is the lack of action by FIFA in the last five years, during which time labour and human rights abuses experienced by construction workers in Qatar have been repeatedly exposed by the media, human rights groups and trades unions,” the report said.

The human rights violations of migrant workers, who constitute a majority of the Qatar population, including interest-bearing recruitment loans, deception over pay rates and job descriptions, delayed wage payments, retention of passports, denial of rights to travel home, squalid living arrangements, excessive surveillance, and physical and verbal abuse by managers, amount to forced labour. The continued abuses violate the supreme committee’s standards as well as limited legal and administrative measures adopted by the government to counter malpractice and reform the kafala system.

In a statement, the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy insisted that it was “committed to ensuring the health, safety and well-being of every worker on World Cup projects.” It asserted that “the tone of Amnesty International’s latest assertions paint a misleading picture and do nothing to contribute to our efforts.”

The committee said Amnesty had interviewed workers of only four of the 40 companies involved in the refurbishment of the Khalifa stadium and that “the conditions reported were not representative of the entire work force on Khalifa.” The committee said that issues raised by Amnesty have since been addressed and that the companies involved had been penalized.

Qatar caught in a Catch-22

Nonetheless, at the root of Amnesty’s criticism of Qatar is the Gulf state’s failure to ensure implementation of its standards throughout the food chain. The companies indicted by Amnesty were sub- rather than prime contractors, the main committee’s main focus. The criticism however puts a finger on a fundamental Qatari problem in ensuring proper implementation of policies its adopts.

That failure is rooted in logistical issues – a small, enriched population reliant on migrant labour – and political dilemmas, first and foremost among which paralysis as a result of existential demographic fears. With a citizenry that accounts for only 12 percent of the population, many Qataris fear that any concession of rights to non-Qataris could ultimately undermine the national predominance of their culture and political control of their state and society.

As a result, Qatar is caught in a Catch-22 between sports, foreign and other policies designed to put the Gulf state in the international limelight and enhance its soft power and the attention and demands that those policies attract in terms of making good on projecting itself as a cutting-edge 21^st century state.

Qatar’s inability to manage that dilemma turns its high-profile sporting efforts into a self-defeating enterprise. Despite billions of dollars of investment in its soft power strategy, of which sports is an important pillar, and five years of seeking to convince the world that it is on the right track, Qatar retains more of an image of an energy-rich slave state than of a small country that is successfully carving out its place as a good citizen of the international community.

President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Cuba has been roundly condemned by his right-wing opponents. The fact that the visit coincided with the Brussels bombing has not been omitted from conservative diatribes.

The conservative press voiced further outrage when it was revealed that Secretary of State John Kerry had met with representatives of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who were in Cuba for negotiations with the Colombian government.

The right-wing press seethed with anger that Obama, who is supposedly fighting a “war against terrorism,” would visit Cuba, which was only officially removed from the State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list last May, several years after the State Department confirmed that the Cuban government “no longer actively supports armed struggle in Latin America and other parts of the world.”

Desiree DeLoach is an organizer for the Venceremos Brigade, a group that, in an act of civil disobedience, routinely violated the recently lifted ban on Americans traveling to Cuba.

When asked about Cuba’s former designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, she told MintPress News that “its hypocrisy is abhorrent.”

DeLoach described how, in her analysis, the United States has actually waged a campaign of terrorism against Cuba. “There have been over 600 assassination attempts against Fidel Castro’s life, bombings of hotels and many other acts of terrorism carried out or backed by the United States,” she said, further noting the example of the refusal to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, a man who confessed to having bombed a Cuban airplane and remains safe and free in Miami.

Looking beyond the hypocrisy, the relationship between the Cuban government and armed groups throughout Latin America — the basis for its former official designation as a state sponsor of terrorism — has evolved based on changing circumstances.

However, Cuba’s ideological principles remain consistent.

The reason for Cuba’s apparent shift in favor of peaceful methods of social activism points toward an unacknowledged and concealed reality about revolutionary left-wing politics.

‘Making violent revolution inevitable’

In 1982, Cuba was officially designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. According to a CIA report, Cuba was included on the list because:

“Havana openly advocates armed revolution as the only means for leftist forces to gain power in Latin America, and the Cubans have played an important role in facilitating the movement of men and weapons into the region. Havana provides direct support in the form of training, arms, safe havens, and advice to a wide variety of guerrilla groups. Many of these groups engage in terrorist operations.”

Indeed, Cuba was supporting armed groups throughout Latin America in 1982. The CIA document lists, among others, the 19th of April Movement in Colombia; the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua; and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador — all as receiving support from the Cuban government in their armed campaigns. The report also quotes Cuban officials saying “acts by legitimate national liberation movements cannot be defined as terrorism.”

Cuban President Fidel Castro, right, and African leader Nelson Mandela.

When asking why Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Colombians were engaged in armed revolutionary violence — and why the Cubans supported them — rather than quoting Cuban officials, the CIA report should really quote President John F. Kennedy, who famously said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Those who accuse Cuba of “supporting terrorism” forget that the M-19 revolutionaries in Colombia, the FMLN in El Salvador, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua all took up arms not against democratic states but against brutal, repressive, human rights-violating autocracies. In Colombia, paramilitaries armed and trained by the U.S. kidnapped, assassinated, and tortured almost all peaceful opposition. Many thousands of labor activists, socialist organizers, and religious leaders were killed.

The M-19 took up arms alongside FARC and other Colombian groups in the context of extreme political repression, violations of human rights, and routine slaughter of innocent civilians. Explaining the situation in Colombia, Fidel Castro said:

“The Colombian Communist Party never contemplated the idea of conquering power through the armed struggle. The guerrilla was a resistance front and not the basic instrument to conquer revolutionary power, as it had been the case in Cuba.”

The Sandinistas in Nicaragua, which Cuba is also accused of supporting, took power in an armed revolution in 1979 against a military dictatorship led by Anastasio Somoza. In 1972, when Nicaragua was struck by an earthquake that killed 10,000 people, the regime’s military shocked the world as it forcibly stole food and money from the quake’s victims. In his 2012 book “Latin American Dictators of the 20th Century,” Javier A. Galván wrote:

“The military engaged in an indiscriminate operation of torture, rape, savage beatings, unjustified incarceration, and the assassination of thousands of poor peasants. The soldiers confiscated their land and kept it for themselves. In the meantime, the urban areas were simultaneously suffering under strict martial law and further censorship of all communications media.”

It was in a fight against this heavily corrupt and human rights-violating regime that the Cuban-aligned Sandinista revolutionaries seized power in 1979.

The guerilla fighters in El Salvador, who also received Cuban support, took up arms in 1979 after a repressive military junta deposed the elected government in a coup d’état. The United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador described the situation this way:

“[V]iolence became systematic and terror and distrust reigned among the civilian population. The fragmentation of any opposition or dissident movement by means of arbitrary arrests, murders and selective and indiscriminate disappearances of leaders became common practice.”

Alfonso Cano, a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) commander, was assassinated by the Colombian military in Nov. 4, 2011. In this photo Cano attends a practice ceremony for the political party opening outside of San Vicente del Caguan in the FARC controlled zone of Colombia (Photo: Scott Dalton/AP)

Nearly all the armed groups Cuba was accused of supporting in 1982 took up arms not out of bloodlust, but only when other means of struggle were made fruitless and impossible by extreme political repression. Cuba is accused of supporting Guatemalan indigenous people who armed themselves against what human rights observers have since described as genocide. Cuba is alleged to have supported armed groups who battled against the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, where dissidents were frequently “disappeared” and their mangled corpses eventually dumped on the street.

The regimes opposed by Cuba’s Latin American allies were staffed by people trained in the School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC) in Georgia. At this CIA facility, paramilitaries and counterinsurgency specialists from all across the American hemisphere were trained in the art of torture, kidnapping, and other methods designed to terrify civilian populations into subservience and obedience. In the context of such brutal repression and autocracies throughout South America, the Cuban government worked with the Soviet Union to provide arms, weapons and military training to resistance forces.

Support for the violent insurgencies of Colombia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere is certainly consistent with the Cuban government’s ideological heritage. The Marxist-Leninist ideology most certainly permits its adherents to take up arms in the context of extreme political repression and a mass movement for social justice.

As de facto leader of the Communist International, Josef Stalin explained the context and theory of armed revolutionary violence to British novelist H.G. Wells in 1934, saying:

“Communists do not in the least idealize the methods of violence. But they, the communists, do not want to be taken by surprise, they cannot count on the old world voluntarily departing from the stage, they see that the old system is violently defending itself, and that is why the communists say to the working class: Answer violence with violence; do all you can to prevent the old dying order from crushing you, do not permit it to put manacles on your hands, on the hands with which you will overthrow the old system.”

In current times, Cuba’s allies are largely not taking up arms. The Sandinistas of Nicaragua and the FMLN of El Salvador are in power, but this power was not won by means of armed insurrection. The Sandinistas and the FMLN took power in peaceful, democratic, internationally-observed elections. Cuba’s allies in the Venezuelan United Socialist Party, or PSUV, the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, in Bolivia, and other anti-imperialist, socialist-oriented governments in Latin America, have taken power by legal, electoral means.

Genuine communists favor peaceful methods

But how can this be possible? Isn’t the Cuban Communist Party still a Marxist-Leninist Party? Do they not still uphold the same ideological beliefs and principles as they upheld in 1982? Do they not advocate “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “smashing of the bourgeois state,” among other communist ideas?

Residents attend a protest to condemn Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip, in Havana, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009.

The Cuban government maintains its Marxist-Leninist political line, but the circumstances have changed. The Latin America of the 21st century is not the same as the Latin America of the 1970s and 80s. The tactical principles of Marxism-Leninism are widely misrepresented. In reality, they do not fetishize or celebrate the use of violence.

Communist Party leader William Z. Foster — not a moderate, but considered to be a “hardliner” and “Stalinist” by historians of American communism — accurately articulated the Marxist-Leninist position on violence in 1948. He wrote:

“The working class and other toiling elements are always and instinctively champions of peace and democracy…This fact is so because the toilers are the ones who always have to suffer the most from tyranny and from war’s destruction. They pick up the sword against those who oppress, exploit, or would butcher them only when they have no other alternative, only when the road of peace is closed to them.”

Even in the context of the brutal czarist autocracy, Lenin and the Bolsheviks condemned “adventurism.” Marxist-Leninists throughout the world have always opposed revolutionary strategies based on isolated acts of violence. Describing political assassinations and bombings as ineffective, Vladimir Lenin wrote:

“We know from the past and see in the present that only new forms of the mass movement or the awakening of new sections of the masses to independent struggle really rouses a spirit of struggle and courage in all. Single combat however, inasmuch as it remains single combat… has the immediate effect of simply creating a short-lived sensation, while indirectly it even leads to apathy and passive waiting for the next bout.”

The world situation, not Cuba, has changed

In the context of the 21st century, progressive activists in Latin America are not compelled to take up arms. In most Latin American countries they are free to organize demonstrations and labor unions, as well as to participate in elections.

In this new context, Cuba is working to resolve — not to expand or exacerbate — one of the longest-lasting armed conflicts on the continent. In 1993, the Communist Party of Colombia and FARC terminated their relationship with each other. At that time, Cuba ended its alliance with FARC. Fidel Castro criticized the FARC leader, Manuel Marulanda, by saying:

“He conceived a long and extended struggle; I disagreed with this point of view. But I never had the chance to talk with him. … I have expressed, very clearly, our position in favor of peace in Colombia; but we are neither in favor of foreign military intervention nor of the policy of force that the United States intends to impose at all costs on that long-suffering and industrious people. … I have honestly and strongly criticized the objectively cruel methods of kidnapping and retaining prisoners under the conditions of the jungle.”

Cuba is now neutral in the conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels. Representatives of both sides are currently in Cuba negotiating a peace settlement. During Obama’s recent visit to Cuba, Kerry met with FARC negotiators.

Those who misunderstand the methods and tactics of genuine revolutionaries portray Cuba as a country of bloodthirsty revolutionaries who spread violence throughout the continent. Cuba has supported progressive forces who, like the Cubans did in 1959, took up arms in self-defense against brutal and repressive autocracies. However, like all sensible forces advocating social justice, they would prefer a peaceful transition to a better world.

The Cuban government and its allies throughout the region have demonstrated to the world that they are not violent psychopaths. Rather, they are individuals who are dedicated to social justice, and will make great sacrifices in order to achieve that. Violent methods may be used in some contexts, but only if necessary.

The reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S. certainly opens a new chapter in U.S.-Cuba relations. As tensions rise in Venezuela, Brazil, and other countries throughout the region, many hope that the possibility of peaceful, democratic struggle can remain open, and that the use of brutal military dictatorships to halt social progress will remain in the history books.

Caleb Maupin is a MintPress journalist and political analyst who resides in New York City focusing his coverage on US foreign policy and the global system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.

¹ In this paper, “East Asia” refers to both Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, especially to urban centers, which are the main sites for the reproduction and consumption of imported popular cultures.

² Lee, Woo-young. “Hallyu Buoys Korean Fashion,” The Korea Herald, March 28, 2013, pp. 1, 6.

¹ In this paper, “East Asia” refers to both Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, especially to urban centers, which are the main sites for the reproduction and consumption of imported popular cultures.

² Lee, Woo-young. “Hallyu Buoys Korean Fashion,” The Korea Herald, March 28, 2013, pp. 1, 6.

NATO’s ugly stepchild, Turkey, has been having trouble of late.

After shooting down a Russian jet back in November and then lying about it after-the-fact, Turkey was then exposed for its seedy role in facilitating the flow of oil stolen by ISIS from Syria, and then sent into Turkey.

In addition to shifting ISIS oil, it was then revealed how weapons and terrorists have been moving freely into Northern Syria from Turkey – with the full knowledge of the Turkish security services. The Turkish MP who broke this story was then charged with treason by the Erdogan government.

If that isn’t enough, Turkey then began a campaign of state oppression by targeting journalists and newspapers who were critical of leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political machine (still clinging to power in Ankara). The embattled authoritarian regime then took its act on the road, to a city which always welcomes its dictators with open arms… Washington DC.

Unfortunately, Erdogan’s henchmen thought they were still in Ankara when they attacked journalists and protesters yesterday in the nation’s capital. Erdogan’s thugs forgot they were in the US, where some press and citizens still have rights.

As expected, total silence on the incident by President Obama and his US State Department. Silence is consent. Of course, if this happened at a Donald Trump event, we would never hear the end of it from the media and the Obama administration – but because it’s by a NATO member (and an actual fascist government), well then, that’s perfectly acceptable for mandarins in Washington.

Clearly, Turkey’s media crackdown knows no borders…

RT

As Binyamin Netanyahu enters his final term as Likud leader, he will likely be remembered merely as a pale emulation of his predecessor, Ariel Sharon [image left]. The exception being that Netanyahu has not quite earned the degree of opprobrium from the international community as that accorded to the late, failed commander of the Christian militia who carried out the bloody massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in 1982, when under his control, and who subsequently provoked the Second Intifada at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

But Netanyahu is still looked at with some revulsion by many in the Diaspora who see him as the misguided disciple of the out-dated, revisionist-Zionist policies that claim all of the Occupied Palestinian Territories as the property of the Israeli state and who has consequently engendered anti-Semitic feeling over much of Europe and the world to a degree not seen since the 1930s.

That has been the greatest blow to World Jewry from a politician who has made no provision whatsoever for the future of the Israeli state, or of the Diaspora, who will have to withstand the inevitable consequences of the hatred that Likud’s right-wing policies have engendered within indigenous Arab communities throughout the Middle East.

The myopic view of this ‘Jabotinsky’ Zionist dogma is a tragedy for both Jew and Arab alike and will likely end in a final conflict that will make the Jewish state of 1948-(2025?) a mere footnote in future Middle East historiography.

It has been a unique opportunity that has tragically been squandered by a cohort of ambitious politicians who, in the end, cared more for personal power than the future welfare of their own community; the Jewish Diaspora and the ethics of Judaism.

What could have been a miracle of co-operative endeavour between immigrant Jew and indigenous Arab, has culminated in a fortified, American-armed, Western militarised enclave in the Muslim Middle East that has achieved the distinction of becoming the epicentre of hatred from those it has occupied and abused for over half a century.

In addition, of course, to being a nuclear-armed state outside the provisions of the NPT and not subject to any inspection by the IAEA but, nevertheless and astonishingly, allowed free trade access to European markets.

(c) EUNewsdesk April 2016 London

It is well known to Washington political observers that politicians invited to speak at the annual, giant AIPAC convention ask for suggested talking points from this powerful pro-Israeli government lobby. Hillary Clinton’s pandering speech must have registered close to 100% on AIPAC’s checklist.

Of course, both parties pander to AIPAC to such depths of similar obeisance that reporters have little to report as news. But giving big-time coverage to sheer political power is automatic. Compare it to the sparse attention given to the conference a few days earlier at the National Press Club on the Israeli lobby featuring scholars, authors and the well-known Israeli dissenter, Gideon Levy of the respected Haaretz newspaper (see israellobbyus.org/).

But Mrs. Clinton’s speech was newsworthy for its moral obtuseness and the way in which it promised unilateral White House belligerence should she become president. A reader would never know that her condemnation of Palestinian terrorism omitted any reference to the fact that Israel is the occupier of what is left of Palestinian lands, colonizing them, seizing their water and land, brutalizing the natives and continuing the selective blockade of Gaza, the world’s largest Gulag ever since Israel closed its last colony there in 2005.

Clinton emphasized her condemnation of Palestinian children being taught “incitement” against their Israeli oppressors and the recent deplorable knife attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians. She neglected to point to massive, daily Israeli incitement backed up by U.S.-supplied deadly weapons that over the last decade have caused 400 times more Palestinian fatalities and serious injuries to innocents than the defenseless Palestinians have caused their Israeli counterparts. One of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition partners, for example, from the Jewish Home Party, called for the slaughter of all Palestinians, the elderly and women in general. “Otherwise,” the partner said (in an English-language translation from the Hebrew), “more little snakes will be raised there.”

Clinton did not mention any of these brutalities, though they are components of what is an illegal occupation under international law and the United Nations charter. The Yale Law graduate simply chooses not to know better. Instead, she told her wildly-applauding audience of her support for increasing the amount of U.S. taxpayer spending for the latest military equipment and technology to over $4 billion a year. For the record, Israel is an economic, technological and military powerhouse that provides Israelis with universal health insurance and other social safety nets that are denied the American people.

In an obvious slap at President Obama, whose name she never mentioned (even Netanyahu thanked Obama in his address to AIPAC), Clinton almost shouted out: “one of the first things I’ll do in office is invite the Israeli Prime Minister to visit the White House.” This was a thinly-veiled reference to Netanyahu’s trip to a joint session of Congress, where he tried to undermine President Obama’s negotiations with Iran in what was an unprecedented interference by a foreign leader. Not surprisingly, Obama did not ask Netanyahu over to visit the White House for a drink before he headed back to Israel.

High on AIPAC’s checklist is to insist that all speakers condemn what Clinton called the “alarming boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS.” She then twice slanderously associated this modest effort (in which many Jews are active participants) to get Israel to lift some oppression from the occupied Palestinian territories, with antisemitism. However, by totally erasing any nod, any mention, any compassion toward the slaughter of Palestinian children, women and men in their homes, schools and hospitals, Hillary Clinton makes a mockery of her touted Methodist upbringing and her declared concern for children everywhere.

For repeated applause at AIPAC’s convention and its associated campaign contributors, she has lost all credibility with the peoples of the Arab world. Moreover, such hostility in her words registers “the other antisemitism,” to cite the title of an address by James Zogby before an Israeli university in 1994.

With all her self-regarded experience in foreign affairs, Mrs. Clinton could pause to ponder why she is backing state terrorism against millions of Arab Palestinians trapped in two enclaves, surrounded by walls, military outposts, and suffering from deep poverty, including widespread diseases and severe anemia among Palestinian infants and children.

Unlimited is her militant animosity toward Iran, bragging about crippling sanctions that she spearheaded (which caused untold harm to the health and care of civilians), and threatening military force “for even the smallest violations of this [nuclear] agreement.” Yet for decades Israel has violated numerous U.N. resolutions to withdraw its occupation and repression of Palestinians without a murmur from Secretary of State Clinton, who as a candidate opposes a role for the U.N. Security Council (over which the U.S. has an often-used veto) in the peace process.

There were some restraints. She repeated her support for a Palestinian state but wondered whether the Palestinian Leadership was up to the negotiations. Also, she resisted going along with recognizing the shift of Israel’s capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Her very oblique reference to illegal, expanding Israeli settlements did not amount to anything more than a wink, foreshadowing no action on her part to stop the expansion of colonies in the occupied territories should she reach the White House.

Near the conclusion of her deferential remarks, she stated “If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.” Some courageous Israeli human rights groups, such as B’Tselem, who defend Palestinian human rights, might view her words as applicable daily to how they perform their noble work.

It was ten years ago that the London Review of Books published an article on the Israel Lobby by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, distinguished scholars at two of America’s top universities.  The following year the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux found the courage to publish The Israel Lobby, a book with 357 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews.

The Israel Lobby is an understated critique of the enormous influence that the tiny state of Israel, which consists of land stolen by fire and sword from the helpless Palestinians, exercises over United States foreign policy.  The crazed Israel Lobby went berserk.  Mearsheimer and Walt were demonized as anti-semitics who wanted to bring back Hitler.

Also in 2006 former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Peace Not Apartheid, was published by Simon & Schuster and became a New York Times bestseller with 846 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews.  Carter, who as US president did his best to bring Israel and Palestine to a settlement, truthfully explained that Israel was the barrier to a settlement.  The Israel Lobby demonized Carter as an anti-semite, and the Jews on the board of the Carter Center resigned.

No member of the Israel Lobby has the stature and distinction of Mearsheimer, Walt, and President Carter. The Lobby’s operatives are people of no significance who make a living slandering, libeling, and trying to destroy the reputation of everyone who makes the slightest criticism of Israeli government policies.

This tells us that the Israel Lobby knows that Israel’s behavior is so atrocious that it cannot stand the slightest examination.  We can criticize Moscow without being labeled “anti-Russian,” and we can criticize Washington without being labeled “anti-American,” but we cannot criticize Israel without being labeled an “anti-semite” and accused of wanting to restart the holocaust.

Nevertheless, just as the Gestapo was untruthful but effective, the Israel Lobby is untruthful but effective.  The Lobby has established its hegemony over the US publisher, McGraw-Hill.  The cowardly publisher was forced to burn its own books and to destroy all copies of a widely used textbook, Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World.  The book had to be destroyed, because it contained accurate maps showing the transformation of Palestine from a land inhabited by Palestinians into a land occupied by Zionists, sprinkled with a few Palestinian ghettos.

These maps are available all over the Internet, and any remaining professors sufficiently brave to call them to the attention of students can refer students to the Internet.  Here is the URL to an article by Lawrence Davidson about McGraw-Hill’s submission to censorship that contains the maps:

  Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44487.htm

The behavior of the Israel Lobby indicates that far stronger criticism of the Lobby is warranted than supplied by Mearsheimer, Walt, and President Carter.  In 2007 the Lobby was able to reach into a Catholic University, DePaul, and overturn the decision of the tenure committee to award tenure to Norman Finkelstein, a distinguished Jewish scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who was declared by the Lobby to be an enemy of Israel.  The craven cowardice of the DePaul University president, administration, and trustees indicates the power that the Lobby is so proud to have but consistently denies having.

In 2015 the Israel Lobby was able to reach into the University of Illinois and have rescinded the tenured appointment extended to Steven Salaita and accepted by him.  Salaita resigned his tenure at Virginia Tech and sold his home, only to have his appointment resinded by University of Illinois chancellor Phyllis M. Wise and the university trustees, who apparently were offered large monetary donations to the university in return for reneging on the university’s contract with Salaita.  Salaita had tweeted some criticism of the Israeli government’s behavior, and this transformed the scholar into an anti-semite.

Of all the countries in the world, only Israel cannot be criticized, not even by experts on the basis of established facts.  This kind of power is illegitimate and unconscionable.  The fact that American universities and publishers submit to it indicates the death of free speech and academic inquiry in the United States.

The Lobby’s power is a danger to Israel.

The Lobby’s reliance and that of the Zionist government on force majeure alienates the rest of the world, but creates a hubristic sense of invulnerability in Israel itself. The pride that Israeli politicians express in their ability to control US foreign policy and the pride that the Lobby enjoys in its influence over US academic appointments, journalism appointments, and decisions of textbook publishers, leads to an arrogance that eventually over reaches.

In the meantime Israel is busy at work eliminating friends whose constructive criticisms are intended to save Israel from a future of woe and misery.

The result for Israel will be isolation.

As U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has gained momentum in the presidential primaries, the attacks on his proposed economic programs have grown proportionally.

Leading the assault have been supporters of Hillary Clinton, especially Paul Krugman, and other “stars” of the economics profession like Christine Romer, Laura Tyson, Alan Kreuger, and Austan Goolsbe — all of whom have served in past Democratic administrations and are no doubt looking to return again in some capacity in another Clinton administration. Sometimes referred to as the “gang of four,” in recent weeks all have been aggressively attacking Sanders’ economic programs and reforms. However, the target of their attacks, which began in February and continue today, is Sanders’ proposals for financing a single-payer universal health care program by means of a financial transactions tax.

The irony of the Krugman/Gang of Four attack is that Sanders’ proposals represent what were once Democratic party positions and programs — positions that have been abandoned by the party and its mouthpiece economists since the 1980s as it morphed into a wing of the neoliberal agenda.

Sanders’ critics have been especially agitated that their own economic models are being used to show that Sanders’ proposals would greatly benefit the vast majority in the U.S. But debating Krugman and his neoliberal colleagues on the grounds of their faulty economic model — a model that failed miserably under Obama to produce a sustained, real economic recovery in the U.S. — is not necessary. Their model has been broken for some time. Some straightforward historical facts and recent comparative studies are all that’s need to show that a real financial transaction tax can generate more revenue than is needed to fund a single-payer type program. Here’s how.

A Real Financial Transaction Tax

Let’s take four major financial securities: stocks, bonds, derivatives, and foreign currency purchases (forex).

A European study a few years ago involving just 11 countries, whose collective economies are about two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy, concluded that a miniscule financial tax of 0.1 percent on stocks and bonds plus a virtually negligible 0.01 percent tax on derivatives results in an annual tax revenue of US$47 billion. In an equivalent size U.S economy that would be about US$70 billion in revenue a year.

Wealthy investors’ buying of stocks and bonds is essentially no different than average folks buying food, clothing or other real ‘goods and services’. Why shouldn’t investors pay a sales tax on financial securities purchases? In the U.S., average households pay a sales tax of 5 percent to 10 percent for retail purchases of goods and many services. So why shouldn’t wealthy investors pay a similar sales tax rate for their retail financial securities’ purchases?

A 10 percent “sales tax” on stock and bond buying and a 1 percent tax on derivatives amounts to a 100x larger tax revenue take than estimated by the European study. The US$70 billion estimated based on the European study’s 0.1 percent stock-bond tax and 0.01 percent derivatives tax yields US$7 trillion in tax revenue with a 10 percent and 1 percent tax on stocks and bonds and derivatives.

Too high, Krugman and the Gang of Four would no doubt argue. Wealthy stock and bond buyers should not have to pay that much. It would stifle raising capital for companies. Okay. So let’s lower it to half, to 5 percent tax on stocks and bonds and 0.5 percent on derivatives. That reduces the US$7 trillion tax revenue to a still huge US$3.5 trillion annually.

Still too high? Okay, half it again, to a 2.5 percent tax on stocks and bonds and a 0.25 percent on derivative trades. That certainly won’t discourage stock and bond trading by the rich (not that that is an all bad idea either). The 2.5 percent and 1 percent tax still produces US$1.75 trillion a year in revenue.

But what about an additional financial tax on currency trading, like China is about to propose? Currency, or forex, trades amount to an astounding US$400 billion each day! Not all that is U.S. currency trading, of course. However, the U.S. dollar is involved in 87 percent of the trading. A 1 percent tax on U.S. currency trades conservatively yields approximately US$3 billion a day. Assuming a conservative 220 trading days in a year, US$3 billion a day produces US$660 billion in financial tax revenue from U.S. currency financial transactions in a year.

US$1.75 trillion in revenue from stock, bonds, and derivatives trades, plus another US$660 billion in forex trade tax revenue, amounts to US$2.41 trillion in total revenue raised from a financial transaction tax of 2.5 percent on stocks and bonds, 0.25 percent on derivatives, and 1 percent on U.S. dollar to currency conversions.

So how much will that US$2.41 trillion a year cover is needed to fund a single payer-Medicare for All program in the US?

Paying for Single Payer Health Care

Nearly every advanced economy in the world provides a version of single payer health care to its citizens—except the U.S. On the other hand, no country spends as much on health care as the US. The UK spends 9 percent of GDP, Japan about 10 percent, France and Germany 11 percent, for example. The U.S., in contrast, pays 17 percent plus of its GDP on health care. Given that the most recent US GDP is about US$18 trillion a year, 17 percent of US$18 trillion equals just over US$3 trillion a year.

If the U.S. spent, like other advanced economies with single payer, about 10 percent of its GDP a year on health care, it would cost US$1.8 trillion instead of US$3 trillion a year. The U.S. would save US$1.2 trillion.

Where does that current US$1.2 trillion go? Not for health services for its citizens. It goes to health insurance companies and other “middlemen,” who don’t deliver one iota of health care services. They are the “paper pushers” who skim off US$1.2 trillion a year in profits that average returns of 20 percent a year and more. They are economic parasites, or what economists refer to as “rentier capitalists” who don’t produce anything but suck profits and wages from those who do actually produce something. They then used the US$1.2 trillion a year to buy up each other, expand globally, and deliver record dividend and stock buybacks for their shareholders.

In other words, a true financial transactions tax, that is still quite reasonable at tax rates of 0.25 percent to 2.5 percent, can pay for all of a single-payer health care program in the U.S. and still have hundreds of billions left over — US$641 billion to be exact (US$2.41 minus US$1.8 trillion).

That US$641 billion residual could then be used to better fund current Medicare programs. It could eliminate the current 20 percent charge for Medicare Part B physicians services and provide totally free Part D prescription drugs for everyone over 65 years. The savings for seniors over 65 years from this, and the tens of thousands of dollars saved every year by working families who now have to pay that amount for private company health insurance, would now be freed up with a single payer system, to be spent on other real goods and services.

A financial transaction tax and single payer program would consequently have the added positive effect of creating the greatest boost in real wages and household income, and therefore consumption, in US economic history. More consumer demand would mean more real investment.

Yes, there would be less spending by the wealth speculating in stocks, bonds, derivatives, forex and other financial securities. But so what? If rich and wealthy investors don’t like that, well then let them eat cake — or some other four letter word.

Jack Rasmus is author of the just published book, “Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy,” by Clarity Press, 2016. He blogs at jackrasmus.com.

The United States Army in Europe plans to significantly bolster its military presence in Eastern Europe, US European Command officials said on Wednesday.

By February 2017, the US military plans to maintain a “permanent footprint” of three combat brigades stationed on the continent. The deployments will include 250 combat vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, Bradley and Paladin Fighting Vehicles, howitzers and thousands of troops.

The 4,200-strong rotation, positioned along NATO’s border with Russia, including deployments in Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Romania, will come in addition to 62,000 US personnel already stationed in Europe.

“This is a big step in enhancing the Army’s rotational presence and increasing their combat equipment in Europe,” US General Philip Breedlove said.

“This Army implementation plan continues to demonstrate our strong and balanced approach to reassuring our NATO Allies and Partners in the wake of an aggressive Russia in Eastern Europe and elsewhere,” he said.

