Global Research

Today an Israeli soldier executed a wounded Palestinian man on the ground in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron’s old city in the occupied West Bank.

In a B’Tselem video (below, viewers should be warned of graphic video) capturing the killing, the man can be seen semi-conscious on the ground, when a soldier cocks his rifle and fires, blowing his brains out.

Before the shooting, voices can be heard asking in Hebrew, “Is the dog alive?”

Israeli forces killed a second Palestinian in the same incident. The men are alleged to have carried out a stabbing attack on a soldier.

In another video, an Israeli soldier can be seen kicking over the body of one of the Palestinian men.

The two Palestinian men have been identified as Ramzi Aziz al-Qasrawi, 21, and Abed al-Fattah Yusri al-Sharif, 21.

The Tel Rumeida neighborhood has faced severe restrictions and been declared a closed military by the Israeli military since November 1, 2015.

Since October, 2015, 203 Palestinians and 30 Israelis have been killed, according to Ma’an News Agency.

Medics leaving Palestinians to die

The video depicts the injured Israeli soldier receiving medical treatment and being evacuated by a settler ambulance seconds before the Palestinian man is executed. The wounded Israeli soldier sits up in a stretcher, indicating that his injuries are presumably much less severe than either of the Palestinian men lying on the ground.

This is in breach of internationally recognized protocol of triage, which requires that the wounded are treated by the severity of their injury and likelihood to benefit from immediate treatment.

The practice of Israeli medics abandoning triage protocol is increasingly prevalent and has support among medical professionals and some in the government.

Official directive of summary executions

In response to today’s killing the Israeli military spokesperson initially said the filmed execution “contradicts the IDF’s ethical code and what is expected from the IDF’s soldiers and commanders” and that the soldier has been suspended while the military conducts a probe.

But the policy of summary executions has been ordered as a directive from top political and military officials, as seen in the video Willful Killing.

Here are some recent examples:

On October 9, 2015, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon announced at a press conference, “Right now is it required to respond quickly to any local attack to eliminate the terrorist stabber or the perpetrator stone thrower and the like, immediately, on the spot.”

On October 14th, 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told paramilitary Border Police units “I know that it requires your discretion, but have no doubt: You have complete backing – complete! – from me, from the Israeli government, and in my opinion from the nation in Israel.”

On October 8, 2015, Israeli military Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot said, “Our policy of use of force is very clear. The IDF has complete freedom of action in order to to fulfill the mission to restore security.” Benti Sau, Israeli Police Acting Commissioner, said “From my personal experience, I can tell you that at this time, we have received backing from the political level, full backing from the legal system.”

On October 11, 2015, Yair Lapid, MK and Chairman of the Yesh Atid Party, “Whoever takes out a knife or a screwdriver, or whatever it may be, the directive needs to be shoot in order to kill. Not to hesitate. There will be full legal backing. The state gives full legal backing.”

Israa Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, survived after being shot by Israeli police at a gas station in Afula. Initially charged with planning to carry out an attack, she was later cleared of charges. Defense Minister Ya’alon, however, criticized Israeli police for hesitating before shooting Abed, and called her a “terrorist.”

Execution as a religious commandment

Jewish religious leaders in Israel have also expressed support for summary executions of Palestinians.

Two weeks ago, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef said that it’s a “mitzvah” (religious commandment) to kill armed Palestinians.

Prominent religious Zionist rabbi and head of Machon Meir yeshiva Uri Sherki said in January that there is an “obligation for Jews to kill terrorists before they kill us.”

Safed Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu said on the Galei Yisrael radio station in October, “It is forbidden to leave a murderer alive.”

Eliyahu and Rabbi Benzion Mutzafi have both called for police and soldiers to be put on trial if they do not execute Palestinian assailants on the spot.

Rabbi Ben-Tzion Mutzafi told his students, “It is commanded to take hold of his head and hit it against the ground until there is no longer any life in it.”

Public support for executions

A poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute found broad public support for the summary executions. 53% of Jewish Israelis support killing alleged attackers on-the-spot, even after their arrest and when they no longer pose a threat. In addition, Israeli civilians have incited soldiers and police to execute Palestinians on-the-spot. This can be seen in the killings of Fadi Alloun and Bashar Massalha.

Last month, when Israeli army chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot said that Israeli soldiers and police shouldn’t unload their magazines into Palestinian children armed with scissors, (referring to the shooting of 14-year-old Hadil Wajia Awad and her cousin) he faced the wrath of the Israeli right.

The irony of the chief of staff’s statement was apparently lost on his detractors. Eizenkot is the architect of Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine, which calls for disproportionate violence against civilian populations in order to turn them against armed resistance.

Members of Knesset turned on Eizenkot, accusing him of harming morale and even blaming an attack at a Rami Levy supermarket in the occupied West Bank on him. Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Bezalel Smotrich, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, and Minister of Internal Affairs Gilad Erdan all criticized Eizenkot for is statement.

Dan Cohen is an independent journalist based in Palestine. He tweets at @dancohen3000.

The aviation and general security services firm ICTS handles security operations at Brussels airport, the scene of a bomb attack yesterday morning.

ICTS was established in 1982 by former members of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency and El Al airline security agents, and has a major presence around the world in airport security including operations in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Japan and Russia. ICTS uses the security system employed in Israel, whereby passengers are profiled to assess the degree to which they pose a potential threat on the basis of a number of indicators, including age, name, origin and behavior during questioning.

Chairman of the Supervisory Board at ICTS is Menachem J. Atzmon. Atzmon is a former Likud party member who was indicted and convicted in 1996 in a fraud and embezzlement case relating to the misappropriation of funds raised by charities. Atzmon is also the CEO of the port authority of Rostock in Germany.

This will not, however, be the first time that ICTS has come under scrutiny for possible security lapses leading to a ‘Muslim terror attack’.

The young knicker bomber. Groomed, sheep-dipped and expended, to bring ‘terror’ to your doorstep.

As the provider of security services to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and United Airlines and US Airways, the firm’s security system was criticized for somehow allowing erstwhile ‘underwear bomber’, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to “slip through” and board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit with explosive materials on Christmas day 2009.

The Christmas knicker bomber, as he came to be known, was not your usual disgruntled Arab or lowly Muslim acolyte. He was the son of Nigerian banking mogul and former Nigerian government minister Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, one of the richest men in Africa. We’re talking one of the African colonial elite here, an African version of the British ‘old boy’s network‘ While in London, his son, the knicker bomber lived in a ₤4 million apartment in Mansfield Street, in the city’s West End. He also enjoyed access to visas for several different countries, including the US.

Detroit attorney Kurt Haskell and his wife Lori

Unlike most alleged Muslim terrorists who usually bring their passports to the scene of their ‘suicide attacks’ (and often leave them there for police to find) Abdulmutallab apparently arrived at Schipol airport to board his flight to the US with a one way ticket, no luggage and without a passport.

Now usually this would have spelled a premature end to his planned attack, but according to Detroit attorney and eyewitness to events at Schipol, Kurt Haskell, Abdulmutallab benefited from the help of a sharply dressed Indian man who was able to escort the youngster to the boarding gate where he told the attendant that Abdulmutallab had no passport but should be allowed on the flight anyway. When the sharply dressed man was told that he would have to speak to the security manager, he did so and successfully planted the knicker bomber on the plane.

Now this requires some serious string pulling, and all the hoopla in the press at the time about whether or not the security system worked was just hubris, because if the knicker bomber appeared at the gate without a passport, it is unlikely that he went through the normal process up to that point, including check-in which requires passengers to show their passports.

In all probability, Abdulmutallab was escorted as a ‘VIP’ to the gate by the sharply dressed man. So how do two suspicious looking dudes, at least one of them without a passport and carrying bomb materials, get to the gate in an airport and then onto the flight? The answer is they don’t, unless they have some friends among the people running the security controls at the airport. In this case, ICTS.

Within a few months of the underwear attack, the US State Department admittedthat it had known about Mutallab’s intentions for some time and had not revoked his entry visa to the USA because they, effectively, wanted to see what he would do.

“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one soldier in that effort.”

Richard Reid, hapless dupe.