America’s regional partners will host “a more frequent presence of an armored brigade with more modernized equipment in their countries,” Breedlove said.

In comments Tuesday, General Breedlove called for NATO to prepare for aerial combat against Russian planes over the Baltic states. “I think that the alliance does need to be ready for the air defense mission,” he said. “Air policing and air defense are meant for two different situations. The Baltic air policing is a peacetime mission.”

The latest moves to expand the US military footprint in the East were authorized by the Obama White House in February, as part of the 2016-2017 European Reassurance Initiative (ERI).

This year’s ERI allocates $3.4 billion to finance the US presence in Eastern Europe, an increase of some 400 percent above the ERI budget for the previous year.

The huge increase in funding is the latest escalation of the US war preparations that have transformed Central and Eastern Europe into a virtual armed camp in the two years since the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine.

During this period, the US steadily extended its basing arrangements and political commitments through the post-Soviet sphere.

Beginning in April 2014, the US deployed expeditionary forces of some 600 troops to all three of the Baltic states. In September 2014, President Obama affirmed that the US commitment to the defense of Estonia is “unbreakable,” “unwavering” and “eternal.” Last February, NATO announced plans to double its combat units stationed in Eastern Europe, including the establishment of six command centers dispersed throughout the region.

Together with these deployments, the latest wave of US military assets dispatched to Eastern Europe is designed to allow US forces to engage in large-scale war with Russia, US Undersecretary of Defense Robert Work said Wednesday. “There will be a division’s worth of stuff to fight if something happens,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

“If push came to shove, they’d be able to come together as a cohesive unit that has trained together, with all their organic equipment, and fight. That’s a lot better than what we have right now,” Work said.

“There will be American equipment and people in each of these countries,” US General Ben Hodges told the Journal.

The new US deployments will be equipped with a “full kit” of the military’s most advanced weaponry and gear, US officials say. Pentagon spokeswoman Laura Seal boasted Tuesday that the additional forces will place “the most modern and capable equipment in the hands of US armored units who will train continuously in Europe.”

Russian forces are already prepared to counter the “confrontational patterns” followed by the US and NATO, Russia’s Permanent Representative to NATO Alexander Grushko said in response to the US military announcements.

Moscow will take “all the military measures we consider necessary in order to counterbalance this reinforced presence,” Grushko said.

“Certainly, we’ll respond totally asymmetrically,” Grushko said.

The anti-Russian drive is being accelerated by the role of NATO’s Eastern European and Baltic members, which seek to use the growing US-Russian confrontation to militarize their own societies and repress dissent under conditions of deepening social crisis.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Polish President Andrzej Duda denounced Russia and called for

“a significantly increased presence of US troops on our territory. Duda called for NATO to “strengthen its defensive potential in this part of Europe to such a degree as to make it absolutely clear that it does not pay off to launch an attack against any member state. Only the increased presence of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe can ensure real deterrence,”

he said.

The Polish president is set to discuss a range of joint security projects with US leaders while attending the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington this week.

Duda’s rhetoric aside, the military preparations of the US and its allies are anything but defensive in nature.

In reality, the US and NATO forces massing on Russia’s border are part of preparations for a range of military and covert-intelligence operations directed against pro-Russian political factions and against the Putin government itself, aimed at destabilizing and overthrowing pro-Russian governments using the “hybrid warfare” methods employed by the Western powers during the 2014 coup in Ukraine and the 2011 US-backed insurgency in Syria.

Both the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa and the Wynne Government at Queen’s Park in Toronto have been making noises of late on the subject of Basic Income. The last Ontario Budget, in fact, declared an intention to carry out a pilot project in a community still to be announced. While no clear details are yet available, it is very likely that we will soon be dealing with a practical initiative that we will have to respond to. We will have to consider how we view the possibility of the Liberals moving in the direction of a Basic Income system.

After decades of intensifying austerity and the erosion of systems of income support, with social assistance in Ontario now providing such wretchedly inadequate benefits that people are unable to feed themselves properly and retain their housing, the notion of a basic level of income that all are entitled to can’t fail to generate a level of interest and raise some hopes. However, I am convinced that a good hard look in the mouth of this particular gift horse is well advised. What are the different notions of how a Basic Income system might work? Why are governments now considering it more seriously? What form would it be likely to take in the present economic and political context?

Looking Deeper Into the Gift Horse

As soon as you start to look into the question of Basic Income or, as it was often called in the past, Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI), you are immediately struck by the ease and enthusiasm with which free market thinkers and warriors of the neoliberal order have embraced the concept. From Milton Friedman to Charles Murray, the idea has found warm support on the political right. There are some clear and obvious reasons why this is so. Firstly, the very idea of a basic level of income is about establishing a floor and right wing proponents are confident they can locate it in the basement. A low and inadequate social minimum seems to them a great way of folding in existing, relatively adequate programs so as to, precisely, drive people into deeper poverty.

Another attraction offered by a low universal payment to those who take the side of the capitalists is the potential role it could play in depressing wages. In a recent contribution to the Union Research blog on the issue of Basic Income, Toby Sanger, draws attention to the Speenhamland System, a wage supplement arrangement put in place under the English Poor Laws between 1795-1834, and the role it played in driving down wages. Low wage paying employers could rely on the tax base to pay their workers wages and employers who had been paying higher wages were under an incentive to lower them in order to obtain the same benefit. In the present context of vastly expanding low wage precarious work, this danger is one that should not be underestimated.

The right wing Basic Income agenda, however, sets its sights on more than cutting benefit levels for people in poverty and depressing the wages of the lowest paid workers. Potentially, it is a means to gut social programs and to decimate the workforce that delivers them. The notion is to use the basic payment to advance the pace of privatization enormously. This kind of payment would replace public services and all who received it would become customers shopping for their social needs in the private market. Not just income support systems, but public housing, healthcare, education and transportation are threatened by the parsimonious universal payment envisaged by free market Basic Income.

A Different Kind of Basic Income?

Of course, the political right’s version of a system of basic social payments is countered by those with more progressive concepts. There is a notion of Basic Income that stresses income adequacy, the need to advance full employment and the importance of preserving and strengthening a range of other elements of the social infrastructure. Without doubting the good intentions of advocates of a progressive Basic Income, it does need to be pointed out that the question of which version is to be adopted will not be decided by an impartial court of the common good but by present day governments. The people running the show on Parliament Hill and at Queen’s Park have some history behind them when it comes to the implementation of measures of austerity and privatization. Their recent experience in bold new social policies that raise the living standards of working class people and increase their share of the social wealth is significantly less.

The austerity agenda, which we can trace back to the 1970s but which has intensified following the international crisis of 2008, has placed a central strategic importance on weakening the adequacy of income support programs. In addition to the massive undermining of federal unemployment insurance, provincial social assistance has been enormously weakened. People on Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) have seen the spending power of their income reduced by up to 60 per cent since the infamous Tory cuts of the mid 90s. Not only have income levels been driven down but rules and policies have been adopted that have made programs harder to access and more uncertain for those receiving them. The increased poverty and the climate of desperation that this attack has generated have been of central importance in ensuring an astounding growth of low wage, precarious employment in Ontario.

As the Liberals, political chameleons that they are, posture on the issue of Basic Income, we must avoid the trap of thinking that a rational and socially just approach is going to be won on the strength of good arguments. The idea that Basic Income is so sensible that everyone on both sides of the class divide will want to get behind it and make it work in the best interests of all is profoundly mistaken. If the concept is being advanced in Ontario by the very provincial government that has led the way in program reduction and austerity, it is not because they want to reverse the undermining of income support, the proliferation of precarious employment and the privatizing of public services but for the very opposite reason. They are looking with great interest at the possibility of using Basic Income as a stalking horse for their regressive social agenda and it will be the version that Bay Street has in mind that will win out over notions of progressive redistribution. As the announcement in the Ontario Budget acknowledges:

“The pilot would also test whether a basic income would provide a more efficient way of delivering income support, strengthen the attachment to the labour force, and achieve savings in other areas, such as healthcare and housing supports” [page 132].

Social programs that have emerged in capitalist societies, especially those devoted to income support, have always been reluctant concessions. Their design, effectiveness and contradictions have reflected the prevailing economic and political situation and the balance of class forces in society. For decades, we have been fighting a largely defensive struggle to prevent the decimation of systems of social provision. We are not in a period when bold new redistributive programs are on the drawing board. The Liberals will be only too happy if we give up our fight to defend the systems that have been won in previous struggles and join them, as ‘stakeholders’ at the consultative round table. A decade of experience in maintaining an empty discussion of ‘poverty reduction’ has turned them into experts in such diversionary tactics. At the end of the process, however, if we allow them, they will put in place a version of Basic Income that will give Milton Friedman very little reason to turn over in his grave.

We are in a period when capitalism and the governments that represent its interests are increasing the rate of exploitation and reducing the level of social provision. That is not about to change and any redesign of income support systems we confront will be all about furthering, not limiting, levels of social inequality. This is a particularly bad time for the lamb to accept an invitation from the lion to lie down. Basic Income will be no panacea and the fight for income adequacy will continue, of necessity, to take the form of social mobilization against an agenda of austerity and regression.

Sometimes even to the most towering cynic, American hypocrisy is more than breathtaking.

As they lambast their latest “despot”, Syria’s President Assad – a man so popular in his country and the region that the US Embassy in Damascus had, by the end of 2006, devised a plan to oust him (1) arms sales to countries where human rights are not even a glimmer on the horizon have for the US (and UK) become an eye watering bonanza.

The latest jaw dropper, as Saudi Arabia continues to bombard Yemen with US and UK armaments, dropped by US and UK-made aircraft, is sales worth $33 Billion in just eleven months to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) according to Defense News. (2)

The GCC, a political and economic alliance of six Middle East countries, comprises of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. It was established in the Saudi Capital, Riyadh, in May 1981.

Weapons sold to the alliance since May 2015 have included:

“… ballistic missile defense capabilities, attack helicopters, advanced frigates and anti-armor missiles, according to David McKeeby, a spokesman the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.”

“In addition, the U.S. government and industry also delivered 4,500 precision-guided munitions to the GCC countries in 2015, including 1,500 taken directly from U.S. military stocks – a significant action given our military’s own needs,” he added, stressing:

“that the US government would like to continue to strengthen partnerships with Kuwait and Qatar through defense sales and other security cooperation activities.”

A metaphor for our times that “partnerships” are “strengthened” with lethal weapons, not in trade of goods, foods, medical, educational or intellectual exchanges.

A fly or two in the oil of the wheels of the US arms trade is the two year delay in approval of sales 40 F/A-18 Super Hornets to Kuwait and Qatar and also 72 F-15 Silent Eagles to Qatar.

Suspicion has been voiced that this has something to do with a pending US-Israel military financing deal, a suggestion emphatically denied by Washington.

In the meantime as Yemen continues to be blitzed, with the UN stating that eighty percent of the population are in need of humanitarian assistance. 2-4 million are displaced and approaching four thousand dead.

It seems Saudi and its allies have more than enough ordinance to continue the slaughter and more than enough US and UK military advisors to help them in the decimation.

 Notes:

1. http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-and-conspiracy-theories-it-is-a-conspiracy/29596
2. http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/policy-budget/budget/2016/03/25/state-33-billion-gcc-weapon-sales-11-months/82255660/

Many have insisted on promoting the idea that the recovery of the United States economy is gathering strength for some time. Even high level functionaries of international financial organisms have declared that the North American economy has managed to escape the tendency of low growth that prevails in the rest of industrialized countries. Nevertheless, this unlimited optimism contrasts with the reality: inflation has not increased in any significant way and unemployment has been chronic in more than 30 states of the American Union, with this, the dangers of deflation persist and with this a new recession.

The North American economy has increased the risks of becoming the epicentre of the next global recession. In spite of the fact that the federal funds interest rate is maintained at a historically low level, between 0.25 and 0.50%, the banks continued denying credit to business. The bankers had no confidence that their loans would be paid, simply they did not find confident signs of recovery in production.

In these moments the magnates of finances of the United States found it more profitable to engage in mergers and acquisitions among corporations, acquire their own actions, or buy goods rooted in emerging countries. The increase in productivity is not sufficient, business investment is too weak and wages are stuck. In consequence, inflation remains below the objective of 2%[1]. This situation was desperate for the Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FED), Janet Yellen, who found no way to stimulate the economy.

The process of recovery is fragile to the point that in mid-March the Federal Open Market Committee (FMOC) of the FED left intact the federal funds interest rate. We recall that in last December, when we saw the first increase in the interest rate in nearly a decade, Dean Turner, an analyst with the financial services firm UBS, prognosticated that members of the FMOC would raise the interest rates four times in 2016[2].

Nevertheless, today the most optimistic stock market investors believe that there will be at most two increases: always and when the labour market improves and inflation increases, this will be during the second half of the year when the FED again raises the reference interest rate at least one-fourth of a percentage point. The panorama today is more sober. Every time that confidence in the global recovery of the economy under the leadership of the North American locomotive has faded, there are even some who think that the United States will again fall into a recession.

In accord with the calculations of the team of advisors of Citigroup under Willem Buiter, the world economy expanded 2% during the final quarter of 2015, the lowest figure since the Euro Zone suffered the most serious ravages of the sovereign debt crisis during the years 2012 and 2013[3]. The economists of Citigroup are surprised that the industrialized countries, those that have enjoyed a more solid growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in recent months are now decelerating dramatically, especially the United States.

For the famous North American businessman, Jim Rogers, the scenario is even more pessimistic. In his judgement, there is a 100% probability that the economy of the United States will fall into recession during the present year. “One should not pay attention to the figures of the government, we must pay attention to the real numbers”, he said in an interview[4].

It happens that during the first months of the year the United States economy showed new signs of vulnerability. The evolution of the labour market is not as buoyant as everyone believes[5]. According to data published by the US Department of Labor. The non agricultural payroll added a record of 242 000 jobs in February, with which the rate of official unemployment was maintained for the second consecutive month at 4.9%, the lowest for the past eight years. In addition, according to data from previous months, in January hirings increased to 172 000, while in December of 2015 they rose to 271 000, a revision to the rise of 30 000 employees in both cases.

Apparently, everything was performing favourably for the North American economy. The increase in the non agricultural payroll in the past month showed increases to 230 000 jobs, the monthly average obtained over 2015. Nevertheless, according to the figures of the US Department of Labor, 80% of the new jobs in February corresponded to sectors with poorly paid wages: health care, social assistance, retail trade, food services and private educational services[6]. On the other hand, if one counts those persons who have abandoned the search for employment (1.8 millions), as well as those in part time jobs (6 millions), underemployment reaches a rate of 9.7%[7].

It is obvious that the United States does not enjoy “full employment”. At the present time 36 states of the American Union suffer chronic unemployment, since their average rate of unemployment (in annual terms) was higher in 2015 than in 2007. In fact, in a research[8] produced by Danny Yagan and published by the University of California (Berkeley) some days ago, under the present rhythm of recovery, it will not be until 2020 when the labour market in the more depressed regions will return to normal: more than a decade after the Great Recession, the same that threatens to return stronger than ever….

Ariel Noyola Rodriguez is an economist who graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Twitter: @noyola_ariel.

Translation: Jordan Bishop.

On the night of October 3, 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130 gunship repeatedly attacked a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Forty-two people were killed and dozens wounded. The US military plane had conducted five strafing runs over the course of more than an hour despite MSF pleas to Afghan, US and Nato officials to call off the attack.

As we reported at the time, MSF were unequivocal in their condemnation of the American attack. The hospital was ‘intentionally targeted’ in ‘a premeditated massacre’; it was a ‘war crime’. The medical charity rejected US assurances of three inquiries by the US, Nato and the Afghan government.

MSF demanded instead an independent international investigation. It was to no avail. The US ignored public outrage and went ahead with its standard whitewashing procedures when it commits war crimes that get exposed. The outcome was announced on March 18. BBC News reported:

‘The US military has disciplined more than a dozen service members after an air strike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in Afghanistan killed 42 people last year.

‘The Pentagon has acknowledged that the clinic was targeted by mistake, but no personnel will face criminal charges.’

Note that the BBC wording – ‘the Pentagon has acknowledged that the clinic was targeted by mistake‘ – is deceptive bias. The BBC made no mention that MSF had presented strong evidence that the clinic was ‘deliberately targeted’, that the attack was a ‘war crime’, and that there was an urgent need for an independent inquiry.

The BBC continued:

‘the sanctions, which were not made public, were mostly administrative.

‘Some received formal reprimands while others were suspended from duty.

‘Both officers and enlisted personnel were disciplined, but no generals were punished.’

MSF said that they would not comment until the Pentagon makes the details of its report public. (At the time of writing, this has yet to happen).

On the morning of March 18, we noted that the BBC’s report was, for a while at least, linked from the front page of its news website. But it was soon removed from this prominent position and instead buried deep in the international news section. This is not unusual when reporting the crimes of the West; if they are reported at all.

Our subsequent online searches revealed just four low-key, relatively brief newspaper reports in the British press that US personnel had been ‘punished’ for the Kunduz bombing: in the Independent, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and the Guardian. The Telegraph reported that the Pentagon would shortly ‘publish a version of its report on the attack. It will be redacted to remove classified material.’ In other words: anything too embarrassing or damaging to US interests.

A few days later, on March 23, a tiny news item on page 34 of The Times carried the headline ‘US commander sorry for hospital attack’. The entirety of the piece, all of 61 words, was this:

‘The new commander of US-Nato forces in Afghanistan has apologised for a mistaken attack on a hospital in Kunduz last October that killed 42 people. General John Nicholson of the US army went to the northern city to meet relatives of those who died at the hospital run by the charity Médecins Sans Frontières. He said the incident was a “horrible tragedy”.’

As ever, Western atrocities are described as ‘tragedy’ rather than ‘war crime’. No other UK national newspaper, as far as we could see, even reported General Nicholson’s ‘apology’.

The New York Times did better, and included this telling quote from Zabiullah Niazi, a nurse who had lost an eye, a finger and the use of one hand, as well as suffering other injuries in the US attack:

‘They hit us six months ago and are apologizing now. The head of the provincial council and other officials who said we accept the apology, they wouldn’t have said it if they had lost their own son and eaten ashes, as we did.’

According to Mr. Niazi, General Nicholson did not even appear at an arranged meeting in the governor’s office with two survivors and male members of victims’ families. Instead, he made a speech in a packed auditorium where family members and survivors did not get a chance to speak. As a further sign of the tightly stage-managed proceedings, the general’s wife stopped by ‘for one minute to say hello and express sorrow’, said Mr Niazi. She spent more time – five minutes – with female survivors and family members in a separate room.

The general’s ‘apology’ was similarly dismissed by an Afghani doctor whose brother, also a doctor, was killed in the US attack. Dr. Karim Bajaouri said:

‘They are asking forgiveness for killing civilians?! They’re only making an apology? First they fire on civilians and then apologize. Personally, I don’t need such apologies, I do not accept them. Our moral wounds cannot be healed this way.’

The Guardian made a recent passing reference to Kunduz in an article by Simon Tisdall, an assistant editor and foreign affairs columnist. The focus of the piece was on Afghanistan as an election issue in the US Presidential race:

‘The fact that the most memorable US contribution to the battle for Kunduz was the destruction of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital with the loss of at least 22 lives, none of them insurgents, only emphasised how hapless and haphazard the US mission in Afghanistan has become.’

(Oddly, Tisdall’s article was originally published on October 15, 2015, but then updated on March 29, 2016; presumably to include the above line.)

Once again, compliant ‘liberal’ journalism is marked by its readiness to label war crimes as merely ‘hapless’ and ‘haphazard’.

In the wake of the Pentagon’s accouncement of ‘punishments’ for the Kunduz killers, an article on the Foreign Policy website noted:

‘Human rights advocates denounced the U.S. military’s decision not to file criminal charges against troops’.

Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch told Foreign Policy:

‘It’s incredibly disappointing and discouraging. We have come up with our own analysis of the case, and we think there should be a criminal investigation.’

As Prasow observed, the American military ‘has a vested interest in protecting its own’.

HRW added:

‘For good reason the victims’ family members will see this as both an injustice and an insult: the US military investigated itself and decided no crimes had been committed’.

The statement continued:

‘The failure to criminally investigate senior officials liable for the attack is not only an affront to the lives lost at the MSF hospital, but a blow against the rule of law in Afghanistan and elsewhere.’

Such comments contrast starkly with the bland indifference of the ‘liberal’ press.

Summing up, then, the reaction to the Pentagon’s ‘punishment’ of the Kunduz killers in the ‘mainstream’ press was as instructive as ever. True to form, we found not a single editorial or column denouncing this latest US whitewashing of US crimes.

Then again, it is standard practice for the Western media to mock Official Enemies, while being blind to the crimes of ‘our’ own Glorious Leaders.

Masses of workers and youth, 1.2 million according to union sources and 390,000 according to police, protested Thursday across France against the labour law reform of Labour Minister Myriam El Khomri. Defying the anti-democratic state of emergency imposed by President François Hollande and a large deployment of heavily armed riot police, high school and university students and growing layers of workers are demonstrating against the Socialist Party’s (PS) austerity policies.

According to trade and student unions, there were over 200 protest marches, demonstrations, and rallies across France. They estimated that marches in Paris, Marseille, and Toulouse gathered over 100,000 people, and tens of thousands of people in Nantes, Bordeaux, and Montpellier.

According to the Education Ministry, 176 high schools were blockaded across France yesterday morning, out of the country’s 2,500 public high schools. High school student unions said their figures showed 250 high schools were blockaded. About 20 Paris high schools were closed pre-emptively by the authorities, a move that education ministry trade unionist Philippe Tournier said was “unprecedented.”

Image: Union of rail workers of Nice and metro area

Dockers and port workers mobilised in Le Havre and Rouen, blocking dozens of bridges and entrances into cities, industrial zones, and ports. They were also in struggle in Marseille, alongside workers at the railways, Air France, and steelmaker Arcelor-Mittal.

Transport and mass transit were also affected by strike action. Only half of regional trains were running, and TGV high-speed train traffic was cut 25 to 50 percent in various regions of France. Orly airport in Paris was hit by strikes, and 20 percent of flights at Orly and a third of flights in Marseille were cancelled preventively.

The PS government, which had hoped that youth demonstrations against its policies would soon die down, is increasingly terrified by the rising protests. From the prime minister’s residence, after a cabinet meeting, government spokesman Stéphane Le Foll called on

“everyone to calm down. … we cannot give some people the opportunity to break things or to commit acts of violence. So I am calling upon everyone to be calm, by definition, and also in order to respect the rules of the Republic. We cannot accept any violence.”

In fact, the PS set up an enormous security deployment, worthy of a police state, in an attempt to intimidate opposition among workers and youth to its reactionary policies. Protest marches took place under the hostile surveillance of large contingents of heavily-armed CRS riot police and mobile gendarmes.

In Paris, many contingents of hundreds of riot police armed with heavy shields, truncheons, and tear gas grenades rapidly surrounded protest marches, particularly those of the youth. Before protests began, many plainclothes policemen could be seen gathering in huddles with riot police and gendarmes, before leaving to try to blend into the crowds.

Image: “The government has disappointed us, Lavoisier high school is in the streets”

One student told the WSWS that at his university, agents of the General Intelligence (RG) agency were attending student sit-ins, distributing their contact information, and calling on students to denounce any suspicious behaviour by their colleagues to French domestic intelligence.

Several protest marches ended in clashes with police, including in Paris, Nantes, and Rennes. In the Paris area, police arrested a dozen people for throwing projectiles. In Nantes, they used water cannon to attack protesters.

In Rennes, where 8,000 people were protesting according to initial trade union estimates, the security forces fired large quantities of tear gas. Seven policemen were reported wounded, and there were approximately 50 arrests.

After four years during which workers’ opposition to Hollande’s austerity agenda has been suppressed by the union bureaucracies and the PS’ political allies, like the Left Front and the New Anti-capitalist Party, class tensions in France are assuming explosive proportions. Seventy-one percent of the population opposes the labour law reform, which would lengthen the workweek and allow the trade unions to work with the bosses to ignore provisions of the Labour Code that protect workers’ rights.

Image: “Look at your Rolex, it’s the hour of revolt”

Masses of people attending the protests are rejecting official attempts to terrorize the movement by citing the state of emergency or the risk of terrorist atrocities, like those in Paris or Brussels, carried out by Islamist networks promoted by the NATO powers in their war for regime change in Syria.

The ruling elite has, however, no intention of seeking a compromise that would respect workers’ demands. Insisting on boosting French capitalism’s competitiveness and driven by the deeply unstable global economic and military situation, business circles, the PS, and the unions are determined to ram through their cuts at all cost and liquidate historic social rights won by the workers.

The only way forward for workers and youth in struggle against the El Khomri law is to take the struggle out of the hands of the union bureaucracies, break with the political satellites of the PS, and to mobilise ever broader sections of the working class in struggle. This means breaking free of the purely national context, and carrying out a struggle appealing to workers internationally against the war drive, attacks on democratic rights like Hollande’s state of emergency, and the austerity policies of the European Union.

Workers and youth need their own organs of struggle, free of any influence of the old parties and of the unions, which have long records of betraying and selling out social struggles. The union bureaucracy is favourable to the law, most nakedly the PS-linked French Democratic Labour Confederation (CFDT). The Stalinist General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and its allies are for their part trying to stabilise the PS government and cover for it, by calling for adjustments to the El Khomri law, to then impose it more easily.

Fearing that they will totally lose control of mass opposition if they do not call for more protests, the union bureaucracies have called new days of action for April 5 and 9.

Image: “If big business brings back slavery, the CFDT union will negotiate the price they charge for our chains”

Yesterday, CFDT number two Véronique Descacq made the grotesque claim that any retraction of the El Khomri law by the PS would be “a defeat for the workers.” On RTL, she said,

“Today we managed to get our proposals heard and we will keep talking to the parliamentarians. Some CFDT officials are in the streets, but we all have the same standpoint. We have to make our influence felt, so the text is changed and gets better.”

For its part, the CGT issued a joint statement with other unions before the protest, declaring that, “After the March 31 day of action, the government must respond. If it does not, the signatory organisations will invite workers and youth to debate whether to continue their actions and mobilisations in coming days, including by strikes and demonstrations.”

By pushing for a halt to the protests with an invitation to debate whether or not to completely capitulate to the PS, the CGT aimed to hide that it is pursuing essentially the same policies as the PS itself.

Trump has called for more waterboarding and torture of suspected terrorists.

The American people agree. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll poll shows that 63% of Americans – 82% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats – believe torture of suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified to gather information.

I understand and share their desire to get tougher on terrorists … but we don’t want to do something which will only make things worse.

We’ve Known for Over 2,000 Years that Torture Produces FALSE Confessions

We’ve known since ancient Rome that torture doesn’t work:

• In 72 BC – 2,086 years ago – Cicero (the well-known Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist and consul) pointed out that torture creates conditions of fear and desperate hope in which “there is but little room left for truth”, i.e. that torture is an unreliable method of extracting truth.

• Later Roman leaders agreed:

As early as the third century A.D., the great Roman Jurist Ulpian noted that information obtained through torture was not to be trusted because some people are “so susceptible to pain that they will tell any lie rather than suffer it” (Peters, 1996). This warning about the unreliability of information extracted through the use of torture has echoed across the centuries.

• The former Attorney General of the United States (Ramsey Clark) notes about the Roman emperor Justinian … who lived in the 6th century:

Justinian condemned torture as untrustworthy, perilous, and deceptive.

• Lawrence Davidson – history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania – points out:

In 1764 Cesare Beccaria [an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, and politician who had a profound effect on America’s Founding Fathers] published his groundbreaking work, On Crimes and Punishments. Beccaria had examined all the evidence available at that time and concluded that individuals under torture will tell their interrogators anything they want to hear, true or not, just to get the pain to stop.

• Napolean Bonaparte wrote in 1798:

The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.

• And in 1836, British police magistrate and lawyer David Jardine documented that – for thousands of years – torture has led to false confessions.

Torture INTERFERES With Our Ability to Fight Terrorism, Obtain Intelligence Information and Protect Our National Security

But what about modern experts?

In fact, virtually all of the top interrogation experts – both conservatives and liberals (except for those trying to escape war crimes prosecution) – say that torture doesn’t work:

• Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

“Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

• The C.I.A.’s 1963 interrogation manual stated:

Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.

• According to the Washington Post, the CIA’s top spy – Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service – said that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration. “I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint.”

• The CIA’s own Inspector General wrote that waterboarding was not “efficacious” in producing information

• The head of the CIA said that the agency “has NOT concluded that it was the use of EITs [“Enhanced Interrogation Techniques aka torture] that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees”.

• A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks (Milton Bearden) says (as quoted by senior CIA agent Ray McGovern):

It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.

***

The old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work ….

• A former high-level CIA officer (Philip Giraldi) states:

Many governments that have routinely tortured to obtain information have abandoned the practice when they discovered that other approaches actually worked better for extracting information. Israel prohibited torturing Palestinian terrorist suspects in 1999. Even the German Gestapo stopped torturing French resistance captives when it determined that treating prisoners well actually produced more and better intelligence.

• Another former high-level CIA official (Bob Baer) says:

And torture — I just don’t think it really works … you don’t get the truth. What happens when you torture people is, they figure out what you want to hear and they tell you.

• Michael Scheuer, formerly a senior CIA official in the Counter-Terrorism Center, says:

“I personally think that any information gotten through extreme methods of torture would probably be pretty useless because it would be someone telling you what you wanted to hear.”

• A retired C.I.A. officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002 (Glenn L. Carle) says:

[Coercive techniques] didn’t provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information…Everyone was deeply concerned and most felt it was un-American and did not work.”

• A former top Air Force interrogator who led the team that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has conducted hundreds of interrogations of high ranking Al Qaida members and supervising more than one thousand, and wrote a book called How to Break a Terrorist writes:

As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse. But that’s only the past. Somewhere in the world there are other young Muslims who have joined Al Qaida because we tortured and abused prisoners. These men will certainly carry out future attacks against Americans, either in Iraq, Afghanistan, or possibly even here. And that’s not to mention numerous other Muslims who support Al Qaida, either financially or in other ways, because they are outraged that the United States tortured and abused Muslim prisoners.

In addition, torture and abuse has made us less safe because detainees are less likely to cooperate during interrogations if they don’t trust us. I know from having conducted hundreds of interrogations of high ranking Al Qaida members and supervising more than one thousand, that when a captured Al Qaida member sees us live up to our stated principles they are more willing to negotiate and cooperate with us. When we torture or abuse them, it hardens their resolve and reaffirms why they picked up arms.

He also says:

[Torture is] extremely ineffective, and it’s counter-productive to what we’re trying to accomplish.When we torture somebody, it hardens their resolve … The information that you get is unreliable. … And even if you do get reliable information, you’re able to stop a terrorist attack, al Qaeda’s then going to use the fact that we torture people to recruit new members.

And he repeats:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

And:

They don’t want to talk about the long term consequences that cost the lives of Americans…. The way the U.S. treated its prisoners “was al-Qaeda’s number-one recruiting tool and brought in thousands of foreign fighters who killed American soldiers.

• The FBI interrogators who actually interviewed some of the 9/11 suspects say torture didn’t work

• Another FBI interrogator of 9/11 suspects said:

I was in the middle of this, and it’s not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective

• A third former FBI interrogator — who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects — says categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence. On the other hand he says that torture actually turns people into terrorists

• A declassified FBI e-mail dated May 10, 2004, regarding interrogation at Guantanamo states “[we] explained to [the Department of Defense], FBI has been successful for many years obtaining confessions via non-confrontational interviewing techniques.” (see also this)

• The FBI warned military interrogators in 2003 that enhanced interrogation techniques are “of questionable effectiveness” and cited a “lack of evidence of [enhanced techniques’] success.