But ICTS’ security faux pas’ don’t end there. In December 2001, they somehow managed to let deranged shoe bomber Richard Reid, onto his Miami-bound flight in Paris, and this was after ICTS had cleared Reid through security at Amsterdam airport on a flight to Tel Aviv in July 2001 for what was apparently an all-expenses paid week-long trip to the Israeli city. What precisely he did there remains a mystery. Reid later said that ICTS/El Al had failed to detect that he had explosives in his shoes on the flight to Tel Aviv, an amazing revelation considering the Israeli airline’s tight security and the fact that, six months later, they were responsible for letting him board the Miami-bound flight with the very same type of ‘shoe bomb’. Israel had not informed British, American, or any other security agency of their concerns about Reid. Reid’s aunt, Claudette Lewis who raised Reid in south London, was quoted as saying she believed her nephew had been “brainwashed”.

ICTS also somehow missed several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers who allegedly flew out of Boston’s Logan airport on September 11th 2001. ICTS also handled security for London’s bus network during the July 7, 2005, ‘suicide’ bomb attacks. In fact, two of its subsidiaries, ICTS UK and ICTS Europe Systems, are based at Tavistock House, Tavistock Square in London, scene of the London Stagecoach bus bombing that day.

That’s quite a record, all in all. And we have to wonder how many terror attacks could have been prevented, how many innocent lives saved, how much further we might be today from a burgeoning police state, if outfits like ICTS and those that support them had not allowed so many unlikely and hapless ‘Muslim terrorists’ to “slip through”.

Of all the authoritarian ‘leaders’ that benefit from the insecurity created by ‘Muslim terrorism’, the political elite of the state of Israel benefit the most. And of all the people who suffer from terrorist attacks, people of Muslim faith suffer by far the most. Israel, a country created on stolen Palestinian land and surrounded by Muslims, requires the continued threat of ‘Islamic terrorism’ to justify its existence. In pushing this insane agenda so far, by encouraging Europe and the ‘West’ to adopt Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians, it seems that the conditions are being created whereby the events of Nazi Germany may well repeat, only this time with Muslims in the position of the Jews.

In an instance of bizarre timing or, perhaps, foreknowledge, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Europe only four days ago that it could see terrorist bombings and attacks in its cities in the near future if it does not cease support for and cooperation with Kurdish “militants.”

Interestingly enough, Erdogan mentioned Brussels as a potential target by name.

Only four days before the Brussels attacks, Erdogan spoke at a commencement ceremony for the 101st anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli in Canakkale, Turkey on March, 18 where he stated that

“there is no reason why the bomb that exploded in Ankara cannot explode in Brussels, in any other European city.”

“The snakes you are sleeping with can bite you any time,” he added.

While ISIS, a Western-created and NATO-directed terrorist organization, has claimed credit for the bombings, it should be pointed out that Erdogan was referring to “Kurdish militants,” whom Turkey considers terrorists.

Turkey, the United States, and Belgium all consider the PKK a terrorist organization but the West has been working closely with the Syrian Kurds (PYD,YPG) on the ground in Syria for their own geopolitical agenda.

Nevertheless, Erdogan’s statement is interesting considering the fact that the Brussels attacks came shortly after his warning which predicted not only the attack but the location.

After all, Turkey has been a major supporter of terrorists and even ISIS itself in Syria since the beginning of the Syrian crisis.

With such close cooperation between the two, one must wonder whether or not Erdogan or MIT had foreknowledge of the Brussels attacks.

Indeed, Turkey has shown no hesitancy in the past to working with ISIS or other terror-related networks.

Brandon Turbeville is the author of seven books. He has published over 650 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

The title of this article is intended to be ironic because of course the Red Army did play the predominant role in destroying Nazi Germany during World War II. You would not know it, however, reading the western Mainstream Media (MSM), or watching television, or going to the cinema in the west where the Soviet role in the war has almost entirely disappeared.

If in the West the Red Army is largely absent from World War II, the Soviet Union’s responsibility for igniting the war is omnipresent. The MSM and western politicians tend to regard the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 as the Soviet Union’s just reward for the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, the USSR «brought their own fate upon themselves when by their Pact with [Joachim von] Ribbentrop they let Hitler loose on Poland and so started the war…» Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the USSR, was Stalin’s fault and therefore an expatiation of sins, so that Soviet resistance should not be viewed as anything more than penitence.

Whereas France and Britain «appeased» Nazi Germany, one MSM commentator recently noted, the USSR «collaborated» with Hitler. You see how western propaganda works, and it’s none too subtle.

Just watch for the key words and read between the lines. France and Britain were innocents in the woods, who unwisely «appeased» Hitler in hopes of preserving European peace. On the other hand, the totalitarian Stalin «collaborated» with the totalitarian Hitler to encourage war, not preserve the peace. Stalin not only collaborated with Hitler, the USSR and Nazi Germany were «allies» who carved up Europe. The USSR was «the wolf»; the West was «the lamb». These are not only metaphors of the English-speaking world; France 2 has promoted the same narrative in the much publicised television series, «Apocalypse» (2010) and «Apocalypse Staline» (2015). World War II erupted because of the non-aggression pact, that dirty deal, which marked the beginning of the short-lived «alliance» of the two «totalitarian» states. Hitler and Stalin each had a foot in the same boot.

MSM «journalists» like to underscore Stalin’s duplicity by pointing to the abortive Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in the summer of 1939 to create an anti-Nazi alliance. No wonder they failed, how could the naïve French and British, the lambs, think they could strike a deal with Stalin, the wolf? Even professional historians sometimes take this line: the 1939 negotiations failed because of Soviet «intransigence» and «duplicity».

If ever Pot called Kettle black, this has to be it. And of course the trope of the Pot and the Kettle is a frequent device of western or MSM propaganda to blacken the USSR and, by implication, to blacken Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. There is just one problem with the western approach: the MSM «journalist» or western politician or historian who wants to incriminate Stalin for igniting World War II has one large obstacle in the way, the facts. Not that facts ever bother skilled propagandists, but still, perhaps, the average citizen in the West may yet have an interest in them.

Consider just a few of the facts that the West likes to forget. It was the USSR which first rang the alarm bells in 1933 about the Nazi threat to European peace. Maksim M. Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, became the chief Soviet proponent of «collective security» in Europe.

He warned over and over again of the danger: Nazi Germany is a «mad dog», he said in 1934, «that can’t be trusted with whom no agreements can be made, and whose ambition can only be checked by a ring of determined neighbours». That sounds about right, doesn’t it? Litvinov was the first European statesman to conceive of a grand alliance against Nazi Germany, based on the World War I coalition against Wilhelmine Germany. Soviet would-be allies, France, Britain, the United States, Romania, Yugoslavia, even fascist Italy, all fell away, one after the other, during the mid-1930s. Even Poland, Litvinov hoped, could be attracted to collective security. Unlike the other reluctant powers, Poland never showed the slightest interest in Litvinov’s proposals and sought to undermine collective security right up until the beginning of the war.

Litvinov reminds me of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in his thankless dealings with the Russophobic West. During the interwar years, the Russophobia was mixed with Sovietophobia: it was a clash of two worlds between the West and the USSR, the Silent Conflict, Litvinov called it. When things were going badly, Litvinov appears occasionally to have sought consolation in Greek mythology and the story of Sisyphus, the Greek king, doomed by Zeus to push forever a large rock to the top of a mountain, only to see it fall back down each time. Like Sisyphus, Litvinov was condemned to pointless efforts and endless frustration. So too, it seems, is Lavrov. The French philosopher, Albert Camus, imagined that Sisyphus was happy in his struggles, but that’s an existentialist philosopher for you, and Camus never had to deal with that damned rock. Litvinov did, and never could stick it on the mountaintop.

My point is that it was the West, notably the United States, Britain, and France – yes, that’s right, the same old gang – which dismissed Litvinov’s repeated warnings and spurned his efforts to organise a grand alliance against Nazi Germany.

Dominated by conservative elites, often sympathetic to fascism, the French and British governments looked for ways to get on with Nazi Germany, rather than to go all out to prepare their defences against it. Of course, there were «white crows», as one Soviet diplomat called them, who recognised the Nazi threat to European security and wanted to cooperate with the USSR, but they were only a powerless minority. The MSM won’t tell you much about the widespread sympathy for fascism amongst conservative European elites. It’s like the dirty secrets of the family in the big house at the top of the hill.