• “When long-time FBI director Mueller was asked whether any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through “enhanced techniques”, he responded “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

• The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found that torture doesn’t work, stating:

The administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

• The military agency which actually provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects warned the Pentagon in 2002 that those techniques would produce “unreliable information.”

• General Petraeus says that torture is unnecessary

• Retired 4-star General Barry McCaffrey – who Schwarzkopf called he hero of Desert Storm – agrees

• The number 2 terrorism expert for the State Department says torture doesn’t work, and just creates more terrorists.

• Scores of high-level intelligence officers say: “Based on our lengthy experience in intelligence, we know that torture doesn’t ‘work.’”

• Former Navy Judge Advocate General Admiral John Hutson says:

Fundamentally, those kinds of techniques are ineffective. If the goal is to gain actionable intelligence, and it is, and if that’s important, and it is, then we have to use the techniques that are most effective. Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough.

He also says:

Another objection is that torture doesn’t work. All the literature and experts say that if we really want usable information, we should go exactly the opposite way and try to gain the trust and confidence of the prisoners.

• Army Colonel Stuart Herrington – a military intelligence specialist who interrogated generals under the command of Saddam Hussein and evaluated US detention operations at Guantánamo – notes that the process of obtaining information is hampered, not helped, by practices such as “slapping someone in the face and stripping them naked”. Herrington and other former US military interrogators say:

We know from experience that it is very difficult to elicit information from a detainee who has been abused. The abuse often only strengthens their resolve and makes it that much harder for an interrogator to find a way to elicit useful information.

• Major General Thomas Romig, former Army JAG, said:

If you torture somebody, they’ll tell you anything. I don’t know anybody that is good at interrogation, has done it a lot, that will say that that’s an effective means of getting information. … So I don’t think it’s effective.

• Brigadier General David R. Irvine, retired Army Reserve strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner interrogation and military law for 18 years with the Sixth Army Intelligence School, says torture doesn’t work

• The first head of the Department of Homeland Security – Tom Ridge – says we were wrong to torture

• The former British intelligence chairman says that waterboarding didn’t stop terror plots

• A spokesman for the National Security Council (Tommy Vietor) says:

The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003.

• The Marines weren’t keen on torture, either

• As Vanity Fair reports:

In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts … Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.

• Neuroscientists have found that torture physically and chemically interferes with the prisoner’s ability to tell the truth

• An Army psychologist – Major Paul Burney, Army’s Behavior Science Consulting Team psychologist – said (page 78 & 83):

was stressed to me time and time again that psychological investigations have proven that harsh interrogations do not work. At best it will get you information that a prisoner thinks you want to hear to make the interrogation stop, but that information is strongly likely to be false.

***

Interrogation techniques that rely on physical or adverse consequences are likely to garner inaccurate information and create an increased level of resistance…There is no evidence that the level of fear or discomfort evoked by a given technique has any consistent correlation to the volume or quality of information obtained.

• An expert on resisting torture – Terrence Russell, JPRA’s manager for research and development and a SERE specialist – said (page 209):

History has shown us that physical pressures are not effective for compelling an individual to give information or to do something’ and are not effective for gaining accurate, actionable intelligence.

• A former CIA analyst notes:

During the Inquisition there were many confessed witches, and many others were named by those tortured as other witches. Unsurprisingly, when these new claimed witches were tortured, they also confessed. Confirmation of some statement made under torture, when that confirmation is extracted by another case of torture, is invalid information and cannot be trusted.

• Top American World War 2 interrogators got more information using chess or Ping-Pong instead of torture than those who use torture are getting today

• The head of Britain’s wartime interrogation center in London said:

“Violence is taboo. Not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.”

• The national security adviser to Vice President George H.W. Bush (Donald P. Gregg) wrote:

During wartime service with the CIA in Vietnam from 1970 to 1972, I was in charge of intelligence operations in the 10 provinces surrounding Saigon. One of my tasks was to prevent rocket attacks on Saigon’s port.Keeping Saigon safe required human intelligence, most often from captured prisoners. I had a running debate about how North Vietnamese prisoners should be treated with the South Vietnamese colonel who conducted interrogations. This colonel routinely tortured prisoners, producing a flood of information, much of it totally false. I argued for better treatment and pressed for key prisoners to be turned over to the CIA, where humane interrogation methods were the rule – and more accurate intelligence was the result.

The colonel finally relented and turned over a battered prisoner to me, saying, “This man knows a lot, but he will not talk to me.”

We treated the prisoner’s wounds, reunited him with his family, and allowed him to make his first visit to Saigon. Surprised by the city’s affluence, he said he would tell us anything we asked. The result was a flood of actionable intelligence that allowed us to disrupt planned operations, including rocket attacks against Saigon.

Admittedly, it would be hard to make a story from nearly 40 years ago into a definitive case study. But there is a useful reminder here. The key to successful interrogation is for the interrogator – even as he controls the situation – to recognize a prisoner’s humanity, to understand his culture, background and language. Torture makes this impossible.

There’s a sad twist here. Cheney forgets that the Bush administration followed this approach with some success. A high-value prisoner subjected to patient interrogation by an Arabic-speaking FBI agent yielded highly useful information, including the final word on Iraq’s weapons programs.

His name was Saddam Hussein.

• Top interrogators got information from a high-level Al Qaeda suspects through building rapport, even if they hated the person they were interrogating by treating them as human

• Senator John McCain explains, based upon his own years of torture:

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading.

According to the experts, torture is unnecessary even to prevent “ticking time bombs” from exploding (see this, this and this). Indeed, a top expert says that torture would fail in a real ‘ticking time-bomb’ situation. (And, no … it did NOT help get Bin Laden).

Torture CREATES Terrorists and REDUCES U.S. National Security

In fact, torture reduces our national security:

• Torture by U.S. personnel led to the CREATION of ISIS

• The head of all U.S. intelligence said:

“The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world,” [Director of National Intelligence Dennis] Blair said in the statement. “The damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

• A top counter-terrorism expert says torture increases the risk of terrorism (and see this).

• One of the top military interrogators said that torture by Americans of innocent Iraqis is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place (and see this).

• Former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke says that America’s indefinite detention without trial and abuse of prisoners is a leading Al Qaeda recruiting tool

• A former FBI interrogator — who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects — says categorically that torture actually turns people into terrorists

• A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:

Torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

• A former US Air Force interrogator said that torture just creates more terrorists

• A former U.S. interrogator and counterintelligence agent, and Afghanistan veteran said:

Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It’s used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo.

• The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously stated:

“The administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies … strengthened the hand of our enemies.”

• Two professors of political science have demonstrated that torture increases, rather than decreases, terrorism

• General Petraeus said that torture hurts our national security

• The reporter who broke Iran-Contra and other stories says that torture actually helped Al Qaeda, by giving false leads to the U.S. which diverted its military, intelligence and economic resources into wild goose chases

• Raw Story says that torture might have resulted in false terror alerts

• Hundreds of other experts have said the same things

Today we received a message from Tom who is recovering in a hospital in Mexico.

He is making progress and should be released shortly.

Today is the first day that I feel like I am making progress. The surgeon tells me I should be out of hospital on Saturday (I hope)

The doctors and staff have been so kind and helpful.

Thank you for your concern and support.

Tom is looking forward to getting back to work as editor of Informationclearinghouse.net

We wish him all the best,  and a speedy recovery,

Tom’s ICH is a powerful independent media committed to Truth and Justice

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research

A U.S. District Court Judge ruled, on Tuesday March 29th, that in the civil matter of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, “there is evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith.” Consequently, he has granted to Clinton’s adversary in the proceedings, Judicial Watch, what they had been seeking, which was “limited discovery” to seek further evidence about what she had done and why. (NOTE: This is not in the FBI’s potential criminal case against her, which remains at a preliminary stage. A main purpose of the civil case is to develop evidence that can assist in a potential criminal prosecution against the defendant.)

The Judge, Royce C. Lambreth, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, further noted that there have been “constantly shifting admissions by the Government and the former officials.” This was a veiled reference to the former Secretary of State, Clinton.

He also said that, for these reasons, such “limited discovery,” as Judicial Watch was seeking, “is appropriate, even though it is exceedingly rare in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] cases.”

Consequently, the petitioner (‘Plaintiff’) Judicial Watch, was, in his ruling, allowed — in accord with a prior judge’s ruling — to draw up its specific list of further evidence to be sought in “discovery,” in the case (which Judicial Watch had already done on March 15th), and, Clinton, the “Defendant shall respond ten days after plaintiff’s submission.” The prior judge’s ruling had already specified that Clinton(’s lawyer, David Kendall) has until April 5th to respond. Judicial Watch is to respond to that by no later than April 15th.

Clinton (via her lawyer) had requested a denial of the petitioner’s request for “limited discovery” of more evidence, and the Judge’s ruling against her here is referring to what he apparently viewed as being already-existing “evidence of government [i.e., of Clinton’s] wrong-doing and bad faith,” so as to make clear, to her — though tactfully in a way that didn’t condemn her by name, but only as “government,” in order not to harm her (political career) outside the ongoing judicial proceedings in this case — that, in his opinion, which is based upon what he has seen thus far, the prospect of a final judgment against her is very real. It’s simply a warning to her.

On February 23rd, a different judge, on the same Court, Emmet G. Sullivan, had already ruled that Judicial Watch’s request for additional evidence in the case was granted, by saying: “The Court grants [48] Motion for Discovery. … Plaintiff to Submit Discovery Plan To Court and Counsel by 3/15/2016. Defendant Response due by 4/5/2016. Plaintiff Replies due by 4/15/2016.” So: that ruling established the timeline by which the Court demands responses.

Judge Lambreth’s ruling merely seconds Judge Sullivan’s prior one, but adds to it Lambreth’s veiled warning to Clinton.

Whereas Judicial Watch is seeking additional evidence, Clinton has been seeking for the case to be instead either dismissed in “summary judgment,” or else, dragged on, until she has become elected President.

The Court has clearly not been convinced that the case is meritless. Consequently, the question for her, at the present stage, seems to be whether or not some additional way to postpone judgment will be able to be found by Clinton’s lawyer.

Already, by April 15th, the Democratic Presidential nominee might have been determined. And, if there is to be any indictment of Ms. Clinton on criminal charges, it would presumably occur after that time. Consequently, the possibility exists that she will be indicted while she is campaigning in the general election, against the Republican nominee. Anyone who votes for her before this case is cleared up is, apparently, comfortable with having helped to nominate a person who might be a criminal defendant campaigning against the Republican nominee. Alternatively, the Democratic Party’s 715 superdelegates might be able, if an indictment comes down prior to the Democratic National Convention on July 25th, to hand the nomination to her competitor, Bernie Sanders. However, if an indictment comes down after the end of that Convention on July 28th, there might be no way of salvaging election-year 2016 for the Democratic Party.

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

Note:

• Judge Sullivan was appointed to the Court by the Defendant’s husband, Bill Clinton.
• Judge Lambreth was appointed to the Court by Ronald Reagan.

The Southeast Asian nation of Thailand has found itself repeatedly in the spotlight regarding labor practices, and in particular those among its shrimp and fishing production industry where Western media sources continue to focus on the use of migrant workers and the appalling conditions they toil under.

The Southeast Asian nation of Thailand has found itself repeatedly in the spotlight regarding labor practices, and in particular those among its shrimp and fishing production industry where Western media sources continue to focus on the use of migrant workers and the appalling conditions they toil under.

America is a one-party state with two wings, its bipartisan supported rogue state agenda threatening world peace, its money controlled electoral process too corrupted to fix.

Democracy is pure fantasy. Voters have no say whatever. Party bosses complicit with Wall Street, war profiteers and other corporate interests decide who’ll be president, hold top congressional posts and be chosen for the nation’s courts, notably its highest.

Government in America serves its privileged class exclusively. No matter who succeeds Obama, the incumbent will follow tradition.

Trump is like the rest. His unorthodox style makes him appear different. He didn’t become a billionaire by being anti-establishment.

His one redeeming quality is he’s less likely to start WW III than Clinton. As a businessman, he’d rather make money than war, but make no mistake.

America has been at war internally and/or abroad every year in its history since before gaining independence from Britain – notably post-9/11 in multiple theaters.

Trump won’t change a thing. Wars of aggression called democracy building and humanitarian intervention will continue – at best maybe fewer in number than if Clinton succeeds Obama, the most recklessly pro-war US political operative in memory.

Power brokers oppose Trump because he sounds anti-establishment, unsure if they can entirely control him.

He’s used to being boss, likely unwilling to let others do his decision-making, the way Washington works.

Big money is mobilized to stop him. Protests targeting his rallies are staged. Paid operatives are involved.

Congressional Trump supporter Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) says they’re part of the “Democrat playbook…There’s no question. These are paid protesters…not a bunch of college kids showing up because they’ve got an issue here or there.”

A previous article explained longtime Democrat party supporter George Soros’ involvement, financing anti-Trump protests, planning disruptive actions in April.

Republican Big Money aims to derail him, perhaps part of a bipartisan effort. Reports suggest people are being paid to protest.

Arizona resident Paul Horner said he was paid “$3,500 to protest Trump’s rally in Fountain Hills” (AR).

He “answered a Craigslist ad…about a group needing actors for a political event. (He) interviewed with them and got the part.”

He thinks Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired him, saying “(t)he actual check I received after I was done with the job was from a group called ‘Women Are The Future.’ “

“After I was hired, they told me if anyone asked any questions about who I was with or communicated with me in any way, I should start talking about how great Bernie Sanders is.”

“Almost all of the people I was protesting with I had seen at my interview and training class.”

“At the rally, talking with some of them, I learned they only paid Latinos $500, Muslims $600 and African Americans $750.”

“I don’t think they were looking for any Asians. Women and children were paid half of what the men got and illegals received $300 across the board.”

“I think I was paid more than the other protesters because I was white and had taken classes in street fighting and boxing a few years back.”

Horner explained he and others completed a six-hour training class before Trump’s scheduled rally, instructed on how to act.

Republicans have been involved in their own dirty tricks. So far, everything thrown at Trump hasn’t stuck.

He’s a deplorable choice for president but so are the other duopoly aspirants, Clinton arguably the most ruthless and dangerous.

Most likely, she and Trump will contest for the presidency in November. Days earlier, Politico called Trump’s Republican adversaries “dazed and demoralized,” millions of dollars spent to undermine him so far failed.

“(T)here’s growing worry” that using a brokered convention to stop him “could be traumatic for the party,” said Politico.

He’s far and away the most popular Republican choice. Manipulating convention delegates to stop him could be hugely disruptive, conceding the election to Clinton.

Perhaps Republican power brokers prefer her to a Trump administration.

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.

A new specter haunts the American elites: the candidacy of Donald Trump in the US President election and his success so far in the Republican primaries. The Republican establishment itself hopes to block his rise, even as he is drawing huge crowds into the party. As for the Democrats, they are hoping that his repugnant image will make the election of Hillary Clinton that much easier.

Let’s start by admitting what seems obvious: Trump is vulgar, insulting, demagogic. He says one thing and then the opposite, and shows distinct signs of megalomania.

That much said, the anti-Trump campaign is typical of the rhetoric of the dominant political class.

Our indignant elites resort to one of their favorite arch reflexes: warnings against “fascism” and yet another “new Hitler”. Ever since Nasser was “Hitler on the Nile”, when he nationalized the Suez Canal, “new Hitlers” spring up in the Western imagination like mushrooms in an autumn woods: Milosevic, LePen, Putin, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Assad have all been subjected to such comparisons.

But in fact a President of the United States is not a dictator and there is no insurrectional movement backing Trump. Should Trump seriously attack the rights or privileges of the elites, he would be rapidly put back in his place. After all, Richard Nixon had recently won an overwhelming victory in the 1972 Presidential election when he was forced to resign, not for having brutally bombed the peoples of Indochina, but for being implicated in attempted espionage of the Democratic Party headquarters (Watergate).

In reality, if Trump seriously tried to apply his extremist measures against illegal immigration, not to mention the protectionist aspects of his program, he would be confronted by all the power of transnational corporations, most of the media and the Congress. If he tried to be truly neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as he has sometimes claimed, the pro-Israel lobby would waste no time in letting him know that things don’t work that way in the United States.

The Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who is also an outsider, has at least warned his voters that he could not succeed as President without a popular movement behind him (which is the truth). But the same goes for Trump, except that Trump presents himself as the providential leader who can manage everything by himself. The real risk of a Trump presidency is not a “fascist threat”, but the likelihood that he would not do much of anything that he has promised his voters but instead would pursue the standard policies with more vigor.

Another amusing aspect of the respectable left’s anti-Trump campaigns is to present him as scandalously unique and unacceptable because of his “racism”. But what is racism after all?   A bad attitude toward people who are different? Trump speaks wildly of excluding certain categories of people from the United States on the basis of who they are. But for decades respectable U.S. leaders have been excluding millions of people who are “not like us” from life itself. How would a Trump presidency be worse than the Vietnam war, than the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, than all the Middle East wars, than support to apartheid in South Africa, than to Suharto’s massacres in Indonesia or to Israel in each of its wars? How would it be worse than massacres in Central America or the overthrow of governments in Latin America or in Iran? Or worse than the embargos causing hardship to the peoples of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, as well as the arms races imposed on countries obliged to try to defend themselves from US hostility and threats?

American liberal intellectuals who are horrified by Trump are quick to forget what their own country has inflicted on the “ROW” – that rest of the world where it is okay to kill masses of people, not out of “racism”, oh no, that is not nice. But killed because they have bad leaders, or bad ideas, or even – the story goes – because they need to be protected.

As commentator John Walsh asked, which is worse, denigrating people because of their race or religion or killing them by the hundreds of thousands? Who among the liberal intellectuals will denounce Hillary Clinton’s policy as racist? But can anybody believe for a second that Clinton would have supported the devastation of Iraq, Libya and Gaza, or that her friend Madeleine Albright would have considered the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq to be “worth it”, if either of them considered the victims of those policies to be really human?

But since we live in a culture where words matter more than acts, and Clinton is perfectly politically correct in her way of speaking, such racism is invisible. Of course, what finally matters is not to know whether all those people were killed out of “racism”, but the fact that they were killed in avoidable, non-defensive wars waged by the United States.

One might reply that precisely because of his “racism”, Trump would be even worse. But there is no sign of that. He is the first major political figure to call for “America First” meaning non-interventionism. He not only denounces the trillions of dollars spent in wars, deplores the dead and wounded American soldiers, but also speaks of the Iraqi victims of a war launched by a Republican President. He does so to a Republican public and manages to win its support. He denounces the empire of US military bases, claiming to prefer to build schools here in the United States. He wants good relations with Russia. He observes that the militarist policies pursued for decades have caused the United States to be hated throughout the world. He calls Sarkozy a criminal who should be judged for his role in Libya. Another advantage of Trump: he is detested by the neoconservatives, who are the main architects of the present disaster.

Even though he is far from being a pacifist (impossible among Republicans), the left has been so thoroughly taken in by the delusions of humanitarian imperialism that Trump’s program ends up looking like the most progressive on the political scene in a long time. (Even Bernie Sanders has not denounced the intervention policy so sharply.)

In light of his unorthodox views on foreign policy, it is a bit too easy to attribute all his success to the supposed racism of his supporters. As Thomas Frank explains, if millions of Americans support Trump, it is because they see in him the embodiment of their own revolt against the establishment, right and left, in their perfect division of labor. The right wants to ensure access to markets, as its neoconservative branch promotes endless wars against supposed threats, while the left provides “human rights” arguments as pretexts.

The issue of protectionism versus free trade is complicated, but the class aspect cannot be denied. For people with stable incomes, it can be advantageous to import goods produced in low-wage countries or to use services provided by workers from those countries. But for those who would otherwise produce those goods or provide those services, that competition is a problem, and they are bound to respond favorably to Trump’s speeches in favor of protectionism and of limiting immigration.

The intellectual left (who mostly enjoy stable incomes, for example in universities) has totally ignored this problem by viewing the issue solely in moral terms: wouldn’t it be marvelous to live in a world open to others, without racism or discrimination? In short, the message to the white worker who lost his job as a result of delocalizations, with no better prospect than delivering pizza, that he should be delighted to live in a multicultural world where one can eat sushi, listen to African music and take vacations in Morocco. He is told that he must absolutely not make any racist, sexist or homophobic remarks, that gay marriage is a huge progress and that the ideal society is not one aiming at relatively equal conditions for all, but rather an “equal opportunity” society in which there is no limit on economic inequalities so long as they do not result from discriminations against minorities. All is well if one can find a good number of women, blacks and homosexuals among the billionaires.

That is essentially the way of thinking that has dominated the left for decades. The working class has been totally forgotten, most of all the white working class which, as Chomsky recently stressed, is the big loser in all this wonderful globalization – so much so that its life expectancy has begun to decline, more than any other ethnic group in the United States. Once the left abandons relative equality of condition as its goal in favor of equal opportunity, it is also playing the card of identity politics, by focusing above all on what makes us different from each other.   By emphasizing minorities, by showing concern for whatever is supposed to be different, or marginal, economically privileged intellectuals are unaware of the class aspect of this discourse, in which the bad guy is inevitably the ordinary guy, who must be racist, nationalist, stuck in his narrow outlook.

The implicit contempt expressed for the white Christian majority, supposedly eternally privileged thanks to the hazards of birth, at a time when it is in fact in total disarray, in economic and moral crisis, was bound to produce a reaction. Trump’s campaign can be partly seen as a “white identity” reaction to identity politics, which elicits cries of indignation from the well-thinking left. The problem was to start playing the game of identity politics.

In many respects, the success of the Sanders campaign, even if it is weaker among Democrats than that of Trump among Republicans, also expresses the revolt of the masses against the elites, but without the “white identity reaction” (which remains totally politically incorrect on the left) and with fewer isolationist tendencies, since while Sanders stresses the need to rebuild America, he has in the past shown a weakness for the notion of humanitarian intervention.

Finally, we must ask what the Trump campaign means for us, the vassals, European citizens of the Empire deprived of the right to vote in the United States. First of all, that popular revolt in a country which is supposed to be the vanguard of all that is for the best, and which our “European construction” strives to imitate while following its lead, is a problem for our elites. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as head of the British Labour Party as well as the rise of various parties labeled “extreme right” in continental Europe are somewhat analogous to the Sanders and Trump phenomena in the United States. Here too, the ruling class consensus in favor of maximum opening of markets as well as confrontation with the rest of the world in the name of human rights is beginning to collapse.

As things go from bad to worse, our political class grasps at a single straw, a single hope for salvation: Hillary Clinton. And it still looks likely that the mobilization of mass media, of transnational business, of the great majority of intellectuals, entertainment celebrities, human rights activists and churches will succeed in defeating Sanders and, with help from the latter, in defeating Trump in November. We shall then be faced with four, or perhaps eight, years of even more militarism, threats of war and war itself, while our self-styled left celebrates the latest victory of democracy, feminism and anti-racism.

But popular discontent will continue to grow. Those who fear seeing it culminate in the rise of someone worse than Trump should not count on the “Queen of Chaos” but rather go on from the movement for Sanders to build a more radical alternative.

Translated by Diana Johnstone.

A French version of this article appeared on RT. 

As the presidential campaign circus dominates headlines across the US, glaring signs the planet is undergoing abrupt anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) abound.

A major study published in Nature Climate Change shows that the planet is warming a stunning 50 times faster than when it comes out of an ice age. The implications of the rapidity of this warming, for those who care to digest it emotionally, are horrifying.

The study shows that even if carbon reduction targets are achieved and the planet’s temperature is kept below the 2 degree Celsius warming threshold, sea-level rise will still inundate major coastal cities around the world, forcing one-fifth of the total world population of humans to migrate away from the coasts. New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Jakarta, Cairo, Kolkata and Shanghai will all be underwater.

As though to reinforce this point, NASA recently released data confirming that February was the warmest month ever measured globally, at 1.57 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline temperature average. The new record easily smashed the old global temperature record, which was set just one month before, in January.

This means that while it took from the advent of the industrial age until October 2015 to warm the planet 1 degree Celsius, humans have managed to warm the planet another .57 degrees Celsius in just the next four months since then.

Let that sink in for a moment before reading further.

As if that isn’t enough, a study recently published in the journal Nature Geosciencerevealed that carbon emissions are now the highest they have been since the age of dinosaurs, 66 million years ago. According to the study, the current pace of emissions is even beyond the highest-known natural surge of carbon that exists in fossil records, an event that occurred 56 million years ago that was believed by many to be caused by the release of frozen stores of greenhouse gases from the seabed.

That ancient release, which drove temperatures up 5 degrees Celsius, is now surpassed by our current surge of carbon release. “Given currently available records, the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years,” the scientists of the new study wrote.

Another ominous sign of escalating ACD: The entire Northern Hemisphere surpassed the 2 degree Celsius mark for the first time since human civilization began. Bear in mind that 2 degrees Celsius is the arbitrary, politically agreed-upon warming limit, above which warming is considered “dangerous” to humanity. Former NASA scientist James Hansen debunked that goal over two years ago, when he published a paper showing that 1 degree Celsius was the scientifically proven point of no return.

Parts of the Arctic were 29 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal in February, which even brought large portions of the Arctic above freezing and into temperature levels more common in June.

Dozens of countries across Europe and Asia set or tiedall-time temperature records, and cities across the United States saw record warm temperatures, in which the 2015-2016 winter was the warmest ever recorded.

Winter in the US, according to meteorologists, technically takes place from December through February. This year, that winter was 4.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, breaking the previous record, which was set in 1999-2000. This winter, all six of the states that comprise New England had their warmest winters ever. Meanwhile, every single US state had winters nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, and Alaska’s winter was an incredible 10.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal.

Underscoring the severity of what is clearly a planetary warming crisis, the New Scientist reported in early March that earth had its highest-ever annual increase in carbon dioxide levels ever recorded, with atmospheric levels breaching 404 parts per million.

The Arctic is where warming continues to be the most blatantly obvious. In early March, the start of the famed Iditarod sled dog race looked more like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie, as snow-starved Anchorage had snow hauled hundreds of miles down from Fairbanks to cover the dry streets upon which the dogs would run. Then, the typically 11-mile long ceremonial start was shortened to three miles.

Meanwhile, melting in Greenland is occurring so intensely and quickly that it is “feeding on itself,” according to a recently published scientific study. Greenland alone contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 20 feet.

This information is emotionally challenging to take in. It is understandable that people prefer to distract themselves with the minute-to-minute antics of the political and media charade that is the US election cycle, yet it has never been more important to understand what the planet upon which we live and depend is undergoing.

A flooded street sits unused in Elmhurst, Illinois, on July 24, 2010. (Photo: Clark Maxwell)

Earth

There are several indicators this month of how rapidly the planet is changing under increasing stressors from ACD.

In North America, millions of acres of forests are struggling and under increasing threat, due to the fact that the speed at which the planetary climate is changing is now far, far ahead of the forests’ ability to adapt to the hotter and drier conditions ACD has ushered in across vast areas of the United States and Canada. New research shows that all of the forests in the US are officially under threat from ACD.

And it’s not just forests that are being impacted. The agricultural sector is in big trouble, as crops are being impacted dramatically by the rapidly changing climate.

For example, in Montana, a recent study shows that agricultural losses due to ACD could total up to $736 million annually.

Panning out, another recent study shows that food scarcity caused by ACD would cause at least half a million deaths across the world by 2050, due to food production being impacted by the effects of ACD.

Making matters worse, a group affiliated with the UN recently released a studyshowing that an ongoing decline of pollinating species now poses a very dire threat to the global food supply. The report warns that the species responsible for pollinating and promoting the growth of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of crops are facing extinction.

Another study, this one published in Nature Climate Change, shows that high-latitude insects, like those in Scotland, face severe declines in population from ACD, due to the fact that they are far more sensitive to warmer temperatures than previously believed.

Even as far north as the Arctic, ACD’s growing impact on insects is obvious. A recent study published in PLOS ONE shows that warming temperatures are impacting beetle populations, and hence the entire biodiversity of the Arctic. The temperature change is causing the insects to migrate into new habitats, which is having a domino effect that is upsetting the natural balance.

For humans in the far north, ACD’s impacts are even more obvious. Intensifying heat is threatening the way of life of the Indigenous population in the Arctic. With the ice disappearing and temperatures continuing to rise, the life cycles and numbers of fish, marine mammals, caribou and polar bears are being altered, which is causing Indigenous communities to face food shortages.

The leaders of First Nations and Inuit communities in the Arctic are now also speaking out about the mental health cost of ACD. The Native populations of the Arctic are dealing with growing despair over the effects of ACD on their lives and communities, and observers are connecting this to a growing array of mental health and social problems.

In addition to this, ACD has caused the onslaught of rising sea levels, melting permafrost and other impacts that have positioned residents of the Arctic in a losing battle to stay in their homes. Housing shortages are now the norm as land is washing and melting away into the rising seas.

Meanwhile, across the lower latitudes, recent satellite images show that tropical rain forests ranging from the Amazon to the Philippines are vanishing far more abruptly than was previously believed, according to recent research. As usual, ACD, drought, wildfires and deforestation are to blame.

Water

As usual, ACD-induced extremes of water, either far too much or far too little, are stark this month.

In Africa, at least 36 million people are facing hunger due to record-high temperatures and drought, which have had a catastrophic impact on crops across the eastern and southern regions of that continent.

Meanwhile in the Arctic, February saw alarming melting of Arctic sea ice, where record-high temperatures brought with them other records — including record lows for that month’s extent and area of Arctic sea ice.

Until this year, the previous records for sea ice extent and area for February were set in 2011. Moreover, the total volume of the Arctic sea ice, which many scientists see as the most important factor determining the health of Arctic sea ice, reached its second-lowest level ever recorded that same month. The record low for sea ice volume was set in 2012, a record that could fall this year or next, according to scientists.

Global rainfall extremes continue to be elevated by ACD. A new study published inNature Climate Change basically warns us to get ready for rain, and lots of it. The study shows that ACD is already driving increases in rainfall and snowfall extremes around the world, even in arid regions. This trend, according to the study, will continue, and likely amplify further.

In the oceans, things continue to look grim.

Recent research shows that coral growth is already being weakened by increasingly acidifying oceans. One-quarter of the carbon dioxide released as a result of human activities is absorbed into the world’s oceans, where it alters their chemistry and reduces coral growth.

Meanwhile, a severe coral bleaching event in the most pristine portions of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has caused authorities there to raise an alarm over severe local coral bleaching, caused by warm ocean temperatures.

Another study shows how ACD is pushing fish toward both poles, which means that traditionally poorer countries near the equator have even less access to one of their primary food sources. The fish migrations are due to global temperature increases in the oceans.

Meanwhile, sea levels continue to rise ahead of worst-case predictions. A study recently published in Nature Climate Change warns that in the continental United States alone, millions of people are already at risk of being forced out of their homes because of sea-level rise. The study shows that sea-level increases will cause the homes of 4 million Americans to be inundated during high tides with three feet of sea-level rise by 2100, although the pace of sea-level rise is consistently ahead of that projection.

“Once you take into account growth of population, the numbers end up being two to three times more in terms of overall population that’s going to be impacted than if you just look at current populations,” said Stetson University landscape ecologistJason Evans, who contributed to the study. “Florida really pops out.”

With six feet of sea-level rise, which many scientists believe is inevitable, more than 4 million people, in Florida alone, will lose their homes.

Fire

In the Southern Hemisphere, ACD-fueled wildfires continue to burn apace.

In Tasmania, bushfires have grown so severe that 1,000-year-old trees are burning to ash while dried-out peat bogs are on fire. Experts there are warning that what is happening in Tasmania is a human-caused calamity as severe as the razing of the temples in Palmyra by ISIS.

It’s also worth noting that in the United States, wildfire season is already underway (albeit earlier than normal of course), with one massive wildfire having already burnt more than 72,000 acres across Oklahoma and Kansas.

Air

This month, there are many bright neon warning signs in the Air category.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached new heights, signaling an alarming increase. February 2015 to February 2016 saw the highest year-to-year growth ever recorded.

Pieter Tans, lead scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said the new record accompanied four straight years of increases of over 2 parts per million in the atmosphere. Of this, Trans said, “We’ve never seen that. That’s unprecedented.”

Temperatures across the globe continue to escalate.

Melbourne, Australia, saw its hottest March night ever recorded, breaking the previous record by more than 1 degree Celsius. The previous record was set only three years prior.

Moving northward, the rapidly increasing temperatures in the Arctic prompted climate scientist Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute in California, to warn that this accelerated increase could have a “catastrophic” effect on the planet’s climate. He explained that the higher temperatures are driving the creation of dangerous storms across the Northern Hemisphere, and that since early February, the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice has been lower this year than any of the last 30 years.

Gleick posted a graph of the diminishing sea ice on Twitter with the message: “What is happening in the Arctic now is unprecedented and possibly catastrophic.”

In parts of the Arctic, February shattered all previous temperature records as the entire month reached a staggering 18 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in some regions. Fort Yukon, Alaska, a place that has recorded the lowest temperature on record in that state, is experiencing record warm temperatures, causing people there to say that the warming trends “have robbed the Arctic of its winter.”

To make matters worse, methane, a greenhouse gas 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a 20-year time scale, spiked in February to more than 3,000 parts per billion in the atmosphere. This was the largest spike of methane ever recorded.

Denial and Reality

Apparently, impending catastrophe doesn’t mean much to some of the United States’ wealthiest people. Once again a report has arisen documenting how fossil fuel millionaires pumped more than $100 million into Republican presidential super PACs last year. That means that $1 out of every $3 donated to Republican candidates coming from hyper-rich individuals came from people who made their fortunes from fossil fuels. In boosting GOP politicians, these funders were simply acting to protect their cash cows from those of us who happen to give a damn about the planet.

A recent report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund shows that more than six out of every 10 Americans are represented by someone in Congress who denies the reality of ACD. According to the report, 59 percent of the Republican House caucus and an amazing 70 percent of the Republicans in the Senate deny ACD is real. The report also reveals that, according to the US Census, 202,803,591 Americans are represented by an ACD denier.

Florida, a state notorious for having a government led by ACD deniers, faces yet another reality check from ACD. Fort Lauderdale, which is a boomtown of growth and construction, and also expects its population to grow by one-third in the next 15 years, is hurtling headfirst toward the reality of ACD. Sea-level rise will eventually cause the city to be abandoned to the ocean.

Another blow for deniers came in the form of recent polling data, which shows a record number of Americans now see ACD as a threat. According to Gallup polling, 41 percent of US adults believe ACD poses a “serious threat” to them during their lifetimes — a 4 percent increase over 2015, and the highest level ever recorded by Gallup.

Gallup data also shows that 64 percent of those polled worried about ACD “a great deal” or at least “a fair amount,” which is the highest level recorded since 2008. Meanwhile, only 36 percent of Americans said they did not worry about it, or only worried about it a little. Additionally, 65 percent of Americans now believe ACD is due to greenhouse gases released by human activity, a 10 percent increase on this topic over last year.

Another reality check came from Dr. James Hansen, who declared recently, “We have a global emergency” due to ACD. Hansen noted that ACD is poised to render large parts of the world essentially uninhabitable by 2100 due to extremely hot temperatures.

Recent data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed that the planet saw an “explosive” amount of annual carbon dioxide growth in the atmosphere during 2015, as the amount of carbon dioxide saw its largest single annual increase since record-keeping began.

A recent study by the University of Queensland gave yet another sobering warning, stating that global temperatures could rise much faster than expected, possibly even breaching the 2 degree Celsius mark much sooner than predicted (thus missing the politically agreed-upon goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius).

The final reality check for this month’s dispatch comes in the form of a cruise ship. For the first time ever, the Arctic passage that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is going to be opened up to cruise liners this summer. The first of them, the Crystal Serenity, will take more than 900 passengers paying over $100,000 each through the perilous route that at one time foiled most explorers, due to there being too much thick ice throughout the summer — given that it is, after all, the Arctic.

Not anymore.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

In December, 2010, Barack Obama cut a deal to extend Republican tax cuts for the rich. In response Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor in an eight-hour long filibuster against the betrayal. Obama responded by calling in Bill Clinton to be the slickest Willie possible and make the case for the stab in the back. Obama was so eager for Clinton’s help that he literally turned over the White House press room to his Democratic predecessor and walked away. Bill Clinton got away with enacting a wide array of conservative policies and that is why Obama asked the master of deception to work his magic one more time.

Liberalish Democrats who fancy themselves as leftists have turned black voters into their favorite scapegoats in 2016. As Black Agenda Report has shown, black voters are motivated by fear of Republican victory more than they are in favor of anything else. Belief in the questionable claim that Hillary Clinton is better able to defeat a Republican and a lack of familiarity with Bernie Sanders has kept most of them in the Clinton family column.

That decision is misguided in that it continues the discredited reliance not just on the Democrats but on electoral politics. That emphasis leads to disaster year and after year. Instead there should be debate and discussion about how to achieve self-determination in 2016.  Sanders supporters are quite right in pointing out the Clintons’ many misdeeds. Her husband did accelerate black mass incarceration. As secretary of state Hillary Clinton blocked an increase in Haiti’s minimum wage. It is true that she killed Muammar Gaddafi and laughed about it on camera. The list of evil doing is quite long, but no more so than it is for Barack Obama, who is the most effectively evil politician in American political history.

Hillary Clinton got away with regime change in Libya because her boss Barack Obama signed onto the effort and bragged about it many times. He has better sense than to cackle about the murder but shrewdness has always been his strong point. He won the Democratic nomination in 2008 in large part because he is better able to hide his evil intent than the clumsy and obviously wicked Hillary.

Sanders’s black supporters point fingers at their Clinton voting brethren and blame them for not catapulting their candidate ahead of her in the delegate tally. But many of these people were unwilling to oppose Barack Obama when he ran for president, even though he made it clear that he would never be in their corner. Not many are willing to oppose him even now despite his record of neo-con imperial murder, bankster bail outs, destruction of the public school system, and maintaining mass incarceration while pretending that he doesn’t.

At Black Agenda Report we dissected the charade back in 2008. Glen Ford correctly labeled Obama and Clinton as “political twins.” Both signed on to the neo-liberal agenda. Both were hard core imperialists. Both took the black vote for granted. Clinton wrongly assumed that respect for her and her husband would continue even though she made pointed racist overtures for white votes. Obama was even worse. Every scolding directed at a black audience went over their heads to white people, letting them know that black collective interests would be ignored in an Obama administration.

Now many Sanders supporters want to have it both ways. Hillary Clinton’s tone deaf, ham fisted manner makes her easy to denounce, but the much slicker and better marketed Obama still gets a pass from them. Any fingers pointed at black Clinton supporters must also be directed at the president and at the suddenly righteous who went along with the horrors of the Obama doctrine. Sanders supporters of all races now want to wash their hands of policies they either supported outright or conveniently ignored.

Any appeal for Sanders which is not also an explicit rejection of Obama is a sham. Yet time and again we hear nonsensical talk about “disappointment” with Obama and not honest assessment and self-criticism about how millions of people sold their political souls for nothing. If people want a Sanders “revolution” what exactly are they trying to change?

Once again most progressives want to be in love with a candidate more than they really want to be political actors. Disliking Hillary Clinton is a substitute for the revolution they claim to want. The funny moment when a bird landed on a podium during a Sanders speech was certainly charming but the response to the moment was frightening. There is nothing special about birds flying around. That is what they do. But people predisposed towards magical thinking will give miraculous import to mundane happenings.

The Sanders supporters of 2016 are some of the same people who fell in love with Obama in 2008. Hillary Clinton isn’t lovable so she is despised. She isn’t much different from her then rival but most Democrats don’t really care about that at all. They would rather focus on magic birds than tear themselves away from the Democratic Party which continues to bring disaster around the world.

Every four years the Democratic rank and file engage in fantasy. Their party is the cause of so many troubles but acknowledging that fact would require thought and action and bring on cognitive dissonance. So they don’t think and they don’t act. They just look for a new idol to worship.

Margaret Kimberley‘s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

The most striking feature of the 2016 US election campaign is the virtual absence of discussion of what is by far the most serious issue facing the people of the United States and the world, looming over everything else: the escalating military conflict that threatens to plunge the entire planet into a new world war.

While it is not a topic of significant debate among the various candidates contending for the presidential nomination of the Democratic and Republican parties, hardly a day goes by without a new provocation that raises the prospect of a military confrontation involving the US, China, Russia and the European powers.

Yesterday was no exception. US Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work announced that the Obama administration would not recognize any air defense identification zone (ADIZ) that China might proclaim in the South China Sea in response to an upcoming international court ruling on territorial disputes in the region.

Earlier this month, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, referring to a future conflict over an ADIZ, wrote that “the US is heading toward a dangerous showdown in China.” Ignatius quoted Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for Asia, who said: “This isn’t Pearl Harbor, but if people on all sides aren’t careful, it could be ‘The Guns of August.’” Campbell was referring to the book by Barbara Tuchman on the events that led up to World War I, which led to the deaths of 17 million people.

Also on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon has “drawn up plans to position American troops, tanks and other armored vehicles full time along NATO’s eastern borders… in what would be the first such deployment since the end of the Cold War.”

Work, who last month declared that a test of intercontinental ballistic missiles was designed to show “that we are prepared to use nuclear weapons in defense of our country,” told the Journal that with the additional forces “there will be a division’s worth of stuff to fight [Russia] if something happens.”

As far as the media and the candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties are concerned, all of this falls under the category of the “great unmentionable.” Indeed, the Obama administration is attempting to temporarily postpone a full conflict with Russia or China, following a well-established pattern in which major military operations are launched after presidential elections. The aim is to prevent the question of war and the war plans of the ruling class from becoming a topic of political discussion among broader sections of the population.

Particularly since the launching of the “war on terror,” and then following the mass protests in 2003 against the impending invasion of Iraq, the American ruling class has worked systematically to exclude any expression of anti-war sentiment from the political process. In 2002, the Democrats kept the issue of the looming invasion of Iraq out of the mid-term elections, after Democrats in Congress agreed to give Bush a blank check to use military force.

In 2004, opposition to war was so intense that it threatened to overwhelm the election cycle. That was the year that Howard Dean, the governor of Vermont, won widespread support due largely to his stated opposition to the Iraq war, and appeared to be on the path to winning the Democratic nomination. His campaign was then derailed through a carefully coordinated operation by the Democratic Party leadership and the media, which proclaimed him “unelectable.” Senator John Kerry, who had voted for the Iraq war, was brought forward, the “antiwar” Democrats mobilized behind him, and the issue of war was removed from an election that culminated in the victory of George W. Bush for a second term.

Two years later, despite the efforts of the Democratic Party to keep the mid-term elections from becoming a referendum on war, opposition to the Iraq invasion led to a massive defeat for the Republicans and gave control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats for the first time since 1994. The Democrats responded by rejecting any move to force a change of course, let alone bring charges against Bush administration officials. They funded all of the Bush administration’s military appropriation bills, including for the 2007 Iraq “surge.”

The channeling of anti-war sentiment behind the Democratic Party was carried out with the critical assistance of the organizations of the middle class that had led the anti-war protests in 2003. This culminated in the campaign of Illinois Senator Barack Obama in 2008. Obama was presented as the “transformational candidate” who would reverse the eight years of war and social reaction under Bush. During the primaries, Obama’s political trump card was the fact that he had opposed the invasion of Iraq while his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton, had voted for it in the Senate.

In fact, the Obama administration became the vehicle for the middle class organizations surrounding the Democratic Party to fully and openly embrace imperialism. After more than seven years of Obama as “commander-in-chief,” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue. The Obama administration has led a war to overthrow the government in Libya, stoked a civil war in Syria through the promotion of Islamic fundamentalist militias, launched drone strikes on Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, supported the Israeli assault on Gaza, backed a brutal Saudi bombardment of Yemen, and overseen the militarization of the South China Sea and Eastern Europe.

All indications are that within a year, if not earlier, the extent of US military operations will be far greater. Despite the looming danger of a global conflict involving nuclear-armed powers, the media and the various candidates are keeping the ongoing military operations off the agenda. When war is discussed, it is from the standpoint of general agreement among Republicans and Democrats on the need to “destroy ISIS” and confront Chinese and Russian “aggression.”

In the Democratic Party campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has emerged as the preferred candidate of the military and intelligence apparatus. She is personally responsible for launching the war in Libya and the CIA-backed destabilization operation in Syria. On her campaign web page, Clinton boasts of having “called out China’s aggressive actions” in Asia. The Clinton campaign web site adds, “Hillary will confine, contain, and deter Russian aggressions in Europe and beyond, and increase the costs to Putin for his actions.”

As for Bernie Sanders, he has said virtually nothing about war or foreign policy, aside from criticizing Clinton for supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On his campaign web site, “war and peace” is relegated to the 25th of 28 issues in the election. He calls the 2003 invasion “the worst foreign policy blunder in modern US history.” The invasion of Iraq was, according to Sanders, not a crime, but a strategic mistake from the standpoint of the interests of the American ruling class.

He proclaims that “as President and Commander-in-Chief, I will defend this nation, its people, and America’s vital strategic interests, but I will do it responsibly.” He boasts of having voted for war in the Balkans in 1999 and in Afghanistan in 2001. He has supported the Obama administration’s drone strikes, denounced Russia, and insisted that the US maintain the largest military in the world.

For all his rhetorical criticisms of the “billionaire class” and its influence over American politics, Sanders never suggests that foreign policy is dictated by this same “billionaire class.” Nor does he propose any cuts to the gargantuan military budget. Sanders too would defend “America’s vital strategic interests”—code words for the drive by the American corporate and financial elite to control the world and its key sources of raw materials, cheap labor and trade routes. Nothing could more fully expose the fraud of Sanders’ “socialism.”

There remains deep and broad-based anti-war sentiment among American workers and youth. Large sections of the voting population have lived their politically conscious lives under conditions of permanent war. There is no mass support for war against China or Russia, or for the measures including a further destruction of democratic rights at home and the introduction of the military draft—that would inevitably accompany such a war.

There remains, however, a huge danger. As a consequence of the conspiracy of silence by the media and the political establishment, the population as a whole is largely unaware of what is currently taking place and what is being planned in the aftermath of the elections. It is a life-and-death question that the attention of the working class be focused on the war plans of the ruling class and that the political foundations be laid for a new mass-anti war movement.

The fight against imperialist war requires the building of an independent political movement of the working class, based on an internationalist and socialist program. Workers must not allow themselves to remain trapped within the pro-imperialist confines of bourgeois politics and the Democratic Party. The working class must intervene with its own program and perspective, connecting the fight against war with the fight against inequality, dictatorship and the capitalist system.

“O inimigo obscuro que se esconde nos cantos sombrios da terra” (como o definiu em 2001 o presidente Bush) continua a fazer vítimas, as das quais em Bruxelas. O terrorismo é um “inimigo diferente daquele até agora enfrentado”, que se revelou ao mundo em 11 de setembro, com as imagens apocalípticas das torres que tombavam.

Para eliminá-lo, ainda está em curso aquela que Bush definiu como “a colossal luta do Bem contra o Mal”. Mas cada vez que se corta uma cabeça da Hidra do terror, surgem outras. Que devemos fazer?  Antes de tudo, não acreditar naquilo que nos contaram durante quase 15 anos.

A partir da versão oficial do 11 de setembro, que entrou em colapso sob o peso de provas técnico-científicas, que Washington, não podendo refutar, liquida como “complô”.

Os maiores ataques terroristas no Ocidente têm três características.

Primeiramente, a pontualidade. O ataque de 11 de setembro ocorre no momento em que os Estados Unidos já tinham decidido (como informava o New York Times em 31 de agosto de 2001) de deslocar para a Ásia o foco da sua estratégia para se opor à reaproximação entre a Rússia e a China: menos de um mês depois, em 7 de outubro de 2001, com a motivação de caçar Osama Bin Laden, mandante do 11 de setembro, os EUA começam a guerra no Afeganistão, a primeira de uma nova escalada bélica. O ataque terrorista em Bruxelas ocorre quando os EUA e a Otan se preparam para ocupar a Líbia, com a motivação de eliminar o Isis (o chamado Estado Islâmico, na sigla em inglês), que ameaça a Europa.

Em segundo lugar, o efeito terror: a matança, cujas imagens desfilam repetidamente aos nossos olhos, cria uma vasta opinião pública favorável à intervenção armada para eliminar a ameaça. Piores massacres terroristas, como em Damasco há dois meses, inversamente, passam quase desapercebidos.

Em terceiro lugar, a assinatura: paradoxalmente “o inimigo obscuro” sempre assina os atentados terroristas. Em 2001, quando Nova York ainda estava envolta pela fumaça das torres demolidas, foram divulgadas as fotos e as biografias dos 19 autores do atentado, membros da Al Qaeda, muitos deles já conhecidos pelo FBI e pela CIA. O mesmo se deu em Bruxelas, agora em 2016: antes de identificar todas as vítimas, identificam-se os autores do atentado já conhecidos pelos serviços secretos.

É possível que os serviços secretos, a partir da tentacular “comunidade de inteligência” estadunidense formada por 17 organizações federais com agentes em todo o mundo, sejam totalmente ineficientes? Ou, ao invés disso, são eficientíssimos instrumentos da estratégia do terror?

Não falta mão de obra: é a dos movimentos terroristas islâmicos, armados e treinados pela CIA e financiados pela Arábia Saudita, para destruir o Estado líbio e fragmentar o Estado sírio com o apoio da Turquia e de cinco mil foreign fighters (combatentes externos) europeus que afluíram à síria com a cumplicidade de seus governos.

Nesta grande bacia se pode recrutar seja terroristas suicidas, convencidos a se imolarem por uma causa santa, seja o profissional da guerra, ou o pequeno delinquente que na ação é “suicidado”, deixando que sua carteira de identidade seja encontrada (como no ataque ao Charlie Hebdo), ou fazendo explodir a carga antes que se afaste.

Pode-se também facilitar a formação de células terroristas, que autonomamente alimentam a estratégia do terror criando um clima de estado de sítio, como ocorre nos países europeus da Otan, que justifique novas guerras sob o comando dos EUA.

Ou se pode recorrer à falsidade, como as provas  sobre as armas de destruição em massa mostradas por Colin Powell ao Conselho de Segurança da ONU em 5 de fevereiro de 2003. Provas que depois se revelaram falsas, fabricadas pela CIA para justificar a “guerra preventiva” contra o Iraque.

Manlio Dinucci

Fonte em italiano: http://ilmanifesto.info/strategia-segreta-del-terrore/

Manlio Dinucci é jornalista e geógrafo; tradução de José Reinaldo Carvalho para Resistência

Guerres d’Irak et d’Afghanistan : un rapport accablant

The liberation of Palmyra is a decisive turning point in the war on Syria. While there were earlier military successes by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies, the publicity value of securing the valued Roman ruins of Palmyra is much higher than any earlier victory. It will change some of the false narratives of the conflict.

The Syrian government is no longer “the Assad regime” and the Syrian Arab Army no longer the “Assad forces”. Ban Ki Moon, the head of the United Nations, congratulated the Syrian government to its success:

In a news conference in Jordan, Ban said he was “encouraged” that the UNESCO world heritage site is out of extremist hands and that the Syrian government “is now able to preserve and protect this human common cultural asset”.

One important part of liberating Palmyra was the use of Russian electronic warfare equipment to interfere with electromagnetic signals around Palmyra. The Islamic State rigged the ruins with improvised explosive devices but was unable to remotely detonate them.

The myth that the Syrian and Russian government are in cahoots with the Islamic State, told by various propagandist as well as the British and U.S. government, has now proven to be false. But other false claims are still made:

Lost in the celebrations was a discussion of how Palmyra had fallen in the first place. When the Islamic State captured the city in May, the militants faced little resistance from Syrian troops. At the time, residents said officers and militiamen had fled into orchards outside the city, leaving conscripted soldiers and residents to face the militants alone.

That depiction of the battle is pure nonsense. The Islamic State offensive that ended with its occupation of Palmyra took thirteen days from May 13 to May 26 2015. Heavy fighting and several Syrian army counter offensives took place during those days. After the Islamic State finally captured the city, the Syrian army immediately prepared for a larger operation to regain the city. This was launched successfully in July 2015 but for lack of air support the gains made were again lost a week later.

Throughout the 2015 fighting around Palmyra the U.S. air force, which claimed to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, did not intervene at all. ISIS was free to resupply through the open east-Syrian desert.

The sole reason that the Islamic State could successfully attack Palmyra was a very large ongoing attack by al-Qaeda Jihadists and CIA mercenary forces on the Syrian government forces in Idleb governate. The Syrian army moved troops from Palmyra to defend Idleb and Latakia and the forces left behind were no longer large enough to repel the Islamic State attack.

The attack on Idleb, for which the CIA allowed its proxy forces to directly cooperated with al-Qaeda, was supported by electronic warfare from Turkey which disrupted the Syrian military communication. The attack and the obvious cooperation between the Jihadists and Turkish and U.S. secret services was the reason that Russia and Iran decided to intervene in the conflict with their own forces. It had crossed their red line.

What followed was the roll up of all “rebels” that posed an immediate danger to the Syrian government. After Turkey ambushed a Russian jet all “rebel” forces supported by Turkey became priority targets. When the success of large scale offensives in Latakia and around Aleppo was established, Russia imposed a cease fire on the U.S. supported forces and on the Syria government. This cease fire freed up the Syrian, Iranian and Russian forces needed to successfully take back Palmyra. From there on the attack will progress eastward to Deir Ezzor and later on to Raqqa.

The Palmyra victory was the biggest defeat yet of the Islamic State. It poses a problem for the Obama administration:

Washington has endeavored to portray the battle against Islamic State as a project of the United States and its allies, while accusing Moscow of attacking “moderate” rebels instead of the extremists. Palmyra seems to embody an alternative narrative.

Congratulations, though still with loads of obligatory anti-Assad rhetoric, are now coming from unexpected corners like the conservative mayor of London:

I cannot conceal my elation as the news comes in from Palmyra and it is reported that the Syrian army is genuinely back in control of the entire Unesco site.There may be booby traps in the ruins, but the terrorists are at last on the run. Hooray, I say. Bravo – and keep going.

I concur.

Boğaziçi University academic members have expressed that their colleagues Esra Mungan [image left], Kıvanç Ersoy, Muzaffer Kaya, Meral Camcı and Chris Stephenson have practiced their right to freedom of expression. They demanded release of the academics.

Colleagues of Asst. Prof. Esra Mungan arrested along with two of her colleagues for signing “We will not be a party to this crime” were in solidarity at Boğaziçi University where Mungan teaches.

Boğaziçi University academic members in the press statement announced the decision of the Academic General Assembly they held on March 17.

CLICK – ARRESTED ACADEMIC ESRA MUNGAN: WE STAND BY OUR WORD

The statement held at Güney Kampüs (South Campus) demanded the release of Esra Mungan, Kıvanç Ersoy, and Muzaffer Kaya.

The statement read by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aybrek Korugan from Department of Industrial Engineering on behalf of academic member reads as follows:

“An academic member arrested for first time in BOUN’s history”

“For the first time in its history, an academic member of Boğaziçi University has been arrested. Esra Mungan has been charged with ‘propagandizing for terror organization’. We find this accusation unacceptable. Prison is not where our colleague Esra Mungan should be, it is the university she should be in where she has been lecturing for 15 years.

“We as Boğaziçi University have always taken sacredness of human life as basis and opposed all sorts of violence. None of our academic members said things or acted in a way to promote terror, and they never will.

“Our university with its students, academic members, and graduates have always stood against any step taken against democracy. Freedom of thought and expression constitutes the main body of this stand”.

“Climate of violence can be most eliminated in environment of free discussion”

“There cannot be a university at where there is no freedom of thought and expression. Lectures cannot be given, researches cannot be done, scientific development halts. Climate of violence and terror can be most effectively eliminated in environment of free discussion.

“Esra Mungan and our other colleagues, Muzaffer Kaya, Kıvanç Ersoy arrested along with her, Meral Camcı on whom warrant has been issued, and Chris Stephenson departed have practiced their freedom of expression under constitutional guarantee.

“We demand our colleagues to be released immediately so they can come together with their students again”. (BK/TK)

While most of humanity rejoices the liberation of Palmyra, some Western pundits have trouble deciding which is worse, the Islamic State or ‘Assad’. After the most hardcore of the West’s warmongering press finally acknowledged that the Syrian ‘regime’ had ‘recaptured’ Palmyra, accusations started flying that everything was ‘Assad’s fault’ as he originally lost the city to ISIL. Moon of Alabama explains why this narrative is false. A better question to ask might be, how the Iraqi government installed by the US occupiers lost Mosul to ISIL, while the last of the US occupying forces where still in the country? Either the US cannot take care and protect its client regimes, or (even worse) creation of the Islamic State was in US interests and plans all along.

But how did the Islamic State capture its capital, Raqqa? It did not. Raqqa was captured in March 2013 by Syrian rebels, i.e. “FSA” and their al-Nusra Front allies. Most likely the operation happened like the capture of Idlib in March 2015, under the command of a US operations room in Turkey and with full access to real time American satellite imagery. The Wikipedia article on the battle has more details:

Battle of Raqqa – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The battle, on the opposition side, was primarily led by the Islamist jihadist group Al-Nusra Front. Ar-Raqqah was not initially a rebel stronghold. The city itself saw several small protests at the beginning of the uprising, but these soon subsided. The anti-Assad elements within the city also remained peaceful until the end of 2012.

Furthermore, previous pro-government tribal coalitions and the presence of more than a half million displaced Syrians, mostly from Idlib, Deir ez-Zor and Aleppo, served to strengthen the Syrian government’s opinion that Ar-Raqqah was relatively safe. By early 2013, the Syrian opposition had secured much of the north of Syria, but had yet to seize control of a major city. The rebels planned an offensive to seize control of Ar-Raqqah where government forces were in control, effectively giving the opposition control over a much greater portion of northern Syria.

As of 2016 the Kurds control the north of Syria, after having driven out the Islamic State. Raqqa was never a rebel stronghold. Where then did all the FSA and Nusra fighters come from that captured Raqqa? It is evident that they mostly came across the border from Turkey, pushing their way through Kurdish controlled areas.

An example is the assault on Ras Al-Ayn detailed in this long article on A Closer Look On Syria. The border town of Ras Al-Ayn, northeast of Raqqa was attacked in late 2012 and early 2103 by FSA and Nusra fighters coming from Turkey. A brief summary of the events is included in this February 1st, 2013 letter from the Syrian Kurds in the UK on behalf of the Kurdish National Council to British Foreign Minister William Hague.

Dear Mr William Hague,

We, the representatives of the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan and the Kurdish National Council in the Uk, would like to draw your attention to the recent attack on civilians in Sere Kaniye (Ras al Ain).

Armed Selafist groups entered the region from Turkey supported and facilitated by the Turkish military and regional powers with the aim of destabilising the relatively peaceful region and dragging it into a violent sectarian war. Since the second attack began on 16 January 2013 armed mercenaries have been using heavy weapons to shell the city killing civilians indiscriminately, many civilian Kurds have been taken as hostages and their houses and properties have been destroyed or looted.

Thousands of vulnerable women and children have become displaced through fleeing from the horror. Since July 2012 the Syrian Kurds have been managing and governing themselves and their region democratically and peacefully. They actively contribute in building a democratic, plural and united Syria where all Syrians can enjoy living together freely and thus regional stability, democracy and peaceful co-existence. We earnestly call on the UK government and its Foreign Ministry to put pressure on the NATO allied Turkish government to end its foreign intervention by supporting those terrorist affiliated groups that are destabilising the Syrian Kurdish region.

We also ask that the UK’s Foreign Minister to persuade the Syrian opposition to end supporting those armed groups and demand their withdrawal from the peaceful Kurdish region and so respect the legitimate Kurdish national rights. Thank you for your kind attention and we look forward to your assessment.

Yours Sincerely,

Representatives of: Kurdish National Council, People’s Council of western Kurdistan in the UK.

 Also, the Vatican News Agency Fides reports in November 2012:

A young Christian of the opposition: “Minorities crushed in the conflict”

In the middle of the night, at two on 8 November, residents of Ras al-Ain were awakened by the sound of explosions, of helicopters and machine guns. They were the fighters of the Free Army and Turkish helicopters reached Syrian territory and easily conquered the border crossing and the city.

The military began to seize civilian homes to use them as fighting positions. My grandfather’s home was among those that were seized, where there were women, children and paralyzed grandmother. All Civilians were Expelled from their homes in pajamas, without being able to take documents, money or anything else. Military and combatants went further: with a ‘black list’, they went from one house to another looking for their enemies.

[…] In Ras al-Ain, the victims were not only Christians, but Christians were the only ones who were immediately expelled from their homes, carrying babies in their arms, put to flight the streets strewn with corpses. […] Kurds, Arabs and Christians, more than 70.000 people fled, mostly to Hassake. Within hours, the city became a ghost town. The Alawites had the worst destiny: killed because Alawites. […] We have always accused the regime of these disasters. Now we talk about the crimes that we have seen with our eyes, perpetrated by the Free Syrian Army.”

ISIL beheading an al-Qaeda leader in Raqqa in June 2015 (source)

A groundbreaking study published today in Seismological Research Letters has demonstrated a link, for the first time, between hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for oil and gas and earthquakes. 

“Hydraulic Fracturing and Seismicity in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin” confirms the horizontal drilling technique (which in essence creates an underground mini-earthquake to open up fissures for oil and gas extraction) is responsible for earthquakes, above and beyond what is already canonized in the scientific literature. We already knew that injecting fracking waste into underground wells can cause quakes. But now it’s not just the injections wells, but the fracking procedure itself that can be linked to seismicity.

The study focuses on an area in Canada known as the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB), one of Canada’s biggest shale basins and tight oil and gas producing regions.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The researchers “compared the relationship of 12,289 fracking wells and 1,236 wastewater disposal wells to magnitude 3 or larger earthquakes in an area of 454,000 square kilometers near the border between Alberta and British Columbia, between 1985 and 2015,” explained a press release. They “found 39 hydraulic fracturing wells (0.3% of the total of fracking wells studied), and 17 wastewater disposal wells (1% of the disposal wells studied) that could be linked to earthquakes of magnitude 3 or larger.”

If that sounds like a fairly small percentage, Atkinson and colleagues readily admit that is the case in the study. Yet they also write that it could portend worse things to come as more and more wells are fracked in the region.

“It is important to acknowledge that associated seismicity occurs for only a small proportion of hydraulic fracturing operations,” they wrote, proceeding to cite another paper written in 2015 by lead author Gail Atkinson — a professor of earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario —  and colleagues on the impacts of induced seismicity. “However, considering that thousands of such wells are drilled every year in the WCSB, the implications for hazard are nevertheless significant, particularly if multiple operations are located in close proximity to critical infrastructure.”

The Western Canada Sedimentary Basin uses less water during fracking operations than in places like the current mecca of frackquakes, Oklahoma. In the paper, the authors also conclude that the massive amount of wastewater incidents in the U.S. may cloak the impact fracking has had on induced seismicity in the central U.S., which calls for more scientific investigation.