Poland also played a despicable role in the 1930s, though the MSM won’t tell you about that either. The Polish government signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934, and in subsequent years sabotaged Litvinov’s efforts to build an anti-Nazi alliance. In 1938 it sided with Nazi Germany against Czechoslovakia and participated in the carve-up of that country sanctioned by the Munich accords on 30 September 1938. It’s a day the West likes to forget. Poland was thus a Nazi collaborator and an aggressor state in 1938 before it became a victim of aggression in 1939.

By early 1939, Litvinov had been rolling his rock (let’s call it collective security) up that wretched mountain for more than five years. Stalin, who was no Albert Camus, and not happy about being repeatedly spurned by the West, gave Litvinov one last chance to obtain an alliance with France and Britain. This was in April 1939. The craven French, rotted by fascist sympathies, had forgotten how to identify and protect their national interests, while the British stalled Litvinov, sneering at him behind his back.

So Sisyphus-Litvinov’s rock fell to the bottom of the mountain one last time. Enough, thought Stalin, and he sacked Litvinov and brought in the tougher Vyacheslav M. Molotov.

Still, for a few more months, Molotov tried to stick the rock on the mountaintop, and still it fell back again. In May 1939 Molotov even offered support to Poland, quickly rejected by Warsaw. Had the Poles lost their senses; did they ever have any? When British and French delegations arrived in Moscow in August to discuss an anti-Nazi alliance, you might think they would have been serious about getting down to business. War was expected to break out at any time. But no, not even then: British instructions were to «go very slowly». The delegations did too. It took them five days to get to Russia in an old, chartered merchantman, making a top speed of 13 knots. The British head of delegation did not have written powers giving him authority to conclude an agreement with his Soviet «partners». For Stalin, that must have been the camel breaking straw. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was signed on 23 August 1939. The failure of the negotiations with the British and French led to the non-aggression pact, rather than the other way around.

Sauve qui peut motivated Soviet policy, never a good idea in the face of danger, but far from the MSM’s narrative explaining the origins of World War II. Good old Perfidious Albion acted duplicitously to the very end. During the summer of 1939 British government officials still negotiated for a deal with German counterparts, as if no one in Moscow would notice. And that was not all, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, boasted privately to one of his sisters about how he would fool Moscow and get around the Soviet insistence on a genuine war-fighting alliance against Nazi Germany. So who betrayed who?

Historians may debate whether Stalin made the right decision or not in concluding the non-aggression pact. But with potential «partners» like France and Britain, one can understand why sauve qui peut looked like the only decent option in August 1939. And this brings us back to Pot calling Kettle black. The West foisted off its own responsibilities in setting off World War II onto Stalin and the Soviet Union.

See Part II

Michael Jabara Carley
Professor of history at the Université de Montréal. He has published widely on Soviet relations with the West

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) militants fired rocket propelled grenades at the Salah gas facility in Algeria on March 18. Despite there were no casualties or damage reported, the Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil and the British oil and gas company BP plc, which mange the attacked infrastructure, have announced that they will temporarily withdraw some of their staff from two natural gas treatment plants.

[Transcript of Video]

The Statoil-BP infrastructure in Algeria was already attacked in 2013 resulting in the death of 40 oil workers on the In Amenas facility located near the Libyan border. Unlike 2013, the recent attack was made from the territory of Mali on the up-country object which shows significant problems in the Algerian security.

Furthermore, AQIM released a video statement threating an attack on Statoil-BP facilities in few hours prior to attack. Considering that militants were able to transport and use 130-mm rockets and launchers, it becomes clear that the Algerian security services aren’t able to provide security for the crucial country’s infrastructure.

An important fact is AQIM’s video included a demand for foreign companies to cut the links with the Algerian government and a suggestion to launch negotiations on terms of future works on the development of gas and oil fields. In other words, AQIM asks money for safety of Statoil-BP facilities. The video also included a threat of non-demonstration attack if AQIM’s demands will be ignored. This is likely why Statoil and BP have decided to temporarily withdraw staff from the gas facilities.

Nonetheless, it couldn’t be ignored that AQIM may be carrying out an order of some foreign power which pursues its own interests in the region. For instance, Saudi Arabia has differences with Algeria on the conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Iran. In this case, the recent attack showed that Algeria is vulnerable for such unfriendly acts.

In the contemporary situation, the Algerian government will seek to demonstrate that it’s able to control the situation in the country. This issue becomes especially acute amid ISIS’ statements to open the war against Algeria.

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“I do believe we are not addressing right the issue of terrorism today.” Dominique de Villepin, CNBC, Mar 22, 2016

Normalising the state of terror has been an ongoing project for decades.  In Europe, it featured the British response to the IRA; the Spanish response to ETA; and the Federal German Republic’s approach to the Red Army Faction.  The folly of assuming that the Cold War somehow did away with these stresses was evident when the sorrows of empire revisited the West in most spectacular form: the disintegration of the Twin Towers in New York.

Since then, the nonsensical talk of a “war” on terror took root with viral enthusiasm, the Bush-speak that President Barack Obama did, at least initially, try to place into deep, archival storage. Such policies, once created, cannot be undone.

The Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel decided to leaf through the rhetorical set of the Bush presidency to hurriedly declare what took place in Brussels to be a matter of war.  Three bombs had gone off – at Zaventem Airport and Maelbeek metro station.

France’s President François Hollande did the same, using language he did when Paris was attacked last November.  “The war against terrorism must be conducted across the whole of Europe, and with all the necessary resources, notably with regard to intelligence.”[1]  Again, abstract nouns could become the subject of military and security targeting.

Now, it was Europe, a civilisation attacked, its cultural institutions challenged.  Unfortunately for guardians of a liberal democratic project, it would be absurd to even claim that the targeting of EU institutions by terrorists might necessarily constitute an assault on democracy, let alone a way of life worth defending.  Belgian residents and tourists were in the firing line, but the overall targeting of institutions so far removed from democratic practice was an absurdity that should not be missed on the eurocrats.

What did matter here was a brutal realisation that bombs that rain down on Raqqa and other Islamic State positions in the name of civilisation (the appropriate one, in any case) will not immunise European states from retribution.  Such measures serve to globalise the conflict, to enlarge the scope of a dispute that might well be far more localised by cooler, and wiser heads.  Disaffected and disturbed youths keen for a fight and a mission, many of which can be found in Molenbeek, further complicate the mix.

The economy of the means terrorism employs relative to the state which responds to it is undisputed – while aircraft and missiles are deployed on Islamic State targets at huge cost, retribution can assume the form of bombs detonated near an airline counter at a fraction of the price.

Individuals like Hollande, to justify their continuous projects in the Middle East, have to extract every ounce of worth from the rhetoric of exceptionalism.  The resort to the exceptional has not merely issued in the clichés of a security state desperate to claw back initiatives (all that surveillance; all those police and security officers, only to be foiled).  It has seen networks in Europe and the United States broadcast wall-to-wall coverage of an event that saw 34 people killed and 170 wounded.  Networks such as Australia’s twenty-four hour news channel insisted on using the term “breaking news” long after the news had broken.

Celebrities dribbled with sentiment and heavy doses of celebrity, Twitter-driven grief.  Supermodel Naomi Campbell and singer Miley Cyrus made the news (because their opinions count) by referencing the event.[2]  Je suis Bruxelles sprung up like an emotive rash, meaning that no doubt, at some point, the colours of the Belgian flag may well shade social media applications.  Such a hackneyed emotional reaction is merely another sign how empathy can be tactically prostituted for the sake of reassurance.

Deeper meaning can be found in the more divisive tools of cultural mobilisation such as Belgium’s very own fictional detective Tintin, a reactionary creation who represents solidarity that is, as Scott Timberg suggests, “uncomfortably divisive.”[3]  “The Adventures of Tintin,” goes a contribution in Vox, “written by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi under the pen name Hergé, has long been a symbol of Brussels and a national hero in Belgium.”  Not to mention a symbol of racial characterisation, caricature and mockery.  The fact that he was made to cry at the slaughter in recent depictions is scant comfort.