“[I]t is possible that a higher-than-recognized fraction of induced earthquakes in the United States are linked to hydraulic fracturing, but their identification may be masked by more abundant wastewater-induced events,” they explained.

One of their most important finds appears to be the definitive link the researchers found between fracking and earthquakes in the region, rather than the sheer number of quakes. They also found no link between the amount of fluid pumped into the ground during fracking and the size of the earthquake.

“More than 60% of these quakes are linked to hydraulic fracture, about 30-35% come from disposal wells, and only 5 to 10% of the earthquakes have a natural tectonic origin,” said Atkinson in a press release. And “if there isn’t any relationship between the maximum magnitude and the fluid disposal, then potentially one could trigger larger events if the fluid pressures find their way to a suitably stressed fault.”

What’s the big takeaway, then, according to the paper? Of course, a call for more investigation, but in the meantime they also call for more thoughtful public policy moving forward.

“The nature of the hazard from hydraulic fracturing has received less attention than that from wastewater disposal, but it is clearly of both regional and global importance,” they wrote in the conclusion. “The likelihood of damaging earthquakes and their potential consequences needs to be carefully assessed when planning HF operations in this area.”

While thoroughly studying the bundles of documents obtained upon gathering material for its new film on Daesh’s activities in Syria, the RT Documentary crew discovered that in addition to routing oil and weapons trafficking through Turkey, the jihadists also organized trade of looted antiquities, with a separate department to manage the business.

According to a document that the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) turned over to an RT Documentary crew during their visit to Syria, there is the one that says that the so-called Ministry of Natural Resources established by Daesh to hold grip of the oil operations had a separate “Department of Artifacts.”

Fakhreddin’s Castle (top), is pictured in the historical city of Palmyra, Syria (Reuters / Nour Fourat)

“One of the new documents is a note that has the same letterhead of Daesh’s (ISIS,ISIL’s)  Ministry of Natural Resources as the oil bills of sale, which we discussed last time,” says RT journalist, whose name has not been revealed for security reasons.

The note, which seems to address a checkpoint sentry, asks him to let a Turkish antiquity seller to cross into Syria.

“To the brother responsible for the border, Please assist the passage of brother Hussein Hania Sarira through your post along with the man from Turkey – the artifacts trader, for the purpose of working with us in the department of artifacts in the Ministry of Natural Resources. May Allah bless you, Loving brother Abu Uafa At-Tunisi,” the note reads.

The crew says that while filming in the town of Shaddadi, located in the Syrian province Hasakah, RT reporters came across archaeological pieces, fragments of various ceramic pots.

Abandoned in a tunnel, which ISIS fighters fled through, they were discovered by the Kurdish YPG troops after they liberated Shaddadi from jihadists in the summer of 2015.

The note therefore proves that Daesh militants have been selling the antiquities they had looted via the same trade route, which, they used to bring in weapons and supplies.

Many of the artifacts, some worth thousands of dollars apiece, have been turning up in antique markets from eastern Europe to the US.

The YPG also gave RT a video interview featuring a Daesh militant after he was captured by the Kurds in the Syrian town of Tell Abiad on border with Turkey, who also confirms that there was a very loose control of the border from Turkey.

“They sent me to serve in Tel Abyad [Tell Abiad] on the Turkish border. Sometimes we even crossed the Turkish border and served there. We saw the Turkish army passing by, but there was never any kind of conflict between us,” militant Abu Ayub Ansari recalled.

He also said that it were the Kurds who stopped the free flow between the Turks and the militants.

He stressed that after Kurdish militia had recaptured Tell Abiad “the connection was lost and foreign fighters could not get in” and “the communication with the Turkish security services was broken.”

The Kurdish control of the town hit the extremist financially as “the tankers can’t drive through the area,” and “the goods that came from Turkey have also disappeared,” Ansari added.

The RT crew has previously released the unique documents which reveal the scope of Daesh’s illicit oil business via Turkey and the revenue it provided.

The proof included captive Daesh fighter interview, testifying that the oil which Daesh produces was sold to Turkey in amounts so great that it is impossible that the Turkish authorities are unaware of this, with Ankara sending funds, arms and food to Syria.

Among the obtained documents there are also some which shed the light on what it was like to live under their reign of terror.

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) As admitted by secret Russian police files that are part of the Hoover Institution’s archives, the Russian Tsar’s secret police set off bombs and killed people in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. And see this.

(2) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this.

(3) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust to seek safety in Palestine, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).

(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident.  For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):

“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

• The murder of the Turkish Prime Minister (1960)

• Bombings in Portugal (1966)

• The Piazza Fontana massacre in Italy (1969)

• Terror attacks in Turkey (1971)

• The Peteano bombing in Italy (1972)

• Shootings in Brescia, Italy and a bombing on an Italian train (1974)

• Shootings in Istanbul, Turkey (1977)

• The Atocha massacre in Madrid, Spain (1977)

• The abduction and murder of the Italian Prime Minister (1978) (and see this)

• The bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy (1980)

• Shooting and killing 28 shoppers in Brabant county, Belgium (1985)

Painting by Anthony Freda

(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.

(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.

***

The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.

(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.

(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.

(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(28) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(29) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(30) As reported by the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. luring foreign migrants into the country, executing them in a staged gun battle, and then claiming they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”.  Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.

(31) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(32) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have alleged that 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.).

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(33) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

(34) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(35) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(36) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.

(37) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(38) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists…

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”

(39) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(40) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs.  While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out.  The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.

(41) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(42) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(43) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)

(44) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(45) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(46) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts  2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(47) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.

(48) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(49) A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat.

(50) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(51) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(52) Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(53) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.

(54) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(55) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(56) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

(57) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants

(58) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot them during a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes:

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.

(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)

(59) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

(60) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags. Similarly, the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom said:

By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

(audio here).

(61) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
– Josef Stalin

Postscript:  The media plays along as well. For example, in 2012, NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, was kidnapped in Syria. NBC News said that Engel and his reporting team had been abducted by forces affiliated with the Syrian government. He reported that they only escaped when some anti-Syrian government rebels killed some of the pro-government kidnappers.

However,  NBC subsequently admitted that this was false.  It turns out that they were really kidnapped by people associated with the U.S. backed rebels fighting the Syrian government … who wore the clothes of, faked the accent of, scrawled the slogans of, and otherwise falsely impersonated the mannerisms of people associated with the Syrian government. In reality, the group that kidnapped Engel and his crew were affiliated with the U.S.-supported Free Syrian Army, and NBC should have known that it was blaming the wrong party. See the New York Times and the Nation’s reporting.

Of course, sometimes atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is sort of like false flag terror … without the terror.

For example:

• The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war

• One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals.  Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress

• Another central lie used to justify the Gulf War was the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)

• Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this

• Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:

had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

• Everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. More

• The entire torture program was geared towards obtaining false confessions linking Iraq and 9/11

• CIA agents and documents admit that the agency gave Iran plans for building nuclear weapons … so it could frame Iran for trying to build the bomb

• The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by false reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this

It is the great moral message these days amongst the righteous Western participants in Middle Eastern crusades: restrict tyranny and despotism, fight theocracies, embrace values of openness.  Such a mission is seemingly imperilled by the workings of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ever ready to purchase arms in its own efforts to preserve the status quo and its particular brand of theocratic rule.

A week prior to the attacks in Brussels which left 34 dead, Saudi-led coalition forces bombed the market place in Mastaba, Yemen.  That particularly grizzly assault left 106 dead.  Twenty-four hour coverage from France 24 to CNN proved skimpy when compared to Brussels.

This inconsistency – both in terms of coverage, but also in terms of policy towards Saudi Arabia by Western states – has not gone unnoticed.  An international legal movement, of sorts, has developed in angry defiance of such foreign policy complicity.  University of Montreal constitutional law professor Daniel Turp decided to take matters into his own hands by filing his own suit in the Canadian federal court.[1]

Turp’s argument for judicial review, directed against Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stephane Dion, is clear and to the point, describing Saudi Arabia as “an Islamic absolute monarchy” with an arms expenditure budget greater in proportion to its GDP than any other state.  It covers an attempt to examine “the issuance of export permits for light armoured vehicles (LAV) to be delivered by General Dynamics Lands Systems Canada (GDLS-C) to Saudi Arabia.”

Canadian laws and regulations restricting the export of weapons that might be used in violation of human rights come into play here, notably the Export and Import Permits Act (RSC 1985) and the 1986 guidelines.

In 1986, the Canadian Department of External Affairs issued a press release announcing the adoption of a new Exports Control Policy on military equipment. It emphasised the point that Canada:

“will not allow the export of military equipment to countries whose governments have a persistent record of serious violations of human rights of their citizens; unless it can be demonstrated that there is no reasonable risk that the goods might be used against the civilian population.”

Turp also seeks a declaration that the issuance of such export permits would also be illegal because of the Geneva Conventions Act, and an excess of power on the part of the Minister:

“knowing that in [Saudi Arabia] human rights are subject to serious and repeated violations and knowing that there is a reasonable risk that the LAV might be used against the civilian population.”

Last month, the European Parliament, in light of a petition with the signatures of 750,000 European citizens, expressed Turp’s concerns in a broader sense, calling for the European Union to impose an embargo on arms to the Kingdom. Such a measure would affect the export regimes in place for Britain and France in particular, both allies with Saudi Arabia.  German military companies also feature in the ledger.

“This is about Yemen,” argued Richard Howitt, a British left-of-centre lawmaker keen to place the issue on the agenda.  “The human rights violations have reached a level that means Europe is obliged to act and to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”[2]  Such a resolution, however, is non-binding.

In concrete terms, The Netherlands, in the wake of a vote in the Dutch parliament, decided to put an embargo in place.  Between 2001 and 2010, its arms sales to the Kingdom came in at a value of $43 million, though it has been policy since 2008 to keep exports to Saudi Arabia “restrictive” in nature.

In March, a resolution was passed calling on the Dutch government to halt such arms to the Kingdom, claiming it was “guilty of violating international humanitarian law in Yemen.”  The resolution made reference to a UN report leaked in January noting that 119 sorties carried out by the Saudi-led force in Yemen constituted violations of international law.[3]

The Saudis will be troubled by such notes of disagreement with its Yemen approach, but not overly so.  The United States, for one, has not been swayed to change course on the subject. If anything, the Obama administration has made it clear that it will reassure the Kingdom of military assistance and overall backing, especially in light of the Teheran nuclear deal.

As Sarah Leah Whitson explains in the Los Angeles Times (Mar 30), the US Defense Department has even gone further, providing “targeting assistance” for the coalition in its Yemen strikes. “Did it assist with the strike on the market?”

Riyadh continues to insist that such actions as those in Yemen are fundamental in the name of balance.  In the words of Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the EU, Abdulrahman Al Ahmed, “the larger ramifications of our not taking action in Yemen would have had devastating geopolitical consequences for the kingdom, Europe and the broader West as well.”  When in doubt, treat any murderous military intervention as necessary in the name of rescuing all of civilization.

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

Notes:

1. https://theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/03/Turp-Lawsuit-1.pdf
2. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-saudi-arms-idUSKCN0VY1K1
3. http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/dutch-parliament-calls-arms-embargo-saudi-arabia-over-yemen-war-1861032989

Accounts of US and European intelligence’s monitoring of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) make ever clearer that the key ingredient in ISIS terror attacks in Brussels and last year in Paris was the support of factions of the NATO countries’ intelligence apparatus for ISIS in the war in Syria.

As NATO officials sought to use ISIS militias and terror attacks to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and to discredit Assad’s accusations that they was supporting terrorists in Syria, they ignored mounting signs that ISIS was developing a broad terror network in Europe. This reckless policy led to substantial infighting inside the intelligence services, which was however hidden from the public.

On March 22 in Brussels, ISIS operatives identified as terrorists to state authorities, the El Bakraoui brothers, were able to prepare and carry out attacks, even though Belgian officials had been warned of the timing and targets of the attacks. Now, as NATO powers debate a shift towards pro-Russian forces and away from ISIS in Syria, factional infighting in the intelligence apparatus is erupting into the open. This is the content of yesterday’s lengthy New York Times feature article, titled “How ISIS built the machinery of terror under Europe’s gaze.”

The article is based on internal documents and testimony of US and French intelligence operatives of how they monitored ISIS operatives returning to Europe from Syria and apprehended several preparing attacks in Europe. It presents extended accounts of the travel plans, social media postings, and political views of several European recruits to ISIS who were preparing attacks in Europe, making clear that ISIS is thoroughly penetrated and monitored by NATO intelligence agencies. This makes it all the remarkable that ISIS was allowed to repeatedly carry out large-scale attacks in Europe.

The Times notes, “Officials now say the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down.”

In fact, sections of the intelligence establishment were aware and concerned from shortly after the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011 that the Islamist militias they were mobilizing against Assad would organize terror attacks not only in Syria, but also in Europe.

The Times cites retired US General Michael T. Flynn, the leader of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 2012 to 2014. Flynn was a key source in a report by Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books in January, detailing contacts of US military intelligence with Russian and Syrian officials, which the DIA hoped to use in a war against ISIS.

Flynn tells the Times, “This didn’t all of a sudden pop up in the last six months. They have been contemplating external attacks ever since the group moved into Syria in 2012.”

These signals included the May 24, 2014 shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels carried out by Mehdi Nemmouche, an ISIS fighter from nearby Roubaix, in France. The Times notes, “Even when the police found a video in his possession, in which he claimed responsibility for the attack next to a flag bearing the words ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,’ Belgium’s deputy prosecutor, Ine Van Wymersch, dismissed any connection. ‘He probably acted alone,’ she told reporters at the time.”

In fact, a review of Nemmouche’s phone records by the intelligence agencies showed that he was in close touch with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the public face of ISIS’ social media recruiting operations, who subsequently led the November 13 ISIS attack in Paris.

The Times writes, “In the months before the Jewish museum attack, Mr. Nemmouche’s phone records reveal that he made a 24-minute call to Mr. Abaaoud, according to a 55-page report by the French National Police’s anti-terror unit in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.”

The article follows in detail the movements of ISIS operative Reda Hame, a 29-year-old computer technician from Paris who traveled to Syria in 2014 and volunteered, apparently after some initial reluctance, to return and carry out terror attacks in Europe. Despite attempts to hide and encrypt his communications with Abaaoud, Hame was apprehended in August of last year before he could carry out any attacks.

He is apparently one of 21 such ISIS operatives who were arrested before carrying out their attacks. “It’s a factory over there,” Hame told French intelligence officials after his arrest, according to the Times. “They are doing everything possible to strike France, or else Europe.”

As sections of the intelligence establishment were well aware, a mass of information pointed to the fact that ISIS was preparing terror attacks in Europe. “All the signals were there. For anyone paying attention, these signals became deafening by mid-2014,” adds Michael S. Smith II, a counterterrorism analyst with private firm Kronos Advisory.

The main question that emerges from the Times ’ account, which it does not even bother to pose, is why intelligence agencies did not pay attention to the “deafening” signs that ISIS was preparing attacks in Europe. This also raises what role state agencies’ decision to downplay these reports played in ISIS’ ability to carry out the Paris and Brussels attacks—against Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, again in Paris in November, and now in Brussels—killing and wounding hundreds in Europe.

The central factor is that in the initial years of the war, there was broad support in the ruling classes of Europe and the United States for a proxy war for regime change against Assad relying on Islamist terror groups. In Europe, protocols were put in place so that thousands of Islamist fighters could travel to the Middle East, to train for war against Assad, with impunity.

Initial reports that NATO proxies were carrying out hundreds of terror bombings, like the report by the Arab League in early 2012, were denounced in the Western media. In the ruling class and reactionary layers of the affluent middle class, there was broad support for an imperialist war against Syria waged via terrorist methods. Middle class pseudo-left groups such as the International Socialist Organization in the United States, the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and the Left Party in Germany enthusiastically promoted war with Syria.

War fever swept the New York Times, which published extensive, favorable portrayals of terror attacks in Syria by leading journalists. C.J. Chivers’ August 2012 video report “The Lions of Tawhid” detailed his stay with an Islamist militia, the Lions of Tawhid, that carried out truck bombings and killings near the Syrian city of Aleppo.

After criticisms emerged that the video showed the Lions of Tawhid carrying out a war crime by trying to use a prisoner as an unwitting suicide bomber, Chivers dismissed his critics as supporters of Assad on his blog, The Gun: “Where you stand on this probably depends on who you are. You might support this if you support the rebels and their cause. You won’t much like it if you are a member of a Syrian Mi-8 helicopter crew, or depend upon those aircraft and those crews for medevac and ammunition resupply.”

As these moods and views dominated in ruling circles, intelligence agencies ignored the mounting evidence that ISIS and similar groups linked to Al Qaeda were developing terror networks internationally. This underscores the fact that the main goal of the so-called “war on terror” is regime change and imperialist domination of the Middle East, not fighting terrorism. The Times report makes clear that the wars and the division of labor between the intelligence agencies and Islamist fighters have emerged as the main danger of terrorism in Europe today.

A number of questions remain, however, on how it was possible for the Charlie Hebdo, November 13, and Brussels attacks to proceed. In all cases, the attackers were high-ranking ISIS or Al Qaeda fighters well known to intelligence services: The Kouachi brothers were under state surveillance and spoke directly to Al Qaeda’s top leadership in the Arabian Peninsula. Abaaoud was known internationally and publicly as a leading ISIS official. And the El Bakraoui brothers in Brussels were violent felons known as terrorists to the intelligence services.

Given that the intelligence services were able to identify and stop more obscure figures such as Reda Hame, it remains inexplicable how such top Islamist fighters were allowed to travel freely across Europe to prepare mass terror attacks.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. She can be reached at [email protected]

Palestinians whose livelihoods are forcibly enmeshed in Israel’s economic system are often used as human shields against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The frequent accusation made by critics is that boycotts of Israeli businesses, especially settlement businesses, will hurt the very Palestinians that BDS activists say they support.

At times, settlement advocates even deploy Palestinian spokespersons to speak positively about the higher wages they receive working for settlement businesses.

A new report released by UK-based Corporate Watch brings the voices of the Palestinian farmers and agricultural workers to the debate over how the BDS movement can best resist Israeli exploitation of their land and labor.

Corporate Watch’s report, titled, “Apartheid in the Fields: From Occupied Palestine to UK Supermarkets,” focuses on two of the most vulnerable segments of Palestinian society: residents of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.

Farming under siege

Anyone entering Gaza through the Erez checkpoint on the northern boundary with present-day Israel, traverses a long, fenced corridor running through the so-called “buffer zone” enforced by the Israeli military.

This poorly defined area ranges from 300 to 500 meters along the inside perimeter of Gaza.

Since 2008, the report states, more than 50 Palestinians have been killed in this zone. Four Palestinian civilians have been killed and more than 60 injured so far this year.

According to the UN monitoring group OCHA, this zone also takes up 17 percent of Gaza’s total area, making up to one third of its farmland unsafe for cultivation. Areas that once held olive and citrus trees have now been bulldozed by Israeli forces.

Corporate Watch says that even though Palestinians are routinely shot at from distances greater than 300 meters, farmers whose land lies near the border have no choice but to cultivate these areas despite the danger.

Economic warfare

In addition to the lethal violence routinely inflicted on Gaza, Israeli authorities enforce what they have called “economic warfare” – a de facto boycott of almost all agriculture originating in Gaza.

Virtually no produce from the enclave is allowed into Israeli or West Bank markets, traditionally Gaza’s biggest customers.

From the time Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza in 2007 up until November 2014, a monthly average of 13.5 trucks left Gaza carrying exports – just one percent of the monthly average of goods shipped out just prior to the closure.

By contrast, already this year more than 22,000 trucks have entered Gaza, many carrying Israeli produce considered unsuitable for international export.

Dumping it on the captive market in Gaza further undermines local farmers.

The trickle of exports that Israel permits from Gaza go primarily to European markets, but this is only allowed through Israeli export companies that profit from the situation by taking commissions and selling Gaza products for far higher prices than they pay the producers.

“The Israelis export Palestinian produce and export it with an Israeli label,” Taghrid Jooma of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees told Corporate Watch. “For example, they export roses from Gaza for nickels and dimes and sell them for a lot of money.”

Muhammad Zwaid of Gaza’s only export company, Palestine Crops, told Corporate Watch that part of the problem is that Palestine lacks its own bar code and so any produce exported through Israel carries an Israeli one.

“We have our own stickers,” said Zwaid, “but [Israeli export company] Arava has asked for them to be smaller and often Arava stickers are put on top of ours. Our produce is taken inside Israel by the Israeli company and then taken to a packing station where it is repackaged.”

Supporting BDS

Corporate Watch reports that while many of the farmers they interviewed support BDS, they also want the opportunity to export their produce and make a living.

This presents a quandary because a boycott of Israeli export companies like Arava will include Palestinian products as well.

Even so, the farmers interviewed maintained their support for BDS as a long-term strategy that outweighs the limited benefits of current export levels.

“What we need is people to stand with us against the occupation,” said one farmer from al-Zaytoun. “By supporting BDS you support the farmers, both directly and indirectly and this is a good thing for people here in Gaza.”

“Farmers all over the Gaza Strip were particularly keen on getting the right to label their produce as Palestinian, ideally with its own country code, even if they have to export through Israel,” the report states. “Country of origin labels for Gaza goods is something the solidarity movement could lobby for.”

Mohsen Abu Ramadan, from the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network, suggested to Corporate Watch that one strategy could be to engage farming unions around the world to urge them to endorse BDS in solidarity with Palestinian farmers.

Bulldozing the Jordan Valley

While Israel’s siege and deadly assaults have rightly focused international attention on Gaza, Israel’s actions in the Jordan Valley have generated far less outrage.

Yet well before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current extreme right-wing government made clear its opposition to a viable Palestinian state, he had pledged to never give up control of this agriculturally rich region under any two-state configuration.

Occupation authorities refuse virtually all Palestinian requests to build or improve infrastructure in the region. Residents face severe restrictions on access to electricity and water as well as other basic infrastructure.

Demolitions of Palestinian homes have increased in recent months, and in February, Israel carried out the largest demolition in a decade.

Routine violations

In the Jordan Valley, settlement agriculture often relies on Palestinian labor – including child labor – to do hazardous jobs for a fraction of what would be paid to Israeli citizens.

Though entitled to the Israeli minimum wage according to a high court ruling, many workers are routinely paid as little as half that.

Palestinians Zaid and Rashid are employed in Beqa’ot, a settlement built on land seized from Palestinians. They receive wages of $20 per day, about a quarter of which goes for daily transport.

They receive no paid holidays despite the fact that the Israeli government advises that workers are entitled to 14 days paid holiday and must receive a written contract and payslips from their employer.

Although they are members of a Palestinian trade union, their settler employers do not recognize any collective bargaining rights.

Workers are moreover frequently pressured into signing documents in Hebrew — which they cannot read — stating that they are being treated according to law. Workers fear being fired if they do not sign.

While Palestinians working in settlements are also required to obtain work permits from the military occupation authorities, several of those interviewed for the report had no such permits, leading to suspicions that employers may be attempting to further circumvent Israeli labor laws by using undocumented workers.

Both Zaid and Rashid told Corporate Watch they back the call for a boycott of Israeli agricultural companies.

“We support the boycott even if we lose our work,” Zaid said. “We might lose our jobs but we will get back our land. We will be able to work without being treated as slaves.”

Label games

Corporate Watch profiles the five main Israeli export companies: Arava, Mehadrin, Hadiklaim, Edom and the now defunct Carmel Agrexco.

A common practice by these companies is mislabeling goods as “Produce of Israel” even when they are grown and packed in West Bank settlements that are illegal under international law.

Corporate Watch also documents the varying degrees of success that BDS activists have had in targeting these companies.

Since 2009, following pressure from activists, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued guidelines stating it is an “offense” to mislabel settlement goods as “Produce of Israel.”

Similar guidelines approved by the European Union late last year outraged Israeli politicians, despite the fact that the same practice has been United States policy since the mid-1990s.

Despite the guidelines, however, UK stores continue to stock Israeli products with misleading labels.

As recently as 2013, Corporate Watch found labels from the Israeli settlement of Tomer for the Morrisons store brand of Medjoul dates.

In another example, the Aldi chain was caught selling grapefruits from Carmel Agrexco labeled as products of Cyprus.

Beyond settlement boycotts

Of the supermarket chains targeted by BDS campaigns, only one, The Co-operative, has pledged to “no longer engage with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements.”

This means that not only would the Co-op not stock settlement produce, but that it would not buy produce grown in present-day Israel from companies that also have settlement operations.

This made it the first major European chain to take such a step.

Corporate Watch points out that while not directly supporting the settlement economy, those Israeli companies without settlement operations still pay taxes to the Israeli government, which supports its ongoing occupation, colonization and oppression of Palestinians.

It notes that the Co-op took a much stronger stance regarding apartheid-era South Africa, when it boycotted all South African products.

In accordance with the 2005 BDS call from Palestinian civil society, Corporate Watch advocates a full boycott of all Israeli goods.

Sham ‘unity’ regime creates further divisions in North African state

A half decade after the United States led destabilization and bombing of Libya, the attempts by imperialism to establish a stable neo-colonial dominated regime has not materialized.

On March 19, 2011, the Pentagon and other NATO forces began the aerial bombardment of the once most prosperous nation-state in Africa. After seven months of air strikes and support for an imperialist-directed ground operation by proxy rebel militias, thousands laid dead while millions were displaced amid the ruins of hundreds of development projects and government institutions.

Leaders of the U.S., Britain, France, Italy and other western countries in cooperation with their allies in Africa and the Middle East lauded the Libyan war as a success story for the remaking of the region where rebel forces would do the dirty work of international capitalism. Hillary Clinton, the-then Secretary of State under the first administration of U.S. President Barack Obama laughed at the lynching of former Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi saying “we came, we saw, he died.” 

Libya is at present one of the most poor and unstable states on the continent having become a source of instability throughout the large sections of Africa and the Middle East. The once lucrative oil industry which supplied resources for the building of hefty national budget surpluses has all but failed with substantial sections of extraction locations and refineries destroyed in fighting between various rival groups backed by various western-allied governments including Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Under Gaddafi Libya enjoyed widespread recognition and respect among African Union member-states. The transition from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to the African Union in 2002 was based upon the Sirte Declaration drafted by OAU affiliates in 1999.

Many of the ideas embodied in the Sirte Declaration and the subsequent founding documents of the AU attempted to address the need for greater African unity within the realms of economic, political, telecommunications, technical and military spheres. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the former leader of Ghana during 1951-1966, and a co-founder of the OAU in 1963, had called for a union government of Africa as the best method to fight the dominance of imperialism.

The Gaddafi government had taken up this idea fostering cooperation and coordination across the African continent. Obviously these political activities alarmed the West prompting the destabilization and consequent overthrow of the Libyan state which remains in shambles.

“Unity” Regime Remains Elusive

Recent developments surrounding the attempt to install a new so-called “unity government” has prompted the declaration of a “state of emergency” by the Tripoli-based faction which drove out a rival group now based in the eastern city of Tobruk.

According to the website medafricatimes.com, “The reasons for the declaration were not officially stated but there are reports that the arrival of some members of the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli provoked it. Deputy prime ministers-designate Ahmed Maetig, Fathi Majberi and Abdelsalam Kajman and Mohamed Ammari, the Minister for Specialized Councils Affairs are said to be already in Tripoli ahead of prime minister-designate Fayez Serraj’s arrival in the next few days. The four members of the GNA are reportedly at the Palm City residential compound which is expected to host the Presidency headquarters. They will serve as the advance team ahead of Serraj’s arrival.” (March 25)

Nonetheless, numerous analysts view the imposition of the GNA as only bringing about more chaos and instability. Indicative of this was the inability of UN envoy to Libya, German diplomat Martin Kobler, to land his aircraft in Tripoli.

Kobler said in a Twitter post on March 23 that “Again had to cancel flight to Tripoli… UN must have the right to fly (to) Tripoli.” The GNA has not been formally accepted and authorized by either of the rival regimes. However, the GNA announced in March that it was assuming control on the basis of a petition signed by a narrow majority of Libya’s so-called “lawmakers.”

The plan for a coalition junta is designed to pave the way for a large-scale 6,000-person Pentagon and NATO-led intervention force under the rubric of the United Nations and brokered by Martin Kobler.

Having lost faith in the local militias and political surrogates to provide any semblance of stability in Libya, the U.S. and other NATO states are aiming at sending in a conventional military force to impose the desired neo-colonial dominated regime that would ensure compliance with the foreign policy imperatives of Washington, London, Paris and Brussels.

In an article published by the military intelligence website Stratfor Enterprises, LLC (stratfor.com), it notes “Western forces may soon intervene in Libya, which has been bitterly divided since the down fall of former leader Moammar Gadhafi. Two governments have been created, one in the west and one in the east, and neither recognized the legitimacy of the other. This is particularly problematic since Western intervention is contingent on a viable, singular Libyan government.” (March 21)

This publication stresses that the putative success of the United Nations engineered GNA could be dependent upon the Misrata militia which helps to prop-up the General National Congress regime that has taken over the capital of Tripoli. The militia gained a reputation during the war of regime-change in 2011 as being one of the most violent and racist in the campaign to overthrow the Jamahiriya system under Gaddafi.

On March 21, Stratfor emphasized that: “Over the past few days, several senior members of the Misratan militia have publicly supported the unity government, calling on the head of Libya’s Tripoli-based government to resign and cede power to the GNA’s proposed prime minister, Faiz Serraj. The Misratan militia’s move comes as the group ramps up its cooperation with the West. Within the past few months, the militia has benefited from training by U.S. and British special operations forces, and its support for the new government will play an important role in the GNA’s success. Other militias in western Libya have joined the Misratan militia in backing the unity government as well.”

Regional Ally of U.S. Reveals Imperialist Regional Plans

Jordanian King Abdullah in a January briefing before the U.S. Senate confirmed the role of Britain in Libya through its Special Air Services (SAS). A leaked memorandum from the meeting with the Senators revealed several aspects of western foreign policy within the regions of Africa and the Middle East saying:

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, ‘believes in a radical Islamic solution to the problems in the region’ and the ‘fact that terrorists are going to Europe is part of Turkish policy, and Turkey keeps getting a slap on the hand, but they get off the hook.’

Intelligence agencies want to keep terrorist websites ‘open so they can use them to track extremists’ and Google had told the Jordanian monarch ‘they have 500 people working on this.’

Israel ‘looks the other way’ at the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra on its border with Syria because ‘they regard them as an opposition to Hezbollah.’

Jordan is looking at al-Shabaab because no one was really looking at the issue, and we cannot separate this issue, and the need to look at all the hotspots in the map. We have a rapid deployment force that will stand with the British and Kenya and is ready to go over the border [into Somalia]. (Randeep Ramesh, March 25)

Libya has become a pariah throughout the regions of North and West Africa due to the lawless atmosphere characterized by human trafficking, the harboring of extremist groups bent on destruction, an ongoing economic crisis exemplified by serious damage to the oil industry and the growing presence of U.S. and

Trump’s AIPAC Speech Attacks Iran and the Palestinians while Praising Israel’s “Democracy”

U.S. Presidential candidate and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump showed his true colors at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). “I came here to speak to you about where I stand on the future of American relations with our strategic ally, our unbreakable friendship and our cultural brother, the only democracy in the Middle East, the state of Israel.” Yes, he is right, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East for Jews, not the Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews (Ethiopian women were sterilized before entering the state of Israel so they won’t produce dark-skinned babies on Jewish land), and Palestinians who live as second-class citizens within the state of Israel. Trump is adamant about dismantling the Iran Nuclear Deal recently passed between the West (P-5+1) and the Iranian government when he said “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

Trump indirectly suggested that Iran is a danger to the world community (although Israel is an undeclared nuclear power) when he said

“I have been in business a long time. I know deal-making. And let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic for America, for Israel and for the whole of the Middle East.”

He said that Iran is a state sponsor of terror“The problem here is fundamental. We’ve rewarded the world’s leading state sponsor of terror with $150 billion, and we received absolutely nothing in return.” Trump said he has studied the issue in great length on Iran’s terrorist activities around the world “I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else.” I guess Trump just forgot to mention that it was the U.S. government who created Al-Qaeda, ISIS and even the Contras in Nicaragua, but that is not an important fact to consider. Trump made it clear that Iran is a danger to Israel which is a big problem he will deal with aggressively if he is elected to the White house:

Believe me. Oh, believe me. And it’s a bad deal. The biggest concern with the deal is not necessarily that Iran is going to violate it because already, you know, as you know, it has, the bigger problem is that they can keep the terms and still get the bomb by simply running out the clock. And of course, they’ll keep the billions and billions of dollars that we so stupidly and foolishly gave them. The deal doesn’t even require Iran to dismantle its military nuclear capability. Yes, it places limits on its military nuclear program for only a certain number of years, but when those restrictions expire, Iran will have an industrial-sized, military nuclear capability ready to go and with zero provision for delay, no matter how bad Iran’s behavior is. Terrible, terrible situation that we are all placed in and especially Israel.

When I’m president, I will adopt a strategy that focuses on three things when it comes to Iran. First, we will stand up to Iran’s aggressive push to destabilize and dominate the region. Iran is a very big problem and will continue to be. But if I’m not elected president, I know how to deal with trouble. And believe me, that’s why I’m going to be elected president, folks

It was music to the ears for AIPAC. Trump said everything they wanted to hear about the Iranian Nuclear Deal. But it did not stop there:

Iran is a problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon, a problem in Yemen and will be a very, very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally every day, Iran provides more and better weapons to support their puppet states. Hezbollah, Lebanon received — and I’ll tell you what, it has received sophisticated anti-ship weapons, anti-aircraft weapons and GPS systems and rockets like very few people anywhere in the world and certainly very few countries have. Now they’re in Syria trying to establish another front against Israel from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

In Gaza, Iran is supporting Hamas and Islamic jihad. And in the West Bank, they’re openly offering Palestinians $7,000 per terror attack and $30,000 for every Palestinian terrorist’s home that’s been destroyed. A deplorable, deplorable situation. Iran is financing military forces throughout the Middle East and it’s absolutely incredible that we handed them over $150 billion to do even more toward the many horrible acts of terror.

Secondly, we will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network which is big and powerful, but not powerful like us. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five years, Iran has perpetuated terror attacks in 25 different countries on five continents. They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the Western Hemisphere, very close to home. Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world. And we will work to dismantle that reach, believe me, believe me.

Third, at the very least, we must enforce the terms of the previous deal to hold Iran totally accountable. And we will enforce it like you’ve never seen a contract enforced before, folks, believe me. Iran has already, since the deal is in place, test-fired ballistic missiles three times. Those ballistic missiles, with a range of 1,250 miles, were designed to intimidate not only Israel, which is only 600 miles away, but also intended to frighten Europe and someday maybe hit even the United States. And we’re not going to let that happen. We’re not letting it happen. And we’re not letting it happen to Israel, believe me. Thank you. Thank you.

Do you want to hear something really shocking? As many of the great people in this room know, painted on those missiles in both Hebrew and Farsi were the words “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.” You can forget that

Iran has collaborated with the Iraqi and Syrian governments in the fight against ISIS, Al-Nusra and Al Qaeda. In fact, it is the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and Qatar who has armed and funded and gave safe-passage to terrorists operating in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Israel has collaborated with Sunni-dominated states to counter the Shiite-led states such as Iran. Trump is concerned about Saudi Arabia (a state sponsor of terror and one of the worst human rights abusers in the world) who wants to weaken Iran’s influence in the region by any means which includes starting a war (Saudi Arabia would commit suicide if they decided to go to war against Iran).

Donald Trump and the Palestinians

Trump says that the United Nations is not a friend to the U.S. and Israel. He says a deal imposed by the United Nations to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be a disaster because it would “delegitimize” Israel and “reward”the Palestinians with the right to commit terrorism against Israeli’s and Americans:

The United Nations is not a friend of democracy, it’s not a friend to freedom, it’s not a friend even to the United States of America where, as you know, it has its home. And it surely is not a friend to Israel. With President Obama in his final year — yea! He may be the worst thing to ever happen to Israel, believe me, believe me. And you know it and you know it better than anybody. So with the president in his final year, discussions have been swirling about an attempt to bring a Security Council resolution on terms of an eventual agreement between Israel and Palestine. Let me be clear: An agreement imposed by the United Nations would be a total and complete disaster. The United States must oppose this resolution and use the power of our veto, which I will use as president 100 percent. When people ask why, it’s because that’s not how you make a deal. Deals are made when parties come together, they come to a table and they negotiate. Each side must give up something. It’s values. I mean, we have to do something where there’s value in exchange for something that it requires. That’s what a deal is. A deal is really something that when we impose it on Israel and Palestine, we bring together a group of people that come up with something.

That’s not going to happen with the United Nations. It will only further, very importantly, it will only further delegitimize Israel. It will be a catastrophe and a disaster for Israel. It’s not going to happen, folks. And further, it would reward Palestinian terrorism because every day they’re stabbing Israelis and even Americans. Just last week, American Taylor Allen Force, a West Point grad, phenomenal young person who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was murdered in the street by a knife-wielding Palestinian. You don’t reward behavior like that. You cannot do it. There’s only one way you treat that kind of behavior. You have to confront it

The United Nations is no friend of Israel because Israel has violated countless U.N Security Council resolutions. Chris Hedges wrote an article in 2012 titled ‘Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All‘ which explains Israel’s refusal to comply with the U.N. Security Council resolution:

Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War”

Trump said Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert made “generous offers” to the Palestinian authority do show his complete ignorance on the facts:

You see, I know about deal-making. That’s what I do. I wrote “The Art of the Deal.” One of the best-selling, all-time — and I mean, seriously, I’m saying one of because I’ll be criticized when I say “the” so I’m going to be very diplomatic — one of… I’ll be criticized. I think it is number one, but why take a chance? One of the all-time best-selling books about deals and deal- making. To make a great deal, you need two willing participants. We know Israel is willing to deal. Israel has been trying.

That’s right. Israel has been trying to sit down at the negotiating table without preconditions for years. You had Camp David in 2000 where Prime Minister Barak made an incredible offer, maybe even too generous; Arafat rejected it. In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert made an equally generous offer. The Palestinian Authority rejected it also. Then John Kerry tried to come up with a framework and Abbas didn’t even respond, not even to the secretary of state of the United States of America. They didn’t even respond. When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on day one. Thank you. And when I say something, I mean it, I mean it.

I will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately. I have known him for many years and we’ll be able to work closely together to help bring stability and peace to Israel and to the entire region. Meanwhile, every single day you have rampant incitement and children being taught to hate Israel and to hate the Jews. It has to stop. When you live in a society where the firefighters are the heroes, little kids want to be firefighters. When you live in a society where athletes and movie stars are the heroes, little kids want to be athletes and movie stars.

In Palestinian society, the heroes are those who murder Jews. We can’t let this continue. We can’t let this happen any longer. You cannot achieve peace if terrorists are treated as martyrs. Glorifying terrorists is a tremendous barrier to peace. It is a horrible, horrible way to think. It’s a barrier that can’t be broken. That will end and it’ll end soon, believe me. In Palestinian textbooks and mosques, you’ve got a culture of hatred that has been fomenting there for years. And if we want to achieve peace, they’ve got to go out and they’ve got to start this educational process. They have to end education of hatred. They have to end it and now

Dan Glazebrook wrote an article for Counterpunch in 2014 titled ‘Israel’s Real Target is Not Hamas’ and said the following on Israeli’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” :

The 1999 election of a Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, made no difference, ushering in “a sustained commitment by Israel’s government to avoid full compliance with the Oslo agreement”, according to Jimmy Carter, most notably in the form of the greatest increase in illegal Israeli settlements that had yet taken place. The popular story that Barak had made a ‘generous offer’ on Palestinian statehood at negotiations in Taba in 2001, turned out to be a complete myth.

In the 2000s, the stakes were raised by the discovery of 1.4trillion cubic metres of natural gas in Gaza’s territorial waters, leading Israel to immediately strengthen its maritime blockade of Gaza to prevent Palestinian access to the reserves. But Palestinian sovereignty over this gas would obviously enormously strengthen the economic position of any future Palestinian state – and thus made the Israelis more determined than ever to prevent such a state from coming into being

Trump mentioned that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert made an equally generous offer and yes Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did reject Olmert’s plan. Why? According to the Times of Israel Olmert did not show the map to Abbas and expected him to except the offer:

Abbas said he supported the idea of territorial swaps, but that Olmert pressed him into agreeing to the plan without allowing him to study the proposed map. “He showed me a map. He didn’t give me a map,” Abbas said. “He told me, ‘This is the map’ and took it away. I respected his point of view, but how can I sign on something that I didn’t receive?”

That is like signing a contract without knowing what’s in the contract. Stephen Lendman wrote an article for Global Research in 2008 titled ‘Palestine: The Structure of Oppression and Dispossession’ and stated the facts on “Olmert’s generous offer”:

Implementation of the Cantonization Plan

In December 2003, Sharon launched some called “the maneuver of the century.” It refers to his 2005 Gaza “disengagement” as a ploy to secure greater West Bank control and give up nothing in return. In March 2006, he suffered a stroke, became incapacitated, and Ehud Olmert took over to “nail down” Sharon’s key objective – “a permanent solution, an end of the Occupation based on the notion of cantonization.” It would have to be unilateral as Palestinians were offered nothing.

Olmert conceived his “Convergence Plan” to control all land Israel wants and maintain separation from Palestinians. It’s the same idea as Begin’s Palestinian “autonomy,” Sharon’s cantonization, unilateral separation, the Matrix of Control, and the Oslo process while it lasted. A Palestinian state would be offered between Israel’s two eastern borders, a mere truncated territory with no potential and little sovereignty. It will be imposed unilaterally, but that contradicts the Road Map that requires negotiation. So Olmert switched his “convergence” to “realignment” – finessing a border one. Palestinians get their state but a “transitional” one with “provisional borders,” according the Road Map’s Phase II. The problem is no Phase III will follow to assure an “independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state.” If Israel manages this, it wins and Palestinians lose. It can claim the Occupation’s end, a two-state solution in place, and the conflict for the victor ended. So far, Palestinians want none of it. Olmert is beset with corruption problems, and final resolution remains a long way off

However, Trump said that “we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel. The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is absolutely, totally unbreakable.” “Unbreakable” is a code-word for U.S. presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and other politicians have used in the past in regards to the strong US-Israel relationship. The U.S. government continues to support Israel with foreign aid (est. at $3 billion annually). As for Trump working with the Israeli war criminal and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring peace to the Middle East is a lie. Netanyahu will bring more war to the Palestinians and increase Israeli settlements and possibly would lead an attack against Iran if Trump as U.S. President would allow him to.

Trump’s “I love Israel” moment at AIPAC

“I love the people in this room. I love Israel. I love Israel. I’ve been with Israel so long in terms of I’ve received some of my greatest honors from Israel, my father before me, incredible. My daughter, Ivanka, is about to have a beautiful Jewish baby.”

The hope the American people have for Donald Trump will fade quickly if he were to become the President of the United States although I do think Hillary Clinton will become the president because she has the support of major banking institutions, Zionist billionaires and Israel, the main-stream media and multinational corporations. As for the Middle East, a Trump Presidency would be disastrous for Iran (not that Clinton’s would be any better) and the Palestinians but extremely beneficial for Israel. Donald Trump’s speech to AIPAC reveals his true colors and that is a danger to the Middle East region.

After Thursday’s execution of a wounded young Palestinian man and his friend (who bled to death), was captured on tape, many details started emerging, including the involvement of an Israeli military medic in the crime.

In one of the videos that captured this extrajudicial assassination of the already seriously wounded, completely incapacitated Palestinian, the sound of an Israeli colonialist settler, who is also a medic and a cameraman, could be heard saying, “He is not dead… shoot him in the head.”

The second video shows an Israeli soldier executing the wounded Palestinian, Abdul-Fattah Sharif, with a gunshot to the head, after conspiring with an Israeli colonialist settler to drive his van forward to block surveillance cameras and prevent onlookers from documenting the crime. The soldiers and settler did not see the Palestinian who was filming from an upstairs window.

The Israeli medics did not attempt any first aid on the two Palestinians, leaving one of them to bleed to death and executing the other.

Issa Amro, the coordinator of the Youth against Settlements Coalition, said what happened “is clear proof that the Israeli soldiers and the medics conspire and cooperate in executing the Palestinians.”

“The fanatic Israeli colonialist settler medic, Ofer Yohanna, appeared in many videos prior to this incident, constantly delaying any medical help to wounded Palestinians,” Amro added, “This is what also happened in the cases of Hadeel Hashlamoun and the Sa’id al-Atrash, who were both killed, and Yasmeen az-Zaro, who was injured.”

He added that the Palestinians are now also suspecting that Israeli medics have killed wounded Palestinians, while transporting them in ambulances, including the case of Tareq Natsha, who did not suffer a serious injury, but died in an Israeli ambulance.”

“Such incidents show the mutual roles between the soldiers, medics, police and the settlers,” Amro said, “They seem to be implementing orders from higher up in the government and leadership, to assassinate wounded Palestinians.”

He added that the investigations conducted by the Israeli army are inaccurate and cannot be fair, because the military should not be allowed to investigate itself. He says this is especially true in this case, where the investigators and the culprit soldiers are colleagues, often serving together.

“They protect each other; these investigations are not fair, and are not transparent, while the outcome of such investigation cannot be trusted,” Amro added, “One of these cases in Hadeel al-Hashlamoun. The army admitted that the soldiers could have arrested her, instead of killing her, as she did not pose any direct threat, yet, she was shot with more than 15 live rounds.” No soldier was charged with any misconduct in the case.

Amro called on the international community to hold Israel accountable for its crimes, since there have been many extra-judicial executions over the past five months, and urged Palestinians to continue to document all conducts of the army, especially since those videos have been proven to be very effective in exposing Israeli crimes.

It is worth mentioning that dozens of extremist Israeli colonialist settlers marched, on Sunday at night, calling on the Israeli government to release the soldier who executed Abdul-Fattah Sharif last Thursday in Hebron.

They gathered in Tal Romeida neighborhood, in the center of Hebron city, while chanting racist slogans, including “Death to Arabs”. They demanded the unconditional release of the soldier.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted on Sunday to the shooting of a wounded Palestinian at point-blank range in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron earlier this week, stating that any questioning of the Israeli army’s moral integrity was “outrageous and unacceptable.”

From massive tax foreclosures, water shut-offs and failed school governance plans to the poisoning of residents in Flint, the political bankruptcy of bank-led policies are laid bare.

Members of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and other community-based organizations held a demonstration outside the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office on March 23 demanding a moratorium on the scheduled 30,000 tax foreclosures set for March 31.

During 2015, a similar campaign was waged that won a halt to tax foreclosures for approximately 70 days allowing residents of Wayne County to make arrangements to pay their obligations. This postponement of the foreclosures last year by the Treasurer’s Office only provides a temporary measure to ease the flow of the inevitable dislocation of tens of thousands more people around and outside the city.

Just one week prior to the protest, a delegation of activists from Moratorium NOW! Coalition, Detroit Eviction Defense, Russell Woods Neighborhood Association, Charlevoix Village Association, residents of Rosedale Park, Woodbridge and others, met with acting Treasurer Eric Sabree to call for a halt to the massive foreclosures which will drive more African American, Latino and working class people out of the city and county of Wayne.

Abayomi Azikiwe on right at Wayne County Treasurer March 23, 2016

Sabree and his staff said they could not declare a moratorium since it was against state laws and that they had no alternative except to foreclose on occupied homes. He pointed to the numerous programs available to assist homeowners short of a total halt to the seizures.

Pat Driscoll of Detroit Eviction Defense pointed out that during the previous decade there were instances of former Treasurer Raymond Wojtowicz removing thousands of homes from the foreclosures roles. Erroll Jennings of Russell Woods on the city’s west side, brought deed abstracts from his family home documenting property tax moratoriums imposed in the mid-1930s.

At the March 23 demonstration outside the Treasurer’s Office, several of the participants were themselves victims of the housing crisis. Jennette Shannon of Detroit Eviction Defense has faced down over twenty eviction attempts by the courts where she has fought to keep her own fraudulent land contract purchased home on the northwest side.

Abayomi Azikiwe Photos at Anti-Evictions Demonstrations

With the large scale foreclosures of homes, small businesses, churches and lots in the city, so-called “investors and developers” are given priority for purchasing over those seeking to redeem their homes. These real estate scavengers have bought thousands of structures and vacant land in the city resulting in many cases of them reselling these homes without paying back property taxes and other liens.

Consequently, when working class people buy these houses through land contracts they are often swindled out of their homes and hard earned money. Within months they are often sent eviction notices for non-payment of taxes including water bills that are placed on the delinquent notices.

Shannon said outside the Treasurer’s Office that “I received 400 delinquent water bills for commercial accounts. My backyard was mortgaged for $300,000 after the home was divided into two separate parcels without my knowledge.”

One major reason why people are buying homes on land contracts is because the banks are not writing mortgages in the city. In 2015, there were less than 400 mortgages issued for the entire city of nearly 700,000 people.

Nonetheless, after the homes are seized by the County, thousands wind up being taken over by the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) which is the largest property owners in the city. A Detroit Blight Removal Task Force is chaired by Dan Gilbert, the owner of Quicken Loans, one of the major players in the current crisis of forced removals and privatization.

After occupied foreclosed as well as abandoned homes and businesses are identified for seizure by the Blight Task Force, they are taken over by the DLBA. Every month hundreds of homes are taken over through the Wayne County Circuit Court which is overseen by Judge Robert E. Colombo, Jr.

Financial Interests to Blame for Housing Problems

Moreover, what cannot be overlooked is the underlying causes of the housing crisis in Detroit and Wayne county, and that is the central role of the banks through the initiation of predatory loans schemes during the 1990s and early 2000s, which resulted in tens of thousands of evictions and the further deterioration of the neighborhoods across the city and its suburbs.

Political officials, either not understanding the magnitude of the crisis or unwilling to confront the perpetrators repeatedly refused to impose a moratorium on the actions of the banks through the declaration of a state of emergency based on the concrete conditions facing the municipalities.

Abayomi Azikiwe Photos at Anti-Evictions Demonstrations

The failure of local governmental entities to stand up to the banks, and the successive Democratic and Republican governors and legislatures in Lansing, has worsened the continuing crises of community desolation and disinvestment. Michigan was the only state to lose population in the last census period of 2000-2010, further weakening municipalities and school systems.

Schools and Municipal Services Collapsing in Michigan Crisis

These same bank-led policies constitute the basis of the Detroit Public Schools debacle, where new legislation is in the works to further disenfranchise local people. The corporate media never mentions that effective control of the DPS has been the official policy of the state since 1999 under the-then Governor John Engler.

After over five years of direct state administration, a board was elected in 2005 which was still heavily corporate dominated. By 2009, yet another emergency manager was appointed who was only accountable to the governor, then Democrat Jennifer Granholm.

When Engler took over the DPS in 1999 the system had a $93 million surplus along with a voter approved $1.5 billion in bond funding designated for school improvement. Under emergency management the system is on the verge of bankruptcy with a reported $3.5 billion debt.

Conditions are so deplorable that teachers have engaged in wildcat strikes demanding better working conditions. Buildings have been neglected under this form of administration where mole, water leaks, lack of heating and other problems are not addressed.

Part of the new state legislative plan places significant control of the DPS under Mike Duggan, the first white corporate-installed mayor in four decades. Many Detroit educators believe this is just another scheme to siphon public money allocated for schools into the coffers of private interests.

Abayomi Azikiwe Photos at Anti-Evictions Demonstrations

Richard Clay, a former Detroit Public Schools teacher said during the March 23 demonstration at the Treasurer’s Office, that “the present plan is designed to finish off the system for good.”

Also the water crises in both Flint and Detroit stem from a privatized governance model that endangers hundreds of thousands through massive shut-offs and the poisoning of residents.

Emergency management functionaries in Detroit during the bankruptcy proceeding acknowledged that the massive water shut-offs were part of the restructuring of the city.

Although a two month moratorium was declared on water shut-offs after pressure was exerted through mass and legal actions led by the Moratorium NOW! Coalition during July 2014, a task force established by the Duggan administration and the City Council has rejected any form of an “affordability plan” for recipients of both the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and the Great Lakes Regional Water Authority.

These developments in Michigan illustrate clearly the disastrous consequences of corporate rule over municipalities and state structures. Other states around the U.S. are suffering similar problems that are manifested through school closings, teacher lay-offs, privatization of public services, the evictions of working class and poor residents, escalating police and judicial repression, environmental degradation, burgeoning poverty, etc.

Only the redistribution of wealth stolen from city residents can begin to ameliorate the problems of declining schools, neighborhoods and municipal services. A mass movement led by workers, residents, students and youth is the only alternative to worsening austerity under corporate control.

By his military withdrawal, Putin was actually enhancing his leverage over both the military situation and the political negotiations still to come

When Russian President Vladimir Putin had a substantive meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry last week, it was an extremely rare departure from normal protocol.  There was some political logic to the meeting, however, because Putin and Kerry have clearly been the primary drivers of their respective governments’ policies toward Syria, and their negotiations have already led to a stunningly successful Syrian ceasefire and possible Syrian negotiations on a political settlement. 

Washington and Moscow had to cooperate in order to get that ceasefire along with the jump-starting of intra-Syrian negotiations, now scheduled to begin next month, according to UN special envoy Steffan de Mistura.  But the diplomatic maneuvering did not involve equal influence on each other’s policies.  Putin’s Russia has now demonstrated that it has effective leverage over the policy of Kerry and the United States in Syria, whereas Kerry has no similar leverage over Russian policy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) meets with US Secretary of State John Kerry at the Kremlin in Moscow, 24 March, 2016 (AFP)

Kerry had appeared to be the primary driver of a political settlement last year, propelled by a strategy based on exploiting the military success of the Nusra Front-led opposition forces, armed by the United States and its allies, in northwestern Syria.  Kerry viewed that success a way of put pressure on both the Assad regime and its Russian ally to agree that Assad would step down.

But that strategy turned out to be an overreach when Putin surprised the outside world by intervening in Syria with enough airpower to put the jihadists and their “moderate” allies on the defensive.  Still pursuing that strategy, we now know that Kerry asked US President Barack Obama to carry out direct attacks on Assad’s forces, so he could have some “leverage” in the negotiations with the Russians over a ceasefire and settlement. But Obama refused to do so, and the Russian success, especially in January and February, conferred on Putin an even more clear-cut advantage in the negotiations with the United States over a Syrian ceasefire.

The US-Russian agreement on a ceasefire has proven to be far more effective than anyone had expected, and it is now clear that the reason is that Putin was able to convert his new-found leverage into the one US diplomatic concession that is necessary to any possibility of ending the war. The agreement between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kerry was more far-reaching than what has been made public. According to a report last week by Elijah J Magnier, who writes on regional politics and diplomacy for Al Rai, Kuwait’s leading daily newspaper, “high officials present in Syria” – which his report makes clear were Iranian – said that the United States had pledged as part of the ceasefire deal to “enforce on its regional Middle Eastern allies the cessation of the flow of weapons” into Syria.

In response to an e-mail query from this writer, Magnier said he had learned from his sources that no weapons have crossed the border into Syria from either Turkey or Jordan since the ceasefire went into effect. This crucial element of the US-Russian understanding, about which the Obama administration has maintained a discrete silence, evidently left the leadership of Nusra Front and its allies with little choice but to go along with the ceasefire for an indeterminate period. The entire armed opposition has thus apparently been shut down in Syria on the insistence of the United States because it was a requirement for the Russians to halt the offensive against them.

That far-reaching US concession explains why Putin surprised the entire world by announcing on 14 March that he was withdrawing the bulk of the Russian aircraft participating in the offensive. Contrary to the speculation of many pundits about his motive in doing so, Putin was actually enhancing his leverage over both the military situation and the political negotiations still to come. Magnier’s sources told him that when Putin had informed Iran of his intention to withdraw the planes, he had emphasized that they could be returned to Syria within 24 hours if necessary.

Magnier’s Iranian sources also made it clear that Iran was unhappy about the timing of Putin’s decisions on the ceasefire. They believed that it came at least a month too soon, just as Iranian forces were in a position to gain significantly more territory. But Putin’s agreement to the ceasefire and partial withdrawal on condition that outside patrons would not move to resupply their clients served the larger Russian strategy of checkmating the aim of Turkey and Saudi Arabia of bringing down the Assad regime – an aim in which the United States had become deeply involved, even as it insisted it wanted to preserve the structure of the Syrian state security apparatus.

Coming after a demonstration of the effectiveness of Russian airpower in frustrating the 2015 ‘s jihadist-led offensive, Putin’s seizing the opportunity to nail down the agreement with Washington and then pulling out most of his airpower conveyed a message to the jihadist’s external patrons that it was in their interets not to restart the war.

By shifting the conflict to the negotiating table, Putin’s moves have also added to Russian leverage on the Assad regime, and the Russians can be expected to be active in suggesting ways to craft a Syrian agreement on new elections and constitutional reform. The Russians have ruled out any requirement for Assad to resign, but the Iranians are afraid that assurance is not ironclad. Iranian officials strongly hinted privately in Vienna that they believed the Russians made a deal with the United States on a key sanctions relief issue at Iran’s expense in the final stage of the nuclear negotiations. They fear something similar may happen on Syria.

Iran has long regarded Assad and his regime as a key in the “axis of Resistance,” so it views his removal from power under any formula as unacceptable. Magnier’s sources told him that Iran believes Putin would accept a formula under which Assad would name someone else to run for president in a future election, according to Magnier.

Once the negotiations reach that stage of the negotiations, however, Putin will have a range of options for compromise that wouldn’t require Assad’s withdrawal from the regime. In a new constitution, for example, Assad could assume the role of chief of state with more ceremonial functions and an “advisory” role, while policymaking powers are assumed by a prime minister. Such a compromise could be seen as preserving the legitimacy and stability of the present regime, even though Kerry could claim that the opposition’s main interest had been achieved.

Of course, despite the remarkable diplomatic leverage Putin has achieved, the negotiations could still fail. That could happen because the opposition’s negotiators are unwilling to agree to a settlement that appears to preserve the Assad regime more and because the Obama administration proves unwilling to compel its allies to maintain the arms supply suspension. But the longer the negotiations continue, the greater John Kerry’s personal stake in seeing them reach a compromise agreement and thus avoiding the resumption of full-scale war.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

The Israeli prime minister announced the reassignment of the settler leader to a U.S. post after Brazil rejected his nomination for ambassador.

Israel bowed to Brazilian pressure and reassigned Monday its pick for ambassador to Brazil Dani Dayan to a U.S. position, months after Brasilia rejected the nomination over his leadership role in Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Netanyahu said in a brief statement Monday that Dayan would instead serve as consul general in New York, a post that focuses on Israeli outreach to U.S. Jews and business sectors.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pictured during
a news conference at his office in Jerusalem Dec. 2, 2014. | Photo: Reuters

Meanwhile, Dayan dismissed the notion that his reassignment was bowing to Brazilian pressure. “I don’t think that we folded. There was no choice,” Dayan told Israel’s Army Radio when asked about the new appointment. “Those that did not want us in Brasilia, ended up getting us in New York, the capital of the world.”

However, by reassigning Dayan, Netanyahu in fact backed off from his previous threats that his government would stand firm by the nomination of the Argentine-born settler leader even if that meant downgrading relations with Brazil.

The controversy was sparked after Brazil’s leftist government refused to accept the appointment as envoy of Dani Dayan, because he was a former settler leader in the West Bank and part of the illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

The Brazilian government of Dilma Rousseff has been a key supporter of the Palestinian bid for statehood over the past few years.

The Brazilian success in blocking the nomination of the settler leader could now set a precedent for other countries to barr settlers from representing Israel abroad, something Dayan himself had warned of.

Reuters reported that on March 17, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it was seeking a new pick for ambassador for Brasilia, replacing Dayan. But it quickly withdrew the statement, saying it was issued in error.

Israeli and Jewish settlements in Palestine are labeled illegal under international law, the European Union, Israel’s key ally the United States and most countries in the world. However, Netanyahu’s government refuses to halt the process of colony building, saying it is legal and taking place within Israeli borders.

Terrorism in Syria and Iraq is receiving direct support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France and the United Kingdom, Syrian President Bashar Assad told Sputnik.

“Terrorism — that’s the real problem. We must fight it on the international level, because terrorism affects not only Syria. Terrorism exists in Iraq. It is directly supported by Turkey. It is directly supported by the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia, as well as a number of Western states, especially France and the United Kingdom,” Assad said.

“As far as other states go, they are watching, observing. No serious work on this issue is being conducted from their side. I think that with regard to this questions, the problem far larger than the problem of the actual figures,” he added.

Syrian Losses Due to War Surpass $200 Billion

Syria’s infrastructure has suffered damages amounting to over $200 billion in the course of the war that has raged in the country for five years, Syrian President Bashar Assad told Sputnik.

“The economic losses and damages to infrastructure surpass 200 billion dollars. Economic issues can be resolved right when the situation in Syria stabilizes. But the reconstruction of the infrastructure needs a lot of time,” Assad said.

Syrian Refugees to Begin Returning Home When Hope for Improvement Appears

Syrian refugees will begin returning home when they see hope for improvement, Syrian President Bashar Assad told Sputnik.

“We’ve started infrastructure reconstruction work before the crisis is over, to soften, as much as possible, the influence of economic losses and infrastructure damage on the Syrian people and at the same time reduce the migration flow out of the country,” Assad said.

“Maybe some will want to return when they see that there is hope for the amelioration of the situation,” he added.

The president noted that the cause of migration is not only terrorism and the security situation, but also the blockade and Western sanctions introduced against Syria.

“Many people have left safe areas where there is no terrorism because of the life conditions. Citizens can no longer provide themselves with all that is necessary. So we, as a state, must take steps, at least the most basic ones, to improve the economic situation and the service sector in Syria. That’s what we are currently doing in terms of reconstruction,” he stated.

Damascus to Lean on Russia, China, Iran in Rebuilding Syria

Damascus will lean primarily on Russia, China and Iran in rebuilding the country following the war, Syrian President Bashar Assad told Sputnik.

“The reconstruction process is in any case profitable for companies that are participating in it, especially if they manage to get loans from the countries that will support them. Of course, we expect that the process will rely on the three main states that have supported Syria during this crisis — that’s Russia, China and Iran. But I suppose that a lot of countries that were against Syria, I mean first of all Western countries, will try to direct their companies to take part in this process. However, for us in Syria there is absolutely no doubt that we will ask, first of all, our friendly states,” Assad said.

According to the president, it is “absolutely certain that if you were to pose this question to any Syrian citizen, his answer, political and emotional, would be that we welcome, first of all, the companies from the three countries, primarily from Russia.”

“If we’re speaking of infrastructure, it spans, perhaps not even dozens, but hundreds of different areas and specializations. So I think that Russian companies will have a very broad space for contributing to the restoration of Syria,” he added.

Syria Needs National Unity Government for Transition Period

The transitional period in Syria must occur under the current constitution and include a national unity government comprising various political forces, Syrian President Bashar Assad told Sputnik.