European and American networks give the airtime that can only be equated to a footnote when the next attack on a school in Waziristan, or the next daring slaughter takes place at the hands of Boko Haram.  These events are far more destabilising in their dimensions, but are not the fodder of myopic celebrities who treat a tweet or a social network post as credible engagement.   Where to now?  More surveillance no doubt, more security baubles, and a fatter budget for an establishment that has not proven itself to be of poor worth.  The language of reaction, rather than solution.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, talking heads such as Daveed Garstenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies in Washington, D.C., would comment that, “Belgium is uniquely challenged and its counterterrorism forces uniquely overstretched.”[4]

Islamic State and its brand of fiery ideology is only one facet of this broader conflict, which involves dozens of countries with mixed motives and interests.  Not all converge with the common goal of ending that artificial experiment that only exists because it has backers who find it convenient.  What is clear is that bombs in Raqqa will not end imminent attacks on European soil.  The emergency, however fat the cow of counter-terrorism becomes, will continue.

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

Notes

 [1] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hollande-to-europe-prepare-for-long-war-against-terrorism/article/2586467

[2] http://variety.com/2016/biz/news/brussels-attacks-celebrity-reactions-1201736246/

[3] http://www.salon.com/2016/03/22/tintins_racist_history_symbol_of_brussels_solidarity_is_uncomfortably_divisive/

[4] http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/brussels-attacks-security-forces-1.3502098

NAFTA and other mega-‘trade’ deals are actually about lots more than merely ‘trade’; they’re about sovereignty — the ability of each of the participating nations to establish laws and regulations restricting toxicity of products, environmental pollution, protecting workers’ rights, and many other things that are essential to the public’s welfare. These ‘trade’ deals lock-in existing laws and regulations so that no matter what is found by future scientific studies which may indicate, for example, that a given product is actually far more toxic than had previously been known, the laws and regulations can’t be increased, because any such increase would subject the given nation to multi-billion-dollar lawsuits by international corporations for ‘infringing on the rights of stockholders to profit’ by any stiffening of those regulations existing at the time the ‘trade’ deal became law.

Thus, for the first time in world history, the rights of the holders of the controlling blocs of stock in international corporations are coming to supersede the rights of any government, so that those stockholders can sue taxpayers of any such country, not in any democratically accountable court and judicial system, but in private panels of unaccountable international ‘arbitrators’ who won’t be subject to any nation’s laws. It’s an international-corporate world government now forming, and the U.S. Constitution prohibits the U.S. from being any part of it (because what’s forming is an international-corporate dictatorship); so, in the U.S., it’s being done entirely unConstitutionally.

The Treaty Clause of the U.S. Constitution says:

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.

The Trade Act of 1974 introduced a new way to pass a treaty, the way now called Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority, by means of which that two-thirds requirement can be eliminated and ‘trade’ deals can now become law merely by being approved by 50%+1 members of the Senate. This was done because President Richard Nixon and some members of Congress wanted to be able to pass into law treaties that would be so controversial (so odious, actually) that approval by two-thirds of the Senate wouldn’t be possible; such proposed treaties wouldn’t be able to become approved in this country unless the two-thirds-rule were eliminated for them.

By means of the Trade Act of 1974, these very controversial treaties would be able to become law in the U.S. by the simple device that, though America’s Founders would certainly have called them “treaties,” and though they actually are called “treaties” by all of the other nations that sign them, our government would instead call them merely “international agreements” not “treaties” (though the two aresynonymous with one-another) and would thus nullify the Treaty Clause without needing to amend the U.S. Constitution (and, of course, the only way legitimately to amend anything in the Constitution is by means of its Amendment-process).

America’s Founders were wise, and were extraordinarily learned about history; and the U.S. Constitution embodies this unique wisdom and learning; the Treaty Clause’s two-thirds requirement exemplifies that. It is a crucial part of their determination to prevent any President from having too much power — from becoming a dictator (something that becomes even worse if the dictator has rammed through not only mere laws, but also treaties, since those are far harder to undo). For example: it was intended to block any President from making a treaty with a foreign nation if that treaty would be so bad that he couldn’t get two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to support it. (That’s a tough requirement for any President to meet on anything, but a treaty is far more difficult than any other law is to cancel; and, so, passing it is passing a law that’s virtually permanent and virtually impossible to modify.

The Constitution wasn’t designed in order to meet the convenience of Presidents, nor of Presidents plus half of the U.S. Senate, but to protect the public.) And their wisdom is why our constitution remains the world’s longest-lasting one. But, at least in this regard, it has been abandoned — and only the U.S. Supreme Court can decide now whether to restore it.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote on 9 January 1796, defending the new Constitution, and especially its Treaty Clause: “I aver, that it was understood by all to be the intent of the provision [the Treaty Clause] to give to that power the most ample latitude to render it competent to all the stipulations, which the exigencies of National Affairs might require—competent to the making of Treaties of Alliance, Treaties of Commerce, Treaties of Peace and every other species of Convention usual among nations and competent in the course of its exercise to controul & bind the legislative power of Congress. And it was emphatically for this reason that it was so carefully guarded; the cooperation of two thirds of the Senate with the President being required to make a Treaty. I appeal for this with confidence.”

He went further: “It will not be disputed that the words ‘Treaties and alliances’ are of equivalent import and of no greater force than the single word Treaties. An alliance is only a species of Treaty, a particular of a general. And the power of ‘entering into Treaties,’ which terms confer the authority under which the former Government acted, will not be pretended to be stronger than the power ‘to make Treaties,’ which are the terms constituting the authority under which the present Government acts.” The phrase “international agreement” was not mentioned by him because no one at that time had even so much as suggested that the term “treaty” was anything else than identical in meaning to an “international agreement”; everyone understood and accepted that any “treaty” was an “international agreement,” and that any “international agreement” was a “treaty.” So: there can be no doubt that the term “treaty” refers to any and all types of international agreements. This was the Founders’ clear and unequivocal intent. No court under this Constitution possesses any power to change that, because they can’t change history.

Furthermore, George Washington’s famous Farewell Address asserted that, ”It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world”; and the third President Thomas Jefferson said in his equally famous Inaugural Address, that there should be “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.” Jefferson’s comment there was also a succinct tip-of-the-hat to yet another major concern that the Founders had regarding treaties — that by discriminating in favor of the treaty-partners, they also discriminate against non-partner nations, and so endanger “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,” which was the Founders’ chief goal in their foreign policies. But, the Founders’ chief concern was the mere recognition that treaties tend to be far more “permanent” and “entangling” than any purely national laws. This was the main reason why treaties need to be made much more difficult to become laws.

Hamilton was quite explicit that the Treaty Clause pertained “to the making of Treaties of Alliance, Treaties of Commerce, Treaties of Peace and every other species of Convention usual among nations and competent in the course of its exercise to controul & bind the legislative power of Congress. And it was emphatically for this reason that it was so carefully guarded; the cooperation of two thirds of the Senate with the President being required to make a Treaty.” He did not exclude “Treaties of Commerce.” Even the possibility of allowing such an exception to the Treaty Clause was denied by him. And yet, starting with the Trade Act of 1974, it happened.

Each one of the 37 Senators (4 more than would have been required under the Treaty Clause to block) who voted against Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority (and here almost exactly the same 37 Senators voted against Fast Track the final time around) should possess the standing to bring this issue to the U.S. Supreme Court for the Court’s determination as to what the Founders meant, and didn’t mean, by their asserting, “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Each one of these Senators might be able to make history here. Each one of the Senators might thus affect the future course of world history by bringing this terrifically important issue to the Supreme Court to be decided, once and for all. However, none has cared enough even to try. But it’s clear: any “international agreement” is a “treaty,” and any “treaty” is an “international agreement.” No one even questioned that at the time the Constitution was written.

THE MAIN U.S. CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE

In June 1954, Morris D. Forkosch headlined in Chicago-Kent Law Review, “Treaties and Executive Agreements,” and summarized the status of this issue up into the start of the Eisenhower Administration. It was a different nation then. He noted: “Suppose, however, that a treaty conflicts with a provision of the United States Constitution or contradicts the terms of a federal statute. Which, then, governs? In the first of these situations, the United States Supreme Court has indicated, albeit the language is obiter, that the treaty would be ineffective.29” (His footnote included: “DeGeofroy v. Riggs, 133 U. S. 258 at 267, 10 S. Ct. 295, 33 L. Ed. 642 at 645 (1890), and Fort Leavenworth R. R. Co. v. Lowe, 114 U. S. 525 at 541, 5 S. Ct. 995, 29 L. Ed. 264 at 270 (1885).”) So: according to U.S. Supreme Court decisions up till at least 1954, any one of the five Fast-Tracked international trade agreements that has been passed since the Fast-Track law, the Trade Act of 1974, was passed, would have been blocked by the Supreme Court, were it not for the Trade Act of 1974 — a mere law that, supposedly, has changed the Constitution without amending it, but that did this simply by asserting that when the Founders said “treaty” they weren’t referring to any and all forms of international agreement — which they clearly were referring to, in their era. (If you doubt it, you’ll find in my “The Two Contending Visions of World Government,” this issue being discussed within its broader context. Key there is that the term “treaty” in the Founders’ era meant any type of international agreement, no exceptions. An originalist interpretation of the Constitution would thus be obliged to outlaw the Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority provision of the Trade Act of 1974.)

Obviously, the power to interpret the Constitution rests solely with the U.S. Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court is supposed to interpret the words that are in the Constitution as closely as possible to the way the Founders who wrote it intended those terms to be understood to mean. That’s just basic, to any constitutional democracy. (Even non-originalist theories of Constitutional interpretation affirm that the overriding concern is the “larger purpose — the animating spirit — of the Constitution,” which ultimately refers to the intentions of the majority of the people who signed the document.) There is no getting around the fact that Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority is unConstitutional. But attempts have been made to get around its being unConstitutional.

In February 2001, Michigan Law Review published John C. Yoo’s January 2000 article, “Laws as Treaties: The Constitutionality of Congressional-Executive Agreements,” in which Yoo, the lawyer who subsequently provided to George W. Bush the rationalization for Bush’s authorization to use torture after 9/11, argued that the two-thirds Senate rule needs, for practical purposes, to be nullified for certain types of international trade agreements, including for the five that had already been Fast-Tracked. Rather than his dealing with the question of whether the Executive and the Legislative branches possess Constitutional authority to interpret the Constitution, he wrote there the argument that he would present to the Judicial branch, at the U.S. Supreme Court, if he were to be the attorney arguing there for the Constitutionality of Fast-Track. (Perhaps this paper was even one of the reasons why he was selected by Bush.) His entire argument was pragmatic as he saw it, such as, this: “Today, however, the Senate has about fifty percent more members than the first House of Representatives envisioned by the Constitution, suggesting that the Senate no longer has the small numbers that the Framers believed necessary for successful diplomacy.”

This sort of thing constituted his argument for why treaties that don’t concern national security and so fall under the President’s Commander-in-Chief authority, shouldn’t be considered to be “treaties,” but only as “Congressional-Executive Agreements.” That’s as far as anyone has yet gone to rationalize the Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority as being ‘acceptable’ under the Constitution.

However, even Yoo noted, at the time, that the most-prominent scholarly argument in favor of the Constitutionality of Fast-Track, “Is NAFTA Constitutional?” by Bruce Ackerman and David Golove, in the February 1995 Harvard Law Review, was a “provocative and idiosyncratic theory of unwritten constitutional amendments,” whereas Yoo didn’t have the nerve to demean, but only to note, the article by Laurence Tribe, “Taking Text and Structure Seriously,” in that same publication, which utterly demolished the Ackerman-Golove article. In December 1998, Golove came forth in New York University Law Review, with a 152-page treatise, “Against Free-Form Formalism,” trying to overcome Tribe’s case. But, more recently, Michael Ramsey posted online his 13 August 2012 review of all of that, “Laurence Tribe on Textualism (and Congressional-Executive Agreements),” where he devotes most of his attention to the two original pro-and-con articles in the 1995 HLR, and says that Tribe’s case was far more persuasive than Ackerman-Golove’s; and, then, he notes parenthetically near the end: “(David Golove makes an attempt, in a reply article published at 73 N.Y.U. L.Rev. 1791 (1998), but I don’t think he makes much headway against them [Tribe’s ‘points’]).” Golove’s 152-page treatise failed to impress anyone. Among the legal scholars, it’s pretty much a settled matter: Tribe was right. Not even Yoo had the temerity to challenge it.

However, Yoo argued that there is a pragmatic need to uphold Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority; and that this pragmatic need (to violate the U.S. Constitution) is “that the Senate no longer has the small numbers that the Framers believed necessary for successful diplomacy.”

Thus: the current academic status of the issue is: The Supreme Court would have little choice but to overturn the Fast-Track provision of the Trade Act of 1974, if the matter were to be accepted by the Court for adjudication, unless the high Court were willing to be despised not only by the public but especially by legal scholars. If the Court were to decline to consider such a case, then it would be accepting the authority of the Executive branch in conjunction with some members of the Legislative branch, to interpret the meaning of “treaty” in the U.S. Constitution — and, in the entire history of the United States, the Supreme Court has never done that.

Well, in a sense, that’s not entirely correct: the 2001 appeals-court case, Made in the USA Foundation v. U.S., was the only case to deal with this issue, and it concluded, citing as its chief authority a non-dispositive Supreme Court decision that was written by Justice William H. Rehnquist, in the 1979 case Goldwater v. Carter, which said that a certain action that President Jimmy Carter had done under both his treaty authority and his Commander-in-Chief authority could not be Constitutionally challenged by Senator Barry Goldwater.

But that Supreme Court decision, which some suppose to constitute authority for this trade-treaty matter, concerned not international trade, but instead the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief, and so it wasn’t even a “trade” case at all; it wasn’t even relevant, and thus really shouldn’t have been cited, because it dealt with different Constitutional provisions regarding what does and what does not reside within the President’s authority — namely, as Commander-in-Chief, and as the negotiator on mutual-defense treaties.

So, there wasn’t even a question in this matter as to whether it concerned a “treaty.” Not relevant at all. On that shoddy basis, the appeals court said: “We nonetheless decline to reach the merits of this particular case, finding that with respect to international commercial agreements such as NAFTA, the question of just what constitutes a ‘treaty’ requiring Senate ratification presents a nonjusticiable political question.” It said this even despite denying that the meaning of the Constitutional term “treaty” should be determined by the Executive and the Legislative branches, instead of by the Judicial branch:

It is true that the Supreme Court has rejected arguments of nonjusticiability with respect to other ambiguous constitutional provisions. In Munoz-Flores, the Court was confronted with the question of whether a criminal statute requiring courts to impose a monetary “special assessment” on persons convicted of federal misdemeanors was a “bill for raising revenue” according to the Origination Clause of the Constitution, Art. I, § 7, cl. 1, in spite of the lack of guidance on exactly what types of legislation amount to bills “for raising revenue.” The Court, in electing to decide the issue on the merits, rejected the contention that in the absence of clear guidance in the text of the Constitution, such a determination should be considered a political question.

To be sure, the courts must develop standards for making [such] determinations, but the Government suggests no reason that developing such standards will be more difficult in this context than in any other. Surely a judicial system capable of determining when punishment is “cruel and unusual,” when bail is “[e]xcessive,” when searches are “unreasonable,” and when congressional action is “necessary and proper” for executing an enumerated power, is capable of making the more prosaic judgments demanded by adjudication of Origination Clause challenges.

So: even that appeals court was not saying that the Legislative and Executive branches, working in concert, should determine what a “treaty” is and what it isn’t, but instead this court reaffirmed the exclusive authority of the Judicial branch to make such determinations. It simply refused to exercise the authority. Its argument here was:

We note that none of these cases [the cited ones on the Supreme Court’s determinations regarding the meanings of specific terms and phrases in the Constitution], however, took place directly in the context of our nation’s foreign policy, and in none of them was the constitutional authority of the President and Congress to manage our external political and economic relations implicated. In addition to the Constitution’s textual commitment of such matters to the political branches, we believe, as discussed further below, that in the area of foreign relations, prudential considerations militate even more strongly in favor of judicial noninterference.

So, why didn’t those jurists even make note of the fact that their chief citation, Goldwater v. Carter, concerned military instead of economic matters, and not the meaning of “treaty,” at all? Stupidity, or else some ulterior motive — because no reason at all was cited by them.

Their decision closed by saying:

We note that no member of the Senate itself has asserted that body’s sole prerogative to ratify NAFTA (or, for that matter, other international commercial agreements) by a two-thirds supermajority. In light of the Senate’s apparent acquiescence in the procedures used to approve NAFTA, we believe this further counsels against judicial intervention in the present case.