“First of all, regarding the definition of the ‘transitional period,’ such a definition does not exist. We in Syria assume that the term political transition means the transition from one constitution to another, and a constitution is what defines the form of the needed political composition in the next stage. Thus, the transition period must be under the current constitution, and we will move on to the new constitution after the Syrian people vote for it,” Assad said.

“Before that, what we can work on, as we see it in Syria, is the government,” he added.

“This transitional structure or transitional format is a government formed by various Syrian political forces — opposition, independent, the current government and others.”

The unity government’s main goal would be to work out a new constitution and let the Syrian people vote on it, after which a transition to the new constitution could take place, Assad explained.

“Neither the Syrian constitution, nor the constitution of any other country in the world includes anything that is called a transitional body of power. It’s illogical and unconstitutional. What are the powers of this body? How will it govern the daily lives of citizens? Who will be assessing it? Today, there is the People’s Council [Syria’s parliament] and the constitution that regulates the work of the government and the state. That’s why a solution is a government of national unity that will prepare a new constitution,” the president underlined.

The full text of Assad’s interview to Sputnik will be posted on the Sputnik website on March 30-31.

On Mar.27 the pro-government forces liberated the ancient city of Palmyra and the adjacent Palmyra Airbase in Eastern Homs completing an anti-ISIS operation that began on Mar.7 with aim to seize the strategic crossroads. The operation was synchronized with the Iraqi forces’ advance on Mosul depriving ISIS’ opportunity to deploy reinforcements to Palmyra. The Russia-Iraq-Syria-Iran coordination center in Baghdad played a key role in this.

More than 5000-strong land grouping, which consisted of mainly the Syrian Arab Army’s Tiger Forces, Syrian Navy Marines, Desert Hawks Brigade, the National Defense Forces, Hezbollah and Liwa al-Fatimiyoun, was involved in the operation.  The Syrian government was able to concentrate such group on the Palmyra front due to the US-Russia promoted ceasefire that took effect on Feb.27.

The Palmyra offensive proceeded as a three-pronged assault displaying an operational design that characterized the most part of the recent major operations and marks a high involvement of Russians into the operation planning.

The Russian Special Forces troops took part in the operation performing target designation and other special missions. It’s complicated to estimate their numbers at the frontline; however, it’s clear that their participation on the ground was one of the main reasons of such military success. Moreover, Russian military specialists will reportedly dismantle IEDs set by militants in Palmyra.

A significant air support played an important role in the success. Russian warplanes have been conducting some 40 sorties to Palmyra’s area per day since Mar.22. These numbers don’t include the participation of Russian fighter helicopters such as Mi-28 which were observed in the area.

Now, when Palmyra is liberated, the SAA and its allies will likely advance through the Palmyra-Sukhna-Deir Ezzor road in order to break ISIS siege from the Deir Ezzor. According to reports, ISIS has already started to set new a defense line at Al Sukhna.

However, before the advance on Deir Ezzor, the Syrian forces need to consolidate their positions in the ancient city and nearby areas. The loyalist forces have redeployed a force to conduct an operation to push ISIS from the town of Qaryatayn and Al-Busairi crossroads. The advance on Qaryatayn is expected to be launched on Feb.28.

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We bring to the attention of our readers excerpts from this important study which further documents the war crimes committed by NATO against the people of Yugoslavia.  

During combustion, and detonation of explosives and energetic materials gunpowder (rocket fuel) uncontrolled releases large quantities of gas, products of combustion and detonation. Bearing in mind that the fry thrown over 30, 000 tons of various destructive missiles, bombs and rockets, the amount of gases released in a relatively small area is enormous and harmful.

Bombing during the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia sparked fires in chemical plants, oil reservoirs and refineries. Combustion products are extremely toxic to the characteristics of poison gases such as phosgene or hydrogen chloride. In addition to this, freed oxides of nitrogen, cyano compounds, gaseous oxides of carbon and large amounts of soot, which are the direct causes of the greenhouse effect, Global warming. The use of incendiary ammunition containing depleted uranium 238 is the vision of keeping the radiological-nuclear war with all its consequences for wildlife FRY. The consequences are an increased number of serious illness that from year to year increase.

INTRODUCTION

Reducing the number of inhabitants according to the last census in Serbia in the period from 2002 to 2011 is -377,335, which is a city the size of Cacak. According to the Institute for Public Health of Serbia “Dr Milan Jovanovic – Batut”, “Cancer Registry in central Serbia 2011” in the period from 2002 to 2009, the total was affected only in central Serbia, 199 119 persons of both sexes, and died 99 . 846 persons. If we know that the cancer of different types of diseases elsewhere in Serbia, after heart disease and ahead of diabetes, Serbian nation, according to these statistics is very sick. We have a negative growth rate or more people dying than being born. However, the fact that an increasing number of young couples having trouble conceiving. There is reasonable doubt that it is also a consequence of environmental pollution that has arisen from the use of bombs of different chemical composition and lethal during the NATO aggression.

That space is bombed FRY and other poisons (as Serbian military experts warned even during the war) confirms interview the Spanish pilots of fighter aircraft F-18, Captain Adolf Luis Martin de la Osa. It was immediately after the bombing, 1999, in the Spanish newspaper “Articulo 20” accused the governments of the countries which have committed aggression against the FRY for spreading false news about the war. He expressed the fact that killing civilians is not a mistake, but plan. “Several times our Colonel protested against NATO superiors because of the choice of civilian targets for bombing targets. They kicked him with insults and threats that the United States would file a complaint with the Spanish army, first in Brussels and later the Minister of Defence. But there’s more I want to announce this to everyone: one is data encrypted command of the US military to throw antipersonnel bombs in Pristina and Nis.

Our colonel refused and after a few days came the order for his transfer. All this now declare is nothing compared to what I say when it was time, “said Captain Martin de la Os. “We are there does not mean anything. Not a word about the terrible accidents, losses, we’ve had outside of combat, contempt and sanctions, not even a single word! From anyone! As for the incorrect choice of targets and humiliation, we are perfectly aware that we are entering into a conflict against whom the majority of Spanish citizens, which is most important for us.

What nobody says is that there is no comments, information or speech that the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese, that we are all there, just to accomplish what the American generals decide. There are not any journalist who knows what’s going on in Yugoslavia. Are destroying land, bombarded with new weapons, toxic nerve gases, uranium bombs, napalm, sterilizing chemicals, herbicides that poison crops, all of this still do not know anything, “upozorovao Captain Martin de la Os. These are the words of a pilot who was under great pressure of his conscience and publicly protested against such a criminal act.

The cynicism and inhumanity during the aggression against Yugoslavia have expressed many world politicians, so the Jacques Chirac, during the aggression on Yugoslavia, joined the mounted media lynch against Serbs. He addressed the French people on 21 April 1999, the following words: “The regime in Belgrade is stubborn. He continues his terrible policy of ethnic cleansing. Massacres, rape, looting, burning villages, separated families thrown onto the roads. That action by the Serbian authorities. That’s what has to stop. We must therefore still to intensify these attacks, to establish additional ways and attack the increasingly diverse targets whose destruction will fall hard on the action force and functioning of the Serbian regime. ”

After the bombing of our country, Alister Campbell second most powerful man in the UK press secretary of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, told the “News”. no regrets NATO bombed Yugoslavia. “Our task was to Milosevic withdraw from the policy of ethnic cleansing that Serbian troops to leave the territory of Kosovo, to create conditions for the return of refugees. We were right as we engage in it, “and further said that even knowledge of the trade in human organs in Kosovo did not stop in the belief of the correctness of bombardment.

With advances in science and technology, develops and military technique with the use of new, modern materials and novel compounds with both destructive and poisonous properties, which is daily synthesized in the laboratory some of NATO.

All missiles were thrown on our country during the bombing, according to its destructiveness and purpose, can be classified into three general groups:

– Devastating, guided and unguided, of different calibres, (missiles, bombs and cluster bombs)
– Anti-armor and anti-concrete fortifications, and filled OU
– Various kinds of so-called “soft” bombs that do not seem devastating, but true great damage.
Apart from the use of depleted uranium in our country during the bombing have used a combination of explosives and rocket fuel with certain chemical compounds that reactions during the explosion released a very toxic and carcinogenic compounds or chemical radicals.

Americans in the late fifties of the past century, they began to experiment with the introduction of fluoride in nitrojedinjenja type formal, in order to increase their energy value. In 1961, in the laboratories of Arlington, Virginia (Office of Naval Research), for the purposes of ” Aerojet-General Corporation ‘experimented with the introduction of fluoride in some nitro compounds for the Navy. Thus, in the course of these studies, which were aimed at obtaining new rocket fuel to propel missiles of increased range, synthesized fluorinated formals, very toxic compounds that are used as an addition to explosives and liquid propellants.

CHEMICAL ASPECTS OF AGGRESSION

In addition to the direct damage caused by the explosions of bombs and missiles on the territory of the FRY was conducted special warfare, which in its effects is one of the chemical war. The alliance did not directly use chemical agents (poison gas) in an attack on our country, but the bombing targeted target – industrial plants and warehouses of chemical raw materials, as well as burning oil tanks and oil installations, indirect effects caused by the consequences are very close effects of chemical warfare.

Planned and are deliberately targeted plants and warehouses of chemical industry. Were bombed facilities in Pancevo, Novi Sad, Lucani, Prahovo, Bor, Baric. Due to the explosion and fire in air, soil and waterways due huge amounts of highly toxic and health hazardous substances: hydrochloric and sulfuric acid, nitric acid, chlorine, vinyl chloride monomer, etilendihlorid, mercury, PIRALEN, ammonia, and many others, also toxic agents .

Pancevo Chemical Plant bombed by NATO. M. Chossudovsky, 2000

NATO aggression against our country and deliberately causing an environmental catastrophe, endangered area with sources of unpolluted water (Serbia is the area with the highest number of healing mineral springs in Europe) and health food, which is directly affected area around the Balkans and Europe.

2.1. Used explosives during the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia

All explosive compounds in a molecule containing certain molecular groups that are bearers of explosion characteristics. Usually, these are NO2 groups in the molecule and which further comprises carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, so that any of the explosive can be represented by the general formula CxHyNzOp. The functioning of explosives is extremely fast oksidacija- detonation, whereby, in a very short time, in the order of nano seconds, releases huge amounts of energy, followed by a large amount of hot gaseous products of detonation under high pressure by a devastating effect.

The resulting gaseous products contain a variety of gases such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, a cyano compound, hydrogen, nitrogen, water in the form of water vapor and elemental carbon in the form of soot. The released gases themselves are highly toxic, and when combined with the products of the combustion of certain chemical compounds, then it can have effects of chemical warfare.

Conventional explosives (general formula Cx Hy Ou Nz) during the chemical decomposition, explosion, released earlier mentioned different gaseous products of detonation. Table 1 shows the compositions of explosives that were in the powder inside projektila- destructive bombs and missiles which targeted the territory of the FRY.

High explosives, trotyl, hexogen and octogen, added and other energy-rich substances, such as ammonium perchlorate, ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder that is used in incendiary munitions, CCR is shown in Table 1. Decomposition of explosives containing ammonium perchlorate, produces highly toxic chlorine compounds, oxides or chemical radicals and, in particular, adiabatic conditions governing the knock comes to the appearance of elemental chlorine, which is extremely poisonous, suffocating and aggressive. Chlorine oxides and radicals freed detonation with water from the air creates acid rain due to which it comes to the destruction of vegetation.

Editor’s Note: the more technical scientific analysis of this study including tables is not included

Par Manlio Dinucci, 29 mars 2016

« L’ennemi obscur qui se cache dans les angles sombres de la terre » (comme l’avait défini en 2001 le président Bush) continue à broyer des victimes, les dernières à Bruxelles.

Par Valentin Vasilescu, 28 mars 2016

Conformément à l’annexe 9 de la Convention (installations) de l’aviation civile faite à Chicago en 1944 et dont la Belgique fait partie, un aéroport ouvert au trafic international de passagers doit fournir deux flux distincts. Le flux des départs assure l’embarquement des passagers à bord des avions et le flux de sortie pour les passagers débarquant des avions.

The Yediot Achronot conference attacking BDS has become a veritable carnival of hate.  Everyone from delusional Hollywood celebrities (Roseanne Barr) to cabinet ministers, to the leader of the Opposition have pledged fealty to the cause.

But the apogee same yesterday when Transportation Minister Israel Katz [image left] called for the “civil targeted killing“of BDS leaders like Omar Barghouti.  The phrase he used (sikul ezrahi memukad) derives from the euphemistic Hebrew phrase for the targeted killing of a terrorist (the literal meaning is “targeted thwarting”).  But the added word ” civil” makes it something different.  Katz is saying that we won’t physically murder BDS opponents, but we will do everything short of that.

One may rightly ask what business a transportation minister has conducting targeted killings, physical or otherwise, against anyone.  Though everything in Israel is in service to the national security state, has transportation fallen under that bailiwick as well?

Speech bubble: “When do you want Barghouti’s scalp? Now? Or later?” (Noam Revkin Fenton/FLASH90)

We are entering dangerous territory when an Israeli cabinet minister engages in wordplay that verges on putting a bull’s-eye on the backs of non-violent activists.  If there are Israel apologists out there who dismiss the significance of such rhetoric they are sadly mistaken.  In this torrid political environment in which Israeli leftists have become criminals and wounded Palestinian youth may be summarily executed in the street,  it is only too easy to forsee Palestinian activists like Barghouti having a bounty on their heads.

Does anyone doubt there are scores of Yigal Amirs out there who’d be pleased to strike a blow for their hateful cause by putting a bullet in the head of a Palestinian?

Not to be outdone, Interior Minister Aryeh Deri called for stripping BDS founder Omar Barghouti of his Israeli residency, which he gained in 1994 when he married an Israeli citizen.  Deri claimed that Barghouti is employing a scam against Israel because his main residence is Ramallah and not Israel (though he’s pursuing, or has completed, an MA at Tel Aviv University).  Given Katz’s ever so veiled threat against him it would be no wonder if Barghouti did choose to value his safety and live where he’s not under threat of death.

In this context, it’s ironic Facebook activists have posted a gag order involving a potential criminal case against Deri himself. It seems that the Israeli Attorney General has been investigating criminal charges of an unspecified nature. It’s important to recall that Deri has been charged with corruption in the past, been convicted, and spent time in prison. However, when his sentence was served, he was reappointed to the leadership of the Shas party, won a seat in the Knesset, and became interior minister.  It appears this recycled thief may be up to the same old tricks once more.

Gag order prohibiting reporting of the details of the criminal charges against Minister Aryeh Deri

Deri’s spiritual boss, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, told an audience of the faithful a few weeks ago that under Jewish law, no Palestinian should be allowed to live in the land of Israel. In other words, he was espousing the ethnic cleansing of Israel, and the expulsion of 20% of its population. Only later did the rabbi explain that he wasn’t, God forbid, proposing that Palestinians be expelled now, but that this would only happen after the Messiah came and Israel was a proper halachic state. Is it any surprise that Deri himself would jump on the band wagon and commence the expulsion by stripping Barghouti of his legal rights to residency?

Israel’s major concert promoter, Shuki Weiss, who plays a major role in combating the cultural boycott against Israel, complained at the Yediot conference that Deri’s interior ministry was demanding that international artists wishing to perform in Israel sign a loyalty oath in order to obtain a visa.  The ministry immediately denied the claim.  And concert promoters aren’t known for being fonts of truth.  So it’s hard to know what’s the truth in this context.  But given how extreme this government is and how petty its leadership, it’s not hard to believe a ministry official would think it was a terrific idea to pressure Elton John to sign a loyalty oath before permitting him to step foot in the Holy Land.

“On July 26, 2000, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association published a review by Dr. Barbara Starfield, a revered public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Dr. Starfield’s review, ‘Is US health really the best in the world?’, concluded that, every year in the US, the medical system kills 225,000 people. That’s 2.25 million killings per decade.” – Jon Rappoport, The Starfield Revelation

This is explosive.

This is about a film no one can see, because it exposes lunatics and destroyers in the vaccine industry.

Here is a quote from the Vaxxed producer and director, after their film was just axed from Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Festival (as reported by Jeremy Gerard, see: “‘Vaxxed’ Filmmakers Accuse De Niro, Tribeca Film Fest Of ‘Censorship’ In Wake Of Cancelation,” 3/26/2016):

“’To our dismay, we learned today about the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to reverse the official selection of Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe [trailer],’ said Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree (the director and producer, respectively). Robert De Niro’s original defense of the film happened Friday after a one-hour conversation between De Niro and Bill Posey, the congressman who has interacted directly and at length with the CDC Whistleblower (William Thompson) and whose team has scrutinized the documents that prove fraud at the CDC. …” (emphasis added)

Okay. So here is the sequence…

One, De Niro, who has an autistic child, decides to screen Vaxxed at his Tribeca Festival. It’s a film that reveals lies and crimes, and shows there is a causative connection between vaccines and autism.

Two, pressure is applied to De Niro, so he meets with Florida Congressman Bill Posey, who lets him know the film is right on target. Posey knows, because he and his team have many pages of documents from CDC researcher, William Thompson, who blew the whistle on vaccine-autism fraud in 2014.

Three, De Niro decides he’ll not only screen the film, he’ll introduce it himself, live, onstage.

Four, out of the shadows emerge people who put the screws to De Niro. What do they tell him? His career in film will end? His annual Tribeca Film Festival will go down the toilet? The medical treatment his autistic child is receiving will be cut off? He and family are now “not safe?”

Five, De Niro backs away and cancels the showing of Vaxxed.

He’s been taught a lesson. Don’t go up against the medical cartel. Keep your mouth shut. Suffer in silence.

Think about this. You can see a film about US drone strikes killing innocent civilians. You can see a film about criminal surveillance of the entire population. You can see a film about the CIA overthrowing foreign governments. You can see a film about mega-corporations spewing chemicals into towns, where children are born with defects and adults are dying of cancer.

But you can’t see a film that suggests a vaccine could be causing autism.

That’s too hot.

That strikes at a secret too big to tell.

That torpedoes a monopoly that must be protected, no matter what.

Censored. Blacked out.

To boil down the background: In 2014, long-time respected CDC researcher, William Thompson, made a statement asserting that he and several esteemed colleagues had lied about a key study they authored 10 years earlier.

The study actually revealed a connection between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and the onset of autism in young black boys—but that part of the study was censored.

In fact, Thompson said, he and his colleagues sat in a room at the CDC, brought in a garbage can, and threw out those pages of research. That’s right.

But Thompson kept copies of the pages. Congressman Bill Posey and a few other people have those pages.

Thompson says, through his lawyer, that he will not speak to reporters. He’ll work with Congress, if an investigation is mounted. But there is no indication Congressional hearings will ever be laid on.

Because this story is too big.

This is the subject of the film, Vaxxed. The betrayal of the people by the Centers for Disease Control.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the prospect of Vaxxed being shown at Robert De Niro’s own festival—with him on stage introducing it—raised alarms at the CDC. Loud ones.

There is a very good chance that the CDC reached out to someone, who in turn reached out to De Niro and whispered in his ear and caused the actor to pause for thought.

He paused, and decided to turn around. He decided the risk was too great. He laid down his sword, such as it was, and went dark.

First Amendment? Never heard of it.

We now live in a country where the government decides, when it needs to, how to “protect the population” from “dangerous information.”

In this case, the Hippocratic Oath is turned inside out. It becomes: “First, do harm.”

Vaccines can cause autism? Well, sure, but don’t tell people that. Lie and keep lying, and keep calling it science.

Who cares how many children are destroyed?

Protect the medical monopoly.

Protect the vaccinators.

Don’t let a film see the light of day.

But it will. One way or another, it will be shown and people will see it and then they will know.

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

“Joseph McCarthy is the only major politician in the country who can be labeled “liar” without fear of libel.” – Joseph Alsop

“The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State (Dean Acheson) as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”  – Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy, February 9, 1950, Wheeling, West Virginia

“If somebody would only smuggle me aboard the Democratic campaign special with a baseball bat in my hand, I’d teach patriotism to ‘Little Adlai’.” – Joseph McCarthy, mocking 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson). – Joseph R. McCarthy

 “I call Marco Rubio, ‘Little Marco’. That frightened little puppy couldn’t be elected dog-catcher in Florida.” – Donald Trump

“Joseph McCarthy was a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America” – William Proxmire, Democratic Party successor to McCarthy. (Proxmire was elected US Senator in a special election in August, 1954 and was subsequently re-elected by landslides 5 times {71% of the vote in 1970, 73% in 1976 and 65% in 1982}. In his last two Senate campaigns , he refused to take any campaign contributions, and in each campaign he spent less than $200 (out of his own pocket) — to cover the expenses related to filing for re-election and for return postage for unsolicited contributions. He was an early advocate of campaign finance reform.

“There are significant analogies between the American fear of Communism during the McCarthy era and the American fear of Islam at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” ― Ben Daniel,  The Search for Truth about Islam:  A Christian Pastor Separates Fact from Fiction

*

Not too long ago, a mild-mannered, 73 year old US Senator from Vermont rose to speak on the floor of the US Senate and introduced Resolution 261 (read it further below). The senator had reached the limits of his patience with a name-calling, mocking, free-swinging, demagogic, megalomaniacal, right-wing politician who had bamboozled thousands of Wisconsin voters to support him.

The name of the Vermont senator was Ralph E. Flanders, and the date was June 1, 1954. Flanders was a moderate Republican, and name-calling politician who had bamboozled thousands of Wisconsinites to support him, was Joseph Raymond McCarthy. Some Republicans back then were moderates and some of them agreed with Flanders that the far-right McCarthy was destroying the Republican Party while selfishly working to achieve his self-promoting agenda.

And so, just like the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the courageous, likeable Vermont Senator Flanders spoke up when it was his duty to do so in order to save America from fascist influences like the infamous Friendly American Fascist, Joseph R. McCarthy.

Flanders and Sanders were and still are simply following a critically-thinking, justice-seeking and independent-minded Vermont tradition. There must be something in the still pure water and still pure air up there. Wisconsin – and my state of Minnesota – still have relatively pure water and air in the northern halves of their states; that is, unless extractive industries like the mining and industrial-strength pig farming industries have anything to say about it.

As an aside, I should mention that recent studies have shown that the drinking water in the eastern, more conservative part of Wisconsin has been contaminated for an unknown number of years with the non-nutritive metallic element strontium (for which there are no known positive health benefits) with undetermined adverse effects. I am certain that the agricultural parts of Wisconsin are probably as contaminated with the agricultural toxins Atrazine and Round-up as are the agricultural parts of southern Minnesota, whose drinking water has been contaminated for years with both toxic pesticides. Those realities are worth speculating about since brain-altering chemicals can affect one’s personalities and politics.

But I digress. Back to Wisconsin politics and proto-fascism.

Before relating what Senator Flanders did to save America from another rightward lurch toward fascism and demagoguery back in 1954, I include some more background to the story.

The Late, Lamented, Friendly American Fascist from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy grew up on a Wisconsin farm in a large, poor Irish Catholic family. After growing up and failing at chicken farming, he got a law degree at Marquette University, a Jesuit college. After setting up what turned out to be a failed law practice, he served for two years in WWII and then, on returning home from the war, went into politics. In 1946, he just barely managed to get elected to the US Senate (by bamboozling Wisconsin voters to vote for him by campaigning on false stories of his “heroism” in the South Pacific (where he was a non-combat desk jockey). The major hurdle in getting to the Senate was his upset primary election victory over Wisconsin’s incumbent senator Bob La Follette, Jr.

La Follette had been a pro-farmer/pro-labor Wisconsin Progressive Party US Senator, but the Progressive Party had recently been dissolved so he had to run for re-election as a Republican in 1946. Having been advised that it should be unnecessary to run an active campaign against the unknown upstart McCarthy, he was narrowly defeated by just 5,000 votes.

McCarthy’s first three years in the Senate were uneventful, except for the fact that he fell in with a variety of nefarious corporate interests that included Texas millionaires, the sugar lobby and real estate interests. He also became known for his proclivity for betting on the ponies, drinking too much and speculating in the stock market.

The Beginning of the Proto-Fascist McCarthy Era

On February 9, 1950, eager to make a name for himself, McCarthy finagled a speaking gig at a Women’s Republican Club/Lincoln Day event in Wheeling, West Virginia. In that speech he made the infamously false claim that he knew of the existence of 205 communists in Truman’s State Department.

With that revelation, McCarthy suddenly began generating 24/7 media coverage from fawning right-wing newspapers, their reporters and their photographers, similar to how the media covers big city gangsters like Al Capone or narcissistic, megalomaniac wannabe politicians like Donald Trump. Significantly, McCarthy revised the 205 number down to 57 by the time he got back to Washington.

Tellingly, McCarthy never made his fake list available to the public, just as our modern-day Republican McCarthy “look-alikes” like Rafael “Ted” Cruz or “act-alikes” like Trump and Cruz refuse to say how they will deal with any number of the many complex foreign or domestic policy issues that real presidents have to deal with.

As one example of the similarities between the current GOP candidates for president, Trump has refused to talk about any of the details concerning one of his biggest applause lines, promising to build a wall along the entire northern border of Mexico and then having Mexico pay for it.

The entire world is laughing at a nation that will even tolerate such delusional thinking.

The Conservative Media Went Gaga Over McCarthy – for About 4 Dangerous Years

Newspapers back in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal era (and they perform the same way today) consistently favored conservative politicians and their anti-labor union, pro-business, pro-banking and war-profiteering interests by 5 to 1 margins, and they covered those issues and candidates in a similarly disproportionate fashion. One only has to recall the huge “Dewey Wins!!” headline on the ultra-conservative Chicago Tribune’s front page as President Truman proudly displayed it the day after his upset win over the conservative Dewey in 1948.

Starting with the Wheeling speech, and buoyed by the overweening press coverage he was given free of charge, the narcissistic far right wing senator from Wisconsin expanded his anti-communist agenda until he foolishly bit off more than he could chew and accused the US Army of harboring communists. It wasn’t long before the hard-drinking, hard-gambling, paranoid demagogue was exposed as a total fraud, and he was justly humiliated out of power.

The final blow occurred on June 9, 1954, the 30^th day of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, when the chief counsel for the Army, Joseph Welch, ended his interrogation of McCarthy with the statement that finished the senator’s destructive political career. Here is Welch’s famous accusation of McCarthy – and the fatal question (which “went viral”):

“Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel…If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I’m a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me…You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Following that truth-telling statement, the press instantaneously lost interest in the spectacle of McCarthy, and the deluded, megalomaniacal senator drank himself to death over the next couple of years. Partly because the Republican Party had tolerated such a demagogue for as long as it had been to their political advantage, the Democrats regained both the House and the Senate in the 1954 mid-term elections. Justice sometimes does happen in politics, especially when a courageous person of influence does his duty.

So let’s go back to hear more about the Flanders/Sanders resistance against Friendly American Fascism.

The Flanders/Sanders Connection: The Role of Independently Thinking Vermont Senators

Even before the Army-McCarthy hearings began, Senator Flanders had been concerned that even war hero president Dwight D. Eisenhower (who actually despised McCarthy) seemed to be reluctant to confront the bullying tactics of “Tail-gunner Joe” (aka the “Pepsi-Cola Kid” – because of his early efforts on behalf of the soft drink company’s sugar interests). So on behalf of the better nature of his party and calling McCarthy “a Dennis the Menace”, Flanders issued Resolution 261, which read as follows:

“Resolved, that the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin is unbecoming a member of the US Senate, is contrary to senatorial traditions and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute. Such conduct is hereby condemned.”

The GOP Habit: Fighting Communism with Fascism

Two days later, as part of the senator’s continued efforts to persuade the GOP-dominated Senate to finally take action against McCarthy’s hysterical anti-communist witch-hunting, he appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and proclaimed to the nation what everybody in Washington already knew (but nobody dared to say out loud): that McCarthy had become “the sole private eye, prosecutor, judge, jury and sentencer (of suspected anti-fascist, liberal, pro-democracy, so-called “communists”). This is so clearly in the direction of fighting communism with fascism that I am seriously disturbed.”

Two months earlier (March 9, 1954), well before the Army-McCarthy hearings began, the well-respected Flanders had spoken on the Senate floor, accusing McCarthy of trying to destroy the Republican Party. In the speech, Flanders said of McCarthy:

“He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist [google the “Irving Peress affair”]. We may assume that this represents the depth and seriousness of Communist penetration at this time.”

What Wisconsin you can do NOW to Shake off the McCarthy Curse

This next week is the run-up to the 2016 Wisconsin primary elections scheduled for Tuesday, April 5. Bernie Sanders is running not just for president of the United States. He is also running for the sustainable future for the planet and for people all over the earth. The rest of the world understands that.

Bernie is arguably the most important politician coming from a number of independent-minded, justice-seeking, whistle-blowing senators (from Vermont or wherever), and he is coming off three impressive landslide victories over the center-right Wall Street and War Street-favored candidate Hillary Clinton in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii.

The mainstream media should be totally ashamed of itself for the way it has handled Bernie’s dramatic, ground-breaking news story.

Over the few days preceding the primary elections in those three states, there was absolutely nothing new to report from the Republican campaigns. The Brussels bombings had already been discussed, ad nauseum; but the 5 to 1 ratio held true to form.

On the three Sunday morning network TV shows the day after Bernie’s dramatic victories every panel member on every show was either covering Trump or Clinton or the campaign perspectives of Wall Street and War Street. Discussion about the Sanders campaign was shut out.

Trump and Terrorism totally over-shadowed the real important news about the Sanders revolution. No coverage of the amazing bird that hopped up on the podium and looked at Bernie was shown. Even most of the late-night talk shows gave short shrift to Bernie’s campaign.

So now Wisconsin, you who have the unusual checkered history of alternately producing or being governed by major Socialist Party politicians or major Progressive Party politicians or your embarrassing lapses into being governed by far-right, anti-labor, anti-democracy, proto-fascist GOP politicians like Joseph McCarthy and Scott Walker (whose paymasters were and still are big corporations and multimillionaires and billionaires who are seeking more privileges and wealth for themselves (like lower taxes and less regulations) and fewer privileges and wealth for the working class (like lower wages and poor access to affordable health care).

So from one of your neighbors to the west, please be aware that a lot of progressive young Wisconsinites are out there working for Bernie Sanders the next week. Please watch one of Bernie’s heartfelt rallies on YouTube, feel the Bern and join the anti-fascist revolution.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Reader, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, psychiatric drugging, over-vaccination regimens, Big Pharma and other movements that threaten the environment or America’s health, democracy, civility and longevity. Many of his columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn

Incisive 2013 article of utmost relevance

Israel has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights, to Genie Energy. Major shareholders of Genie Energy – which also has interests in shale gas in the United States and shale oil in Israel – include Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild. This from a 2010 Genie Energy press release:

Claude Pupkin, CEO of Genie Oil and Gas, commented, “Genie’s success will ultimately depend, in part, on access to the expertise of the oil and gas industry and to the financial markets. Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch are extremely well regarded by and connected to leaders in these sectors. Their guidance and participation will prove invaluable.”

“I am grateful to Howard Jonas and IDT for the opportunity to invest in this important initiative,” Lord Rothschild said. “Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary achievements speak for themselves and we are very pleased he has agreed to be our partner. Genie Energy is making good technological progress to tap the world’s substantial oil shale deposits which could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world.”

For Israel to seek to exploit mineral reserves in the occupied Golan Heights is plainly illegal in international law. Japan was succesfully sued by Singapore before the International Court of Justice for exploitation of Singapore’s oil resources during the second world war. The argument has been made in international law that an occupying power is entitled to opeate oil wells which were previously functioning and operated by the sovereign power, in whose position the occupying power now stands. But there is absolutely no disagreement in the authorities and case law that the drilling of new wells – let alone fracking – by an occupying power is illegal.