This assertion totally ignored that “the Senate’s apparent acquiescence” had occurred, and been measured, only according to the 50%+1 Fast-Track standard, never according to the Constitution’s two-thirds standard. According to the Constitution’s standard, which was applied nowhere in the process along the road toward approval of any of the five Fast-Tracked treaty-bills into law, the Senate never actually ‘acquiesced in’ any of them. This court was simply accepting the Constitutional validity of that ‘acquiescence,’ so as to determine whether or not it was Constitutionally valid. Circular reasoning — prejudice.

However, in order to assist nullification of Fast Track for Obama’s proposed ‘trade’ treaties, it would greatly help if one or more of the very vocal opponents in the U.S. Senate, against Fast-Tracking these treaties — any of the 37 Senators who voted “Nay” on it, for examples — would petition the Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of the provisions in the Trade Act of 1974 (and subsequent legislation) that introduced Fast Track, and thus on Fast Track’s abolition of the Constitution’s two-thirds rule. The rights of each one of those 37 Senators, and of everyone who elected them (including the present writer), are being violated by the Fast Track provision’s denying the victory to them when they constituted 37 votes and the Constitution says that anything more than 33 votes will successfully block a treaty from becoming law. Supposedly, the 60/40 requirement for cloture enables a mere 51/49 vote for the treaty itself in order for the treaty to pass into law — despite the two-thirds-of-Senate rule for treaties. This is crazy.

It could salvage American democracy, and the world (the sovereignty of each one of the participating nations), by ending U.S. participation in those treaties, and thus ending those treaties.

The current plan is for Obama’s TPP treaty, and either or both of the others that might also be available for U.S. signature, to be approved after this November’s elections, so that voters won’t be able to expel from Congress the members who do it. However, even if they get passed this way, a Supreme Court ruling against Fast Track would overturn them all (and NAFTA).

Lawyers Bruce Fein and Alan Grayson have presented a separate way in which Fast Track is unConstitutional.

The likeliest way to bring the case to the Supreme Court (in order to meet the Court’s stiff “standing” test for it to be able to be considered) will be in the name of petitioner(s) who concretely and demonstrably suffered severe financial damage as a consequence of NAFTA, since the enabling Act for that was the same as for Obama’s proposed deals: the Trade Act of 1974. That would be the law which would be overturned, and the overturning of which would not only end NAFTA, it would block TPP, TTIP & TISA from going into effect. If this has happened to you, you may contact[email protected] in order to be considered to be (or to be included among) the named petitioner(s) on behalf of whom this case will be brought. (Though none of your losses could be recouped, your name could become prominent in history-books, because of the enormous impact this case will have if it is won.) The subject-line for that email should be: Case #5831

Whenever it happens, this will be the most important decision in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court — perhaps even more important than any President’s Presidency has been. It will be a global decision, because these treaties are creating a global government, and the U.S. is central to all of them: without U.S. participation, each one of these multinational ‘trade’ treaties will end. If all three of Obama’s mega-‘trade’ deals (TPP, TTIP, and TISA) become law and stay, then the participating democracies will become so hamstrung by international corporations, there won’t be any real democracy remaining; and, for example, the increases in CO2 regulations that have been ‘agreed’ in the recent Paris accord to limit global warming, will be blocked — the planet will cook uncontrollably. Opponents of “regulation” might think that that would be worth the enormous harms — to the environment, to workers’ rights, to product-safety, and all the rest that would be crippled by these treaties — but even many opponents of “regulation” favor democracy, and favor the sovereignty of nations. Only the billionaires who own controlling blocs of stock in the major international corporations would have any authentic reason to be happy, though their own descendants might end up sharing the hell of an incinerating planet.

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to decide whether the term “treaty” in the U.S. Constitution means “international agreement,” and whether “international agreement” means “treaty.” If they rule that those two are not synonymous, then the U.S. Constitution will be dead — in the sense that it will then be gone.

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.

One of the first videos published by Belgium’s mainstream media, was, according to reports, from the  CC security surveillance cameras at Brussels airport. The video report was released at 9.07am, one hour after the first bomb attack at the airport.

The video was fake. What Derniere Heure and La Libre published was footage from a January 2011 terror attack at Moscow International airport.

Journalists and media editors are fully aware that surveillance videos at an airport are under the jurisdiction of  the airport’s security authorities. They are not normally released immediately after a terror attack.

There was no way the media could have got hold of the surveillance videos in the immediate wake of the attacks. Moreover, following the attack, the airport was closed down. 

In another words, the airport surveillance video would not have been available to the media less than one hour after the terror event.

What Derniere Heure did was to take the Moscow International airport video, remove the audio in Russian, change the date and broadcast it on the Internet and network TV at 9:07 AM.

Was this a stupid mistake or was it deliberate. The case of the fake airport surveillance video was fully documented in a previous Global Research article.

Below is the screenshot of DH’s report:

And here is a screenshot of the January 2011 terror attack at Moscow’s Domodedova International Airport

Our apologies says the VRT TV network (Dutch language) which broadcast the Moscow airport terror attack:

” Surveillance images circulating of attack Zaventem are old pictures. Our apologies.” (author’s Translation)

 

Fake Video Used in News Coverage of Brussels Terror Attacks

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 22 , 2016

The Second Fake Surveillance Video at Brussels Maelbeek Metro Station 

The terror attack in the afternoon of March 22 at Brussels Maelbeek Metro station was reported by mainstream media including CNN.

In these reports, video footage from a 2011 terror attack in Minsk, Belarus was used by network TV and online media to describe what was happening in the metro station at the time of the attacks.

According to the Independent:

CCTV footage that was shared after the Brussels attacks, believed to show video from inside Maelbeek Metro station, has been proven fake.

As news emerged of the third explosion in the Belgian capital, which targeted the station situated near EU offices, many began sharing what they believed to be footage of the bombing.

However it was soon discovered that the video in fact came from the Minsk Metro bombing of 2011 that killed 15 and injured over 200 people.

The Independent’s report is based on a fallacy. It was the mainstream media that published the Moscow and Minsk video footages. It was thanks to incisive social media blog reports that the use of fake videos by the mainstream media was revealed.

The more fundamental question: two cases of fake videos:

Can we trust the mainstream media reports concerning the Brussels terror attacks?

Comparisons: Brussels, 22 March 2016 versus Minsk, 11 April 2011. Same video footage

Here is a screenshot of  video footage broadcast on network TV and on the internet depicting the explosion in the Metro in Brussels, March 22, 2016

Here is the alleged video footage of the CCTV surveillance camera, Brussel Maelbeek Metro Station.  The CC surveillance camera is under control of the Metro security authorities.

Now Compare the above to the screenshot of  the Minsk April 2011 attacks followed by full-length video.

 Full video of the Minsk Attack

Every so often, the bourgeois political system runs into crisis. The machinery of the state jams; the veils of consent are torn asunder and the tools of power appear disturbingly naked. Brazil is living through one of those moments: it is dreamland for social scientists; a nightmare for everyone else.

Dilma Rousseff (left image) was elected President in 2010, with a 56-44 per cent majority against the right-wing neoliberal PSDB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party) opposition candidate. She was reelected four years later with a diminished yet convincing majority of 52-48 per cent, or a majority of 3.5 million votes.

Dilma’s second victory sparked a heated panic among the neoliberal and U.S.-aligned opposition. The fourth consecutive election of a President affiliated to the centre-left PT (Workers’ Party) was bad news for the opposition, because it suggested that PT founder Luís Inácio (Lula) da Silva could return in 2018. Lula had been President between 2003 and 2010, and when he left office his approval ratings hit 90 per cent, making him the most popular leader in Brazil’s history. This likely sequence suggested that the opposition could be out of federal office for a generation. The opposition immediately rejected the outcome of the vote. No credible complaints could be made, but no matter; it was resolved that Dilma Rousseff would be overthrown by any means necessary. To understand what happened next, we must return to 2011. 

Supporters of Lula confront police officers in front his apartment in Sao Bernardo do Campo, March 2016.

Booming Economy

Dilma inherited from Lula a booming economy. Alongside China and other middle-income countries, Brazil bounced back vigorously after the global crisis. GDP expanded by 7.5 per cent in 2010, the fastest rate in decades, and Lula’s hybrid neoliberal-neodevelopmental economic policies seemed to have hit the perfect balance: sufficiently orthodox to enjoy the confidence of large sections of the internal bourgeoisie, and heterodox enough to deliver the greatest redistribution of income and privilege in Brazil’s recorded history, thereby securing the support of the formal and informal working class. For example, the minimum wage rose by 70 per cent and 21 million (mostly low-paid) jobs were created in the 2000s. Social provision increased significantly, including the world-famous Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer programme, and the government supported a dramatic expansion of higher education, including quotas for blacks and state school pupils. For the first time, the poor could access education as well as income and bank loans. They proceeded to study, earn and borrow, and to occupy spaces previously monopolized by the upper middle class: airports, shopping malls, banks, private health facilities and roads, that were clogged up by cheap cars purchased in 72 easy payments. The government coalition enjoyed a comfortable majority in a highly fragmented Congress, and Lula’s legendary political skills managed to keep most of the political elite on side.

Then everything started to go wrong. Dilma Rousseff was chosen by Lula as his successor. She was a steady pair of hands and a competent manager and enforcer. She was also the most left-wing President of Brazil since João Goulart, who was overthrown by a military coup in 1964. However, she had no political track record and, it would later become evident, lacked essential qualities for the job.

Once elected, Dilma shifted economic policies further away from neoliberalism. The government intervened in several sectors seeking to promote investment and output, and put intense pressure on the financial system to reduce interest rates, which lowered credit costs and the government’s debt service, releasing funds for consumption and investment. A virtuous circle of growth and distribution seemed possible. Unfortunately, the government miscalculated the lasting impact of the global crisis. The U.S. and European economies stagnated, China’s growth faltered, and the so-called commodity supercycle vanished. Brazil’s current account was ruined. Even worse, the U.S., UK, Japan and the Eurozone introduced quantitative easing policies that led to massive capital outflows toward the middle income countries. Brazil faced a tsunami of foreign exchange, that overvalued the currency and bred deindustrialization. Economic growth rates fell precipitously.

The government doubled its interventionist bets through public investment, subsidised loans and tax rebates, which ravaged the public accounts. Their frantic and seemingly random interventionism scared away the internal bourgeoisie: the local magnates were content to run government through the Workers’ Party, but would not be managed by a former political prisoner who overtly despised them. And she despised not only the capitalists: the President had little inclination to speak to social movements, left organizations, lobbies, allied parties, elected politicians, or her own ministers. The economy stalled and Dilma’s political alliances shrank, in a fast-moving dance of destruction. The neoliberal opposition scented blood.

The Opposition

For years, the opposition to the PT had been rudderless. The PSDB had nothing appealing to offer while, as is traditional in Brazil, most mainstream parties were gangs of bandits extorting the government for selfish gain. The situation was so desperate that the mainstream media overtly (!) took the mantle of opposition, and started driving the anti-PT agenda, literally instructing the politicians on what to do next. In the meantime, the radical left remained small and relatively powerless. It was despised by the hegemonic ambitions of the PT.

The confluence of dissatisfactions became an irresistible force in 2013. The mainstream media is rabidly neoliberal and utterly ruthless: as the equivalent would be if Fox News and its clones dominated the entire U.S. media, including all TV chains and the main newspapers. The upper middle class was their obliging target, as they had economic, social and political reasons to be unhappy. Upper middle class jobs were declining, with 4.3 million posts paying between 5 and 10 minimum wages vanishing in the 2000s. In the meantime, the bourgeoisie was doing well, and the poor advanced fast: even domestic servants got labour rights. The upper middle class felt both squeezed and excluded from their privileged spaces, as was explained above. It was also dislocated from the state. Since Lula’s election, the state bureaucracy had been populated by thousands of cadres appointed by the PT and the left, to the detriment of ‘better educated’, whiter and, presumably, more deserving upper middle class competitors. Mass demonstrations erupted for the first time in June 2013, triggered by left-wing opposition against a bus fare increase in São Paulo. Those demonstrations were fanned by the media and captured by the upper middle-class and the right, and they shook the government – but, clearly, not enough to motivate them to save themselves. The demonstrations returned two years later. And then in 2016.

Now, reader, follow this. After the decimation of the state apparatus by the pre-Lula neoliberal administrations, the PT sought to rebuild selected areas of the bureaucracy. Among them, for reasons that Lula may soon have plenty of time to review, the Federal Police and the Federal Prosecution Office (FPO). In addition, for overtly ‘democratic’ reasons, but more likely related to corporatism and capacity to make media-friendly noise, the Federal Police and the FPO were granted inordinate autonomy; the former through mismanagement, while the latter has become the fourth power in the Republic, separately – and checking – the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. The abundance of qualified jobseekers led to the colonization of these well-paying jobs by upper middle class cadres. They were now in a Constitutionally secure position, and could chew up the hand that that fed them, while loudly demanding, through the media, additional resources to maul the rest of the PT’s body.

Corruption was the ideal pretext. Since it lost the first democratic presidential elections, in 1989, the PT moved steadily toward the political centre. In order to lure the upper middle class and the internal bourgeoisie, the PT neutralized or expelled the party’s left wing, disarmed the trade unions and social movements, signed up to the neoliberal economic policies pursued by the previous administration, and imposed a dour conformity that killed off any alternative leadership. Only Lula’s sun can shine in the party; everyone else was incinerated. This strategy was eventually successful and, in 2002, ‘Little Lula Peace and Love’ was elected President. (I kid you not, reader: this was one of his campaign slogans.)

For years the PT had thrived in opposition as the only honest political party in Brazil. This strategy worked, but it contained a lethal contradiction: in order to win expensive elections, manage the Executive and build a workable majority in Congress, the PT would have to get its hands dirty. There is no other way to ‘do’ politics in Brazilian democracy.

We only need one more element, and our mixture will be ready to combust. Petrobras is Brazil’s largest corporation and one of the world’s largest oil companies. The firm has considerable technical and economic capacity, and it was responsible for the discovery, in 2006, of gigantic ‘pre-salt’ deep sea oilfields hundreds of miles from the Brazilian coast. Dilma Rousseff, as Lula’s Minister of Mines and Energy, was responsible for imposing exploration contracts in these areas including large privileges for Petrobras. This legislation was vigorously opposed by PSDB, the media, the oil majors and the U.S. government.

The Investigation

In 2014, Sergio Moro, a previously unknown judge in Curitiba, a Southern state capital, started investigating a currency dealer suspected of tax evasion. This case eventually spiralled into a deathly threat against Dilma Rousseff’s government. Judge Moro is good-looking, well-educated, white and well paid. He is also very close to the PSDB. His Lavajato (Carwash) operation unveiled an extraordinary tale of large-scale bribery, plunder of public assets and funding for all major political parties, centred on the relationship between Petrobras and some of its main suppliers – precisely the stalwarts of the PT in the oil, shipbuilding and construction industries. It was the perfect combination, at the right time. Judge Moro’s cause was picked up by the media, and he obligingly steered it to inflict maximum damage to the PT, while shielding the other parties. Politicians connected to the PT and some of Brazil’s wealthiest businessmen were jailed summarily, and would remain locked up until they agreed a plea bargain implicating others. A new phase of Lavajato would ensnare them, and so on. The operation is now in its 25th phase; many have already collaborated, and those who refused to do so have received long prison sentences, to coerce them back into line while their appeals are pending. The media turned Judge Moro into a hero; he can do no wrong, and attempts to contest his sprawling powers are met with derision or worse. He is now the most powerful person in the Republic, above Dilma, Lula, the speakers of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate (both sinking in corruption and other scandals), and the Ministers of the Supreme Court, which have either been silenced or quietly support Moro’s crusade.

Petrobras has been paralyzed by the scandal, bringing down the entire oil chain. Private investment has collapsed because of political uncertainty and an investment strike against Dilma’s government. Congress has turned against the government, and the Judiciary is overwhelmingly hostile. After years of sniping, the media has been delighted to see Lula fall under the Lavajato juggernaut, even if the allegations seem stretched: does he actually own a beach-side apartment which his family does not use, is that small farm really his, who paid for the lake and the mobile phone masts nearby, and how about those pedalos? No matter: Moro detained Lula for questioning on 4 March. He was taken to São Paulo airport and would have been flown to Curitiba, but the Judge’s plan was halted by fear of the political fallout. Lula was questioned at the airport, then released. He was livid.

In order to shore up her crumbling administration and protect Lula from prosecution, Dilma Rousseff appointed Lula her Chief of Staff (the President’s Chief of Staff has ministerial status and can be prosecuted only by the Supreme Court). The right-wing conspiracy went into overdrive. Moro (illegally) released the (illegal) recording of a conversation between President Dilma and Lula, pertaining to his investiture. Once suitably misinterpreted, their dialogue was presented as ‘proof’ of a conspiracy to protect Lula from Moro’s canine determination to jail him. Large right-wing upper middle class masses poured into the streets, furiously, on 13 March. Five days later, the left responded with large – but not quite as large – demonstrations of its own against the unfolding coup. In the meantime, Lula’s appointment was suspended by a judicial measure, then restored, then suspended again. The case is now in the Supreme Court. At the moment, he is not a Minister, and his head is well-positioned on the block. Moro can arrest him at short notice.

The Coup

Why is this a coup? Because despite aggressive scrutiny, no Presidential crime warranting an impeachment has emerged. Nevertheless, the political right has thrown the kitchen sink at Dilma Rousseff. They rejected the outcome of the 2014 elections and appealed against her alleged campaign finance violations, which would remove from power both Dilma and the Vice-President – now, chief conspirator – Michel Temer (strangely enough, his case has been parked). The right simultaneously started impeachment procedures in Congress. The media has attacked the government viciously for years, the neoliberal economists plead for a new administration to ‘restore market confidence’, and the right will resort to street violence if it becomes necessary. Finally, the judicial charade against the PT has broken all the rules of legality, yet it is cheered on by the media, the right and even by Supreme Court Justices.

Yet… the coup de grâce is taking a long time coming. In the olden days, the military would have already moved in. Today, the Brazilian military are defined more by their nationalism (a danger to the neoliberal onslaught) than by their right-wing faith and, anyway, the Soviet Union is no more. Under neoliberalism, coups d’état must follow legal niceties, as was shown in Honduras, in 2009, and in Paraguay, in 2012.

Brazil is likely to join their company, but not just now: large sections of capital want to restore the hegemony of neoliberalism; those who once supported the PT’s national development strategy have fallen into line; the media is howling so loudly it has become impossible to think clearly, and most of the upper middle class has descended into a fascist hatred for the PT, the left, the poor, and the black. Their disorderly hatred has become so intense that even PSDB politicians are booed in anti-government demonstrations. And, despite the relentless attack, the left remains reasonably strong, as was demonstrated on 18th March. The right and the elite are powerful and ruthless – but they are also afraid of the consequences of their own daring.

There is no simple resolution to the political, economic and social crises in Brazil. Dilma Rousseff has lost political support and the confidence of capital, and she is likely to be removed from office in the coming days. However, attempts to imprison Lula could have unpredictable implications and, even if Dilma and Lula are struck off the political map, a renewed neoliberal hegemony cannot automatically restore political stability or economic growth, or secure the social prominence that the upper middle class craves. Despite strong media support for the impending coup, the PT, other left parties and many radical social movements remain strong. Further escalation is inevitable. Watch this space.

Alfredo Saad Filho is Professor of Political Economy at the SOAS Department of Development Studies, London University. His research interests include the political economy of neoliberalism, industrial policy, alternative macroeconomic policies, and the labour theory of value and its applications.

US President Barack Obama landed in Havana Sunday to great fanfare, both in Cuba and stateside. His visit marks a significant shift of the United States’ approach towards the socialist state, and the possibility of cooperation after decades of hostility. US media generally struck a hopeful tone, with a surprisingly nuanced mix of positive and critical stories about Cuba.

Some Cold War hold-outs in the media just weren’t having it, though, taking the occasion to feign outrage that Obama could visit a country with such a terrible human rights record. While American human-rights hypocrisy is nothing new, a string of Bush-era, pro-torture, pro-Guantánamo pundits expressing indignation at Cuba’s human rights failings was still remarkable.

Marc Thiessen. As a former Bush speechwriter, Thiessen helped shape the messaging around “enhanced interrogation” that provided the Orwellian phraseology the administration hid behind while torturing hundreds of detainees. He has since been a staunch defender not just of Guantánamo prison, but of force-feeding its prisoners and even expanding its use. The New York Times recapped his much-criticized defense of torture in 2010:

Mr. Thiessen, a practicing Roman Catholic, says that waterboarding suspected terrorists was not only useful and desirable, but permitted by the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Today, however, in the Washington Post opinion section, Thiessen suddenly discovered his inner human rights advocate, quoting an “activist” saying of Obama’s trip:

This will prolong the life of the dictatorship, is worsening the human rights situation there, marginalizing the democratic opposition and compromising US national security.

Thiessen even had the gall to cite Amnesty International, which has roundly condemned the US’s extrajudicial prison in Cuba that Thiessen loves to champion.

National Review‘s concern about the rights of prisoners in Cuba does not extend to all prisoners in Cuba.

Rich Lowry. The National Review editor was another Bush-era torture advocate, telling the McLaughlin Group in 2002, when asked if the US should torture terrorism suspects:

If it comes to that, we should let someone else do it. We should send him to another country that will do the job…. Look, this is going to be a messy war and you have to do some underhanded things.

The National Review’s contempt for basic human rights and legal norms continues, with the non-ironic article “Guantánamo Bay Detainees: Why Not Shoot Them?” published just last month. But Lowry has considerable concern for oppressed people in Cuba who aren’t on a US military base:

Obama’s Che Moment: President Obama’s Cuba Visit Ignores Continued Human Rights Abuses  

But a patina of revolutionary romance, embodied by that image of Che looking down on President Obama, still hangs over Cuba. It makes its human-rights abuses, theft and lies an afterthought, or even excusable, for the American Left.

Jonathan Alter. A putative liberal, Alter was one of the more vocal supporters of torture in the wake of 9/11, writing his now-infamous article in Newsweek, “Time to Think About Torture,” which acts as a 1000-word trial balloon for some of the more heinous aspects of detainee abuse. He even cites the Jordanian security service threatening to kill Palestinian militant Abu Nidal’s family in the 1980s as an example of torture “working.”

But during the March 9 Democratic presidential debate, Alter tweeted his outrage at Bernie Sanders not condemning Cuba:

Bernie a lefty sucker for Cuban line on health care. If he got sick there, he’d medevac out. And where’s his concern for human rights there?

— Jonathan Alter (@jonathanalter) March 10, 2016

In almost 6,000 tweets, Jonathan Alter had not once tweeted out the words “human rights” until that moment. Per usual, “human rights” were not a categorical imperative, or a moral framework; they were merely a weapon to be wielded against America’s enemies when our establishment pundits saw fit, and to be discarded just as quickly when they didn’t.

John Bolton. Bush’s UN ambassador,  Bolton has long been one of the biggest advocates for keeping Guantánamo open, writing multiple op-eds after Bush left office in defense of the notorious prison. Bolton also said he was open to the idea of torture in a 2008 interview with British television. But Monday, upon Obama’s arrival in Cuba, the famously unilateral Bolton appealed to the very international norms he had long dismissed (PJ Media, 3/21/16):

Bolton pointed out that the president said initially that he wouldn’t go to Cuba until there were improvements in the area of human rights there. “But not only has there been no improvement, things have been going in the wrong direction,” he lamented. “More people have been put in jail than have been released.”

Bill O’Reilly on Obama’s trip to Cuba: He shouldn’t have gone.

Bill O’Reilly. Leading Fox News blowhard O’Reilly has repeatedly defended torture, saying as late as 2014 that a President O’Reilly would have “authorized waterboarding and other severe interrogation methods,” and calling the CIA’s torture policy “morally correct.” He has played the role of Guantánamo truther, insisting in 2008 that there was “no proof” of mistreatment at the Cuban detention center. But last night,  discussing Obama’s trip to Cuba, O’Reilly told Fox’s resident straw liberal Kirsten Powers that Obama shouldn’t have gone because it is a “human-rights violator.”

***

Human rights are important. Human Rights™, as arbitrary tools of Western propaganda, are dangerous. Not only because they serve to bully unfriendly nations with cheap sloganeering, but they also, in the long run, undermine the otherwise noble and well-intentioned enterprise of establishing international norms.

“The problem with living outside the law,” Truman Capote once quipped, “is that you no longer have its protection