Israel tried to make the same move twenty years ago but was forced to back down after a strong reaction from the Syrian government, which gained diplomatic support from the United States. Israel is now seeking to take advantage of the weakened Syrian state; this move perhaps casts a new light on recent Israeli bombings in Syria.

In a rational world, the involvement of Rothschild and Murdoch in this international criminal activity would show them not to be fit and proper persons to hold major commercial interests elsewhere, and action would be taken. Naturally, nothing of the kind will happen.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

In May of 2012, The U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, visited his first NATO country, Canada. He found Canada’s indigenous peoples generally deprived of adequate nutrition (“People are simply too poor to eat decently”). He found the Aboriginal peoples at risk. *1

In October, 2013, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous rights, James Anaya, visited Canada and found Canada’s Aboriginal peoples “in crisis.” 20% lived in unfit housing. There was an alarming suicide rate. There were high rates of violence against women. And high rates of incarceration. Discriminatory funding disparities. Lack of adequate funding. Lack of Aboriginal inclusion in the educational policies, etc.. In sum, Aboriginal people were at risk, some without enough to eat, some with bad water, some without liveable shelter. *2

The “at risk” status of First Peoples does not mean they’re at risk of being uncomfortable. It means they could die. It is a way to talk about the failure of the Canadian government’s responsibility for Aboriginal peoples, without imputing intention for the deaths. Americans consider the proving of “intention” necessary for charges of genocide, and the American interpretation of the Convention on Genocide is often adopted by less powerful nations.

The devastation of Northern First Nations communities has increased through years of intentional federal neglect by the Harper government. Hoping to reverse this, in March 2016 Canada’s new Trudeau government assured Aboriginal peoples a 8.4 billion dollar slice of the 2016 Budget.

Of immediate concern is the lack of medical care in northern Aboriginal communities which are currently without resident doctors and are often without resident registered nurses as well as nutritionists, physical and psychological therapists.

Northern Native communities are very vulnerable to drugs. A drug economy and terminal drug use are of no use to a revolutionary society so in many capitalist countries drug use is covertly supported by the State. The alternative community of prison and a prison culture is also supplied by the State.

Canada’s correctional investigator, Howard Sapir, finds that while crime rates decreased every year, Canadians in prison increased by 10% between 2005 and last year, and of these, Aboriginal incarceration increased by 50%. So the percentage of federal prisoners with Aboriginal ancestry exceeds 25% nationally. In the prairie provinces this rises to 48%.*3

Currently, Northeastern Ontario’s First Nations continue to suffer from lack of safe tap water; in February the problem was brought to the U.N.’s Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, by the Neskantaga, Grassy Narrows and Shoal Lake 40 First Nations.*4

The Neskantaga community of about 300 hasn’t had safe drinking water since 1995. The Federal government promised in early December (2015) to fund a new drinking water plant.*5 The Liberals have promised all First Nations safe drinking water, within 5 years.

The Grassy Narrows First Nation also suffers from high levels of mercury contamination in the water from pulp mill dumping between 1962 to 1970. The amount is informally referred to as 9000 kilograms. The contamination became buried in sediment and continues to be released, spreading, poisoning water and fish, then people. Japanese experts in mercury poisoning visiting Grassy Narrows in 2014 found compensation levels for neurological poisoning inadequate. Only 27% of those applying to the Mercury Disability Board (started in 1986) receive a pension as compensation averaging $400/month. The Liberal Premier of Ontario won’t have it cleaned up without further study.

Canada’s land management practices have taken away the food source of fish. The band is trying to prevent the stripping away of its lumber. Worried by conceivable links between clear cutting of their forest (as mandated in Ontario’s recent forest management plan) and mercury poisoning the band has asked the Ontario government to wait for further environmental assessment. The Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change rejected this request so the decade long blocking of logging company ordinance on Indigenous territory is likely to continue. These people are fighting their disappearance as a people. The Crown has made no public effort to examine the issue within perspective of the crime of genocide. Logging interests may try to rely on repressive legislation and law enforcement procedures which approach Aboriginal protest with policies intended for anti-terrorism.*6

Northern bands tend to lack confidence in government management: in Spring a year ago the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation (on the border of Ontario and Manitoba) had to declare an emergency when the ferry failed its 4 year Transport Canada inspection (leaking too badly).The community lives on a man-made island where the ferry is necessary to get groceries or bottled water and the community’s boil-water advisory has lasted 18 years.*7

More recently, on February 24th, 2016, leaders of Northern Ontario First Nations called a state of emergency, a plea for help, due to a dire lack of medical supplies and a suicide epidemic of the youth. The declaration asks government to provide within 90 days an intervention plan that also assures clean drinking water. One of the First Nations at risk is the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, 49 communities with 35,000 people in the Province’s north.*8

In Manitoba, the Pimicikamak Cree Nation where four children and two adults have taken their own lives in the last three months has declared a state of emergency. The CBC offers these statistics: the nation, 700 kilometres north of Winnipeg has a population of 8000 with 80% unemployed. 170 children are on the high school’s suicide-watch list. The problem is conventionally traced to lack of opportunities for youth.*9

In Saskatchewan three First Nations communities have declared a health crisis in response to too many violence-drug-disease related deaths: the Keeseekoose, Cote, and Key First Nations. The former chief of the Keeseekoose attributes the deaths to the lack of access to good health care.*10

Common to all these emergencies among First Peoples is that they don’t seem to surprise anyone. Military Field hospitals are not sent in. Airlifts of vitamin rich foods are not dispatched. The resource corporations in the neighbourhood are not identified and made responsible to these bands which remain in such poverty. The government officials responsible for the areas where emergencies occur are not identified. The unacceptable is accepted as if it were normal. Is the State criminal when it intentionally leaves a community without drinking water?

Throughout the world there is a pattern in the deliberate killing of Native groups and poor people (the categories coincide) who have or could claim land rights to surface and sub-surface resources. As international human rights treaties gain strength, corporate powers will have to pay Native Peoples just portions for taking what belongs to the people of the land. And the corporate powers will have to ask. Canadian corporations are repeatedly implicated in the deaths of environmental and Aboriginal activists resisting their operations, for example in Central and South America.*11 Why do we suppose that they are acting within human rights law and international law at home?

The violence against Indigenous peoples takes many forms. In Canada it’s apparent in the ongoing unsolved murders and disappearances of women of child-bearing age. Kevin Annett’s witness which continues to predate, trouble and annoy many of the official accounts, finds that the names of the disappeared are frequently those of old families with land claims.*12The new Federal budget allocates 40 million dollars for an inquiry into missing and disappeared Aboriginal women.*13 10.4 million goes to the reserve communities for women’s shelters.*14

Psychological patterns of hopelessness, recognizable in military psywar tactics, have the violent effect of youth acculturation to drugs. Aboriginal “management” programs which don’t address housing and cultural needs on Aboriginal terms mold entire communities to despair. Are Indigenous employment programs directly related to improving the survival of the Indigenous community, the band, the Tribe? Employment with corporate resource strippers which are not adequately paying the community, equates with working for the enemy.

European colonialism treats Indigenous communities as those of a conquered people. While the Indigenous approach to the environment allows humanity to continue, European capitalism doesn’t. Just who has won the hearts and minds of North American people is an unsettled question. As an exception to the colonialist’s override of Indigenous culture, Canada’s Winnipeg Arts Gallery has collected Inuit art for over 60 years and has just received a shipment of 50 creates (6000 pieces) on five year loan from the Government of Nunavut, to augment the gallery’s 14000 artifacts of Inuit culture.*15 Yet this tribute to an early First Peoples’ culture is embittered by facts of contemporary life.

In northern communities’ lack of adequate dietary needs, lack of nourishment and lack of clean water enforce what has become a hostile environment. Lack of adequate medical care in areas particularly in need of medical care increases the suffering and death rate. For example, nurses available to remote and isolated northern communities are by unconfirmed estimate, 88 in Ontario, 8 in Quebec. Most publicly available Health Canada reports are out of date. Despite all the niceties which insist on how legal resource-stripping operations are, in areas of crushing poverty where people have historical claims to the lands, the resources are being stolen. The government and corporations would not agree, and to imply any intention of destroying a people is unfriendly.

But this is an established mechanism of colonialism: in order to steal from Native peoples the peoples are degraded to lack of self-respect, lack of understanding their human value, lack of pride in their cultures, lack of value to the oppressor society, so that the Indigenous are less likely to resist physically these thefts. Those who do resist are on occasion cut in or paid off, to manage those who would continue to resist. If educated to believe the inferiority of their world view and community mores, to a Settler culture which sustains corporate capitalism, lack of Aboriginal self value continues. If not overtly intentional, the criminally high suicide rates of northern communities are abnormal, ie. created by outside factors not normal to the community.

There are many government workers who devote their lives to making this better. Yet there is a national emergency occurring, without adequate attempts to stop it. Blame must be assigned even to the level of those funding means of survival, and charges laid against Federal or Provincial government management responsible for a band’s state of emergency. In each area where a band risks disappearance due to a history of environmental mismanagement, pollutants, the effects of resource extraction, lack of medical services, lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of adequate dietary information, lack of police protection from the drug market, those responsible should be charged within the historical context of genocide.

For over ten years Night’s Lantern has carried *16 ongoing genocide warnings for Canada’s First Nations and Aboriginal peoples. The history of genocide against First Peoples is so deeply established in North America that the outrageous results of injustice have become a norm. Isolated problems are solved when bent to corporate benefit. First Peoples are expected to adapt to a system that historically kills them as part of the colonial metaphor of conquest.

After years of the Harper government’s obtuseness to evidence against it of genocide, which could one day be prosecuted at international law, the more aware Liberal government of Justin Trudeau provides a substantial coherent rescue attempt to save First Nations from destruction and Canada from its failure of responsibility. It won’t be enough. Its dream isn’t large enough. The worry is this is simply an instance of bad cop good cop.

The 2016 Budget’s funding just begins to make up for past denials. Current estimates of funding differences in education find Indigenous funding 30% lower than for all Canadians.*17 However, military spending is being cut back while the budget for Aboriginal peoples expands. Of the 8.4 billion dollars to First Peoples focusing on infrastructure and education – about a quarter of this will be for schools on reserves, and the spending cap on Aboriginal funding will be lifted.*18

All of Canada’s poor are finding even less to eat with the rising price of foods.

I believe  that the Government of Canada really wants to stop a destruction of Indigenous peoples.

The desire for change so evident in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1996 was held back by corporate interests and the Conservative Party. The Trudeau government has promised to honour each of the Royal Commission’s 94 calls to action.*19 Justice for Aboriginal people isn’t a political issue. The issue was and remains whether the people have human rights. Portions of Settler groups are being destroyed economically as well, and with the same pragmatism, pushed out of survival by prices of food and lodging and social patterns requiring an expensive conformity. The fate of First Peoples foreshadows the fate of Canada’s poor who will grow in number as wealth separates from commonality. In Canada, peoples’ fates are interwoven and tied to each other.

  Notes

1. http://nightslantern.ca/2012bulletin.htm#10may; http://nightslantern.ca/2012bulletin.htm#18mayun.

2. http://nightslantern.ca/2013bulletin.htm#16octja .

3. “Tories’ ‘tough-on-crime’ approach has broken Canada’s justice system, say experts,” Ally Foster, March 10, 2016, hilltimes.com; “Prison watchdog says more than a quarter of federal inmates are aboriginal people,” Jan. 14, 2016, CBC News.

4. “Canada violates human rights, northern Ontario First Nations tell UN,” Feb. 22, 2016, CBC News.

5. “Liberals to fund water plant for Neskantaga First Nation in 2016,” Jody Porter, Dec. 29, 2015, CBC News.

6.”Mercury levels still rising near Grassy Narrows First Nation, report says,” Jody Porter, June 15, 2015, CBC News; “Japanese mercury experts push Canada to help Grassy Narrows,” Jody Porter, Sept. 2, 2014, CBC News; “Ontario gives green light to clear cutting at Grassy Narrows,” Jody Porter, Dec. 30, 2014, CBC News; “Mercury contamination at Grassy Narrows First Nation will get worse with logging, deputy chief says,” Judy Porter, June 17, 2015, CBC News.

7. “Reserve loses lifeline, declares emergency,” Chinta Puxley / The Canadian Press, April 30, 2015, Victoria News.

8. “We are in a state of shock:’ First Nations declare health emergency,” Colin Perkel / The Canadian Press, Feb. 24, 2016, Victoria News.

9. “Pimicikamak declares state of emergency to deal with suicide crisis,” Jillian Taylor, March 9, 2016, CBC News; “Cry for help after four teens take their own lives on Manitoba First Nation,” Karen Pauls, March 4, 2016, CBC News.

10. “High death rate has three Saskatchewan reserves declaring health crisis,” Canadian Press, March 15, 2016, Victoria News.

11. “Canadian Mining is Murder,” Rachel Small, March 9, 2016, Now; “Blood flows where Canadian capital goes,” Tyler Shipley, March 6, 2016, Winnipeg Free Press; “Action Needed in U.S. and Canada Concerning Assassination of Berta Caceres and Assassination Attempt Against and Illegal Detention of Gustavo Castro,” March 21, 2016, Rights Action.

12. “Exclusive: Missing Women in Canada – The Cause,” Kevin Annett, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDeCYFJ1KJk&feature=youtu.be.

13. “On missing Aboriginal women,” J.B.Gerald, Aug. 27, 2013, nightslantern.ca.

14. “Breaking down the biggest items — and biggest omissions — from the 2016 budget,” the Canadian Press/Postmedia News, March 22, 2016, National Post.

15. “World’s-biggest Inuit art collection at WAG just got a whole lot bigger,” Braeden Jones, March 3, 2016, Toronto Metro.

16. Since 2001 Gerald and Maas Night’s Lantern has posted news and documents concerned with the prevention of genocide. Its genocide warnings appear at http://nightslantern.ca/02.htm#ca.

17. “First Nations education funds quietly ‘removed’ by the previous government, Liberals say,” Susana Mas, March 11, 2016, CBC News; First Nations students get 30 per cent less funding than other children, economist says, Judy Porter, March 14, 2016, CBC News.

18. “Breaking down the biggest items — and biggest omissions — from the 2016 budget,” the Canadian Press / Postmedia News, March 22, 2016, National Post.

19. “20 years since Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, still waiting for change,” Martha Troian, March 3, 2016, CBC News.

On Mar.29, the Syrian Democratic Forces, mostly Kurdish YPG units reportedly launched an offensive towards the town of Manbij in Northern Syria.

Meanwhile, Kurdish units captured the Al-Shat checkpoint and the Al-Kadi Villa near Azaz and attempted to advance to the town which remains one of the latest Al-Nusra-controlled logistical hubs used to receive supplies from Turkey. In turn, Al Nusra militants supported by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) launched a counter-offensive in the area. Pro-militant sources report about heavy casualties among the SDF. It’s confirmed that a Kurdish T72 battle tank has been destroyed with a TOW-missile. Now, heavy clashes are ongoing at the contested area near the town.

It’s also expected that al-Nusra and the FSA militants will be able to concentrate a major of their forces at the Azaz front because there is no threat of ISIS advance in the area. Turkish-, Qatari- and Saudi-backed groups have a kind of agreement dividing spheres of influence in Northern Syria.

On Mar.29, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that 50 Al Nusra militants and three vehicles loaded with ammunition crossed Turkey’s border into Syria. Those terrorists arrived the town of Anadan to help militant forces to threat Kurdish units in the Sheikh Maqsood neighborhood of Aleppo.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) supported by Russian warplanes and fighter helicopters is advancing on the town of al Salamiyah located on the important crossroads in the province of Hama. The army units are now in full control of several key areas and heights near the town. If Salamiyah is captured, the Syrian forces will be able to increase the safety of the vital M5 highway and, with recent gains in Palmyra, expand dramatically its logistic and freedom of manoeuvre. The advance on Al Quaryatayn pursues the same goal.

An ISIS governor identified as Mohammad Ahmad Sha’yeb has been killed by the Iraqi government troops near the city of Mosul in the Nineveh province. Ahmad Sha’yeb is the third ISIS commander killed by the Iraqi army recent days, Iraqi defense ministry announced on Mar.29.

The EU has stepped up its behind-the-scenes role in organizing regime change in Burundi by taking the dramatic step to cut most of its funding for the country’s anti-terror contingent in Somalia, this according to the latest exclusive report from Reuters. Burundi provides nearly a quarter of the 22,000 African Union (AU) troops stationed in the country and is the largest international contributor. Correspondingly, while there’s no official data about the number of AU soldiers who have been killed during the nearly decade-long African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), reliable estimates and official UN data from 2013 indicate that Burundi has borne the brunt of the roughly 3,000 fatalities that are thought to have occurred.

Given Burundi’s dedicated commitment to fighting terrorism in Somalia and the blood that its military has already shed in furtherance of this goal, it’s all the more surprising that the EU would risk undermining its anti-terror effectiveness, especially when Burundi is essentially carrying out its task as a paid surrogate for Western troops themselves. Revealingly, Brussels’ decision adds proof to the convincing allegations that the EU elite are more influenced by US-whispered geo-economic imperatives in overthrowing the leader of a geopolitical pivotal and mineral-rich state than pragmatically assisting its forces in the shared struggle against global terrorism.

Black-On-Black Terrorism

Probably the most immediate reason why the EU elite don’t appreciate Burundi’s anti-terror commitment in Somalia is because Al Shabaab, the primary target of this indefinite mission, only operates in Africa and targets black victims. It’s not that the group is doing this out of any purposeful intent, but simply that its area of operations around the Horn of Africa puts it within range of mostly black targets. In an ironic rebuff to their ideology but in accordance with their unsurprising and typical double standards, the Cultural Marxist EU elite don’t see any pressing need to halt black-on-black terrorism so long as it’s contained to Africa and doesn’t target European-based Africans. Al Shabaab has yet to expand its zone of attack to anywhere directly relevant to conventional EU interests, preferring instead to kill Ethiopians, Kenyans and even fellow Somalians in its crazed pursuit of an irredentist and ethnic Somali-dominated “Islamic State” in East Africa.

Members of Somalia’s hardline Islamist rebel group al Shabaab. Photo: The Daily Nation

It’s true that there exist certain grievances that the regional Somali community definitely has towards their respective governments no matter which country they presently reside in, and there was a failed Cold War-era effort at reviving the “Greater/Natural Somalia” that was divided by European and what was perceived to be African (Ethiopian) imperialism, but Al Shabaab has expertly manipulated these preexisting sentiments and historical memory and intertwined it with the violent doctrine of extreme Islam in order to manufacture a semi-appealing terrorist group that masquerades as a pseudo-“resistance” organization. Furthermore, there have been strong suspicions in the West that Qatar is one of the terrorist group’s sponsors, and while no smoking gun has emerged, such a truth would believably mesh with the emirate’s already proven modus operandi in the Mideast.

In contrast to Saudi Arabia’s terrorists, Qatar’s have largely refrained from attacking Western targets, possibly owing to a tacit agreement that they have with the latter’s governments to provide soft support (media sympathy, “refugee” status, etc.) for Doha’s patronized Muslim Brotherhood and affiliated elements in exchange for much-needed and competitively priced energy contracts. Both sides are presently upholding this deal, with the EU continuing to purchase Qatari energy resources while Emir Thani holds off the terrorist hordes from attacking European targets (at least for now), and with Al Shabaab likely part of this arrangement, Brussels sees no urgent need to substantially support outsourced anti-terror activities against a regional African group that only targets local black victims. For this self-interested and ideological inconsistent reason, the “bleeding heart” Cultural Marxists of the EU are eagerly willing to sacrifice the effectiveness of a solid and tested anti-terrorist force in Somalia solely as a means of encouraging regime change in Burundi.

The Geopolitical Hinge

The average observer might be dumbfounded with disbelief that the EU would knowingly hamper anti-terror operations in Somalia in order to pile up regime change pressure on a geographically tiny and landlocked Central African state, but the unspoken geopolitical reality behind all of this is that Burundi is actually quite important in a regional strategic sense.

It’s far from being a pivot, but because it plays an integral influencing role on the nearby pivots themselves, it can more accurately be described by the author’s own neologism as being a “geopolitical hinge”. Its strategic disposition one way or the other can impact on regional affairs but not necessarily change them owing to the country’s comparatively lesser influence on its neighborhood, but it nevertheless fulfills an important role in the larger East African paradigm of power. All economic considerations aside about the lust that Western companies have for displacing their expected Russian and Chinese rivals in the country’s largely untapped mineral sector, Burundi occupies an ideal geographic space in one of the most dynamic and gradually focused-on areas of the continent. To place the country into a grander context, East Africa is on the cusp of undergoing New Silk Road-affiliated transnational integrational projects that could dramatically elevate its regional partners’ multipolar status in the emerging world order.

That said, Burundi is the weak link in this emerging construction due to the potential that its domestic identity-differences, legally subdued but still socially present, could be manipulated from abroad to engineer a disruptive Hybrid War that sabotages an important spoke of the African Silk Road network. To get into the details, Burundi abuts regional giant Tanzania, whose population is expected by the UN to surge to epic and powerful proportions by mid-century to 137 million, making it the fourth-fastest-growing country in the world. Relatedly, while this could potentially be a demographic curse, it could also be an economic blessing, and it’s for this reason why China and other countries have a deep-seated interest in getting involved in the country’s economy now while it’s still relatively early on to do so. However, a prompted Hybrid War in Burundi would inevitably lead to overspill effect across the Tanzanian border, not only in terms of “Weapons of Mass Migration”, but also in armed non-state actors traversing its territory and embedding themselves along the Central Corridor railroad line that’s expect to form a crucial part of the East African Railway Master Plan, itself the New Silk Road infrastructural backbone of the formative East African Federation.

Additionally, any humanitarian/militant crisis in Burundi could easily draw in Rwanda, which is already conspiring against Bujumbura as it is (and even worse, exploiting refugees to do so), and this could offset one of the most economically promising countries on the continent. One should bear in mind, however, that this is mostly a macroeconomic and statistical illusion largely facilitated by Rwanda’s developing hub status and its key role in laundering the eastern Congolese minerals that its affiliated rebel forces have pillaged (despite it being ‘officially’ illegal to do so). Even so, Rwanda does have a lot of minerals in its own right and is the world’s largest exporter of coltan, for example, but the US likely takes issue with the fact that it’s selling some of them to China and diversifying its overall economic relations with Washington’s prime global economic rival. Rwanda’s role vis-à-vis China is increasingly taken on a very strategic nature owing to the importance that its own and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC’s) (illegally transited) minerals have to China’s (overseas) scientific-technological manufacturing base. As much as Paul Kagame has wantonly behaved as an untouchable American proxy since he came to power on the heels of the country’s externally instigated genocide, that does appear to be changing, as Washington signaled its “disappointment” at his ambitions to run for a third term next year, indicating that it now potentially sees him and his county as dispensable scraps of geopolitical “scorched earth” material in the larger New Cold War that it’s fighting against China’s New Silk Road vision in Africa.

To summarize Burundi’s geopolitical hinge relevance in East and Central African affairs, not only could a Hybrid War in the tiny country offset Tanzania and the East African Federation’s broad New Silk Road integrational connective projects, but it could also return the neighboring mineral-rich country of Rwanda to being an unapproachable battlefield that scares away and obstructs all possible Chinese strategic investments there. Tangentially, but no less importantly, Burundi’s location next to the extraordinarily mineral-rich areas of the eastern DRC also means that both its possible Hybrid War problems or the influence of any ‘Western/foreign protector’ can extend into one of the most prized natural resource regions in the entire world, either indefinitely offsetting its export capability (both legal and illegal via Rwanda) or redirecting its market destinations more firmly to the West at the expense of East Asia. Undoubtedly then, after considering these geopolitical and geo-economic imperatives, tiny Burundi begins to take on an outsized significance in the global calculations of the New Cold War.

Rekindling The Hybrid War Conflict

Imbued with a relevant understanding of Burundi’s grandiose geostrategic and geo-economic pivot importance to New Cold War affairs and fresh with knowledge about how the EU (under likely American orders) has betrayed Burundi’s brave anti-terrorist sacrifices in Somalia, it’s now time to investigate the connection between these two seemingly disparate topics and unveil that larger goal that’s being pursued. As is already widely known, the US and its allies have been pushing for a regime change against the democratically elected and legitimate Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza, wanting to replace him with a pliant politician that would open the country up to full Western ‘investment’ at Russia and China’s strategic multipolar expense. The ‘normative’ cover for doing so was to allege that the President was constitutionally barred from running for a third term, but the country’s highest court ruled that he can do so on the technicality that his first term was an appointment and not an actual election.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang and the First Vice President of Burundi laid the foundation for the primary school to be built with China’s assistance, January 2008

No matter the nitty gritty details of the state’s sovereign affairs, it’s evident that foreign powers were involving themselves in this process as a means of acquiring future long-term influence inside what they presumed would quickly become a post-Nkurunziza Burundi. A low-intensity Hybrid War was launched against the country on the grounds that the President’s campaign and eventual election to a third term was unconstitutional, and the UN estimated that a comparatively small figure of 474 people have been killed there since the manufactured turmoil broke out on command in April 2015. While the global body quite rightly recognizes that the conflict could spill over Burundi’s borders and become the spark for a larger regional conflagration (in line with the author’s above-mentioned assessment about the US’ scorched earth Hybrid War tactics in East and Central Africa against China), it’s quite telling that, respectfully speaking, not even half a thousand people have died in a political crisis that captivated the attention of most of the world’s leading international news outlets for almost the past year. This attests not only to the exaggerated importance that the Western media gave to this crisis, but also to the patriotism of the country’s civilian population and the majority of its military leaders, not counting of course the conspirators of the failed May 2015 coup.

Although the attempt at a traditional regime change ploy miserably failed, the fact that it came the closest out of all of the ones that were tried (Color Revolution and Unconventional War included) indicated to the West that this is the method which must be most heavily invested in for possible future success. Returning to the beginning of the article where Reuters’ exclusive report was cited about the EU cutting off funding for the Burundian anti-terrorist forces in Somalia, it must be qualified that this doesn’t translate to the full suspension of funds, but to a significant enough percentage that it will negatively impact not only on the government itself (which takes a 20% cut), but most relevantly on the soldiers themselves who have come to depend on this added income. The goal is to turn the rank-and-file soldiers against the government by essentially blackmailing them into supporting another military coup sometime in the future, but unlike its failed predecessor, any forthcoming one might have a larger supportive cadre of conspirators to draw from and might end up splitting the military forces along ethnic lines. Whether it succeeds or not in overthrowing the government at that point isn’t actually all that vital so long as it can add fuel to the Hybrid War flames of identity violence that the West has been trying to fan for almost a year now.

Concluding Thoughts

It shouldn’t be forgotten that if the US can’t successfully co-opt or change a targeted government, then it will instinctively resort to geopolitical ‘scorched earth’ tactics in taking down the country and the rest of the region that are expected to otherwise play very constructive roles in China’s New Silk Road global multipolar paradigm. Burundi, with its small size and relatively godforsaken geographic location, surprisingly plays a very significant role in affecting the geopolitics of East and Central Africa, especially when this its geo-economic relevance is factored into the overall strategic equation. The West is very cognizant of the Hybrid War vulnerabilities that plague the country, particularly the recent and very bloody Hutu-Tutsi civil war, and it’s adroitly manipulating these factors in order to add increasingly intense pressure on the government.

Thankfully, the people are well informed of the external threat against their country and understand the nefarious plot that’s been deployed against them to return Burundi to ethnic-based civil war, hence why the Hybrid War plan has dismally failed to reach its full and genocidal hoped-for potential that would have then triggered a “humanitarian intervention” by the African Union, the East African Federation, the UN, and/or a unilateral “coalition of the willing” from the West. In light of this ‘inconvenient’ reality, the West now appears to be investing heavily in winning the ‘hearts and minds’ (and pocketbooks) of the rank-and-file soldiers of the Burundian military, obviously in anticipation of a forthcoming military coup redux that represents the best possible chances at overthrowing the government or sparking a renewed civil war.

There’s a possibility that a separate foreign patron (perhaps China) could step in to fill the financial void left by the EU’s withdraw of monetary commitment to the Burundian anti-terrorist forces in Somalia, but if even if this doesn’t eventuate, the proven patriotism of the country’s military and the astuteness of its officer corps should be enough to repel the forthcoming conspiracy against it and ensure that it fails just as badly as its forerunner did. Nevertheless, depending on how the forecasted situation develops, it frighteningly might be destabilizing enough that it exacerbates Burundi’s internal identity-based divisions and noticeably pushes it closer to the brink of Hybrid War, possibly even involving a more robust Rwandan role. The next few months will be decisive, and any major national commemoration or foreign presidential trip might be chosen as the date for launching the latest coup attempt bringing Burundi back to its days of civil war and dysfunction.

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

Americans are helpless against false prosecutions because so many Americans are gullible and cannot believe that prosecutors and police would be corrupt.  They do not give thought to the character of prosecutors. Have you ever asked yourself what type of persons become prosecutors?  Most Americans think a prosecutor is a person dedicated to serving justice and punishing criminals for their crimes.  There are such people, but there are also ambitious prosecutors who pursue high conviction rates and high profile cases as a path to higher office. For these prosecutors, justice is a subsidiary concern. The worst kind of prosecutors are those who simply enjoy ruining people, whether innocent or guilty.

Prosecutors formerly were restrained by enculturation and a moral environment. Today the only restraint is their own character.

Miscarriages of justice have always occurred, but as Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, miscarriages of justice are becoming the norm, not the exception.  The Boston Marathon Bombing case is an example of a corrupt prosecution.

Once a miscarriage of justice occurs, it is almost impossible to reverse it. Public authorities do not readily admit to mistakes or corrupt motives.  For example, Ivan Teleguz is set to be executed in a few days despite the fact that two of the three witnesses against him have publicly stated that they lied for prosecutors at Teleguz’s trial as their part of deals prosecutors made with them.  In other words, the false evidence against Ivan Telguz was created by the prosecutors for the purpose of executing him.

There is a petition sponsored by change.org to Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe that is trying to stop the execution of a wrongly convicted person who appears to be innocent.  Here is the petition:

Petitioning Terry McAuliffe

Please Stop the Imminent Execution of Ivan Teleguz, an Innocent Man

The Commonwealth of Virginia plans to execute an innocent man, Ivan Teleguz. We need to make sure Governor McAuliffe knows that there is too much evidence of Ivan’s innocence to allow this execution to go ahead. Please join the call for the Governor to intervene.

The government’s case against Ivan was based on false evidence. Three men said that Ivan hired Stephanie’s killer. But two of those men have since admitted that they lied in court – and sworn under oath that Ivan was not involved. The third, Michael Hetrick, confessed to killing Stephanie. He was offered a deal that spared his own life in return for saying that Ivan hired him to commit the murder.

The prosecutor coerced the witnesses. The witnesses have sworn under oath that they gave false testimony at trial because of threats from the prosecutor and promises she made to improve their sentences.

The prosecution tried to influence the jury by saying Ivan was involved in a made-up murder. At trial, the prosecutor argued that Ivan should be sentenced to death because he was involved in another murder in Pennsylvania, and was highly dangerous. It was later revealed that the testimony about the murder and the prosecutor’s argument were completely made up—the murder never even happened.

There is evidence that calls into question every part of the Commonwealth’s case against Ivan. There is too much doubt for Governor McAuliffe to allow this execution to go ahead. Please help make sure he knows that The Commonwealth is about to execute an innocent man.

Please help save an innocent man. Join the call for Governor McAuliffe to intervene.

Visit ivansprayerforjustice.org to learn more about Ivan’s case.

Visit Facebook and Twitter for case updates.

http://ivansprayerforjustice.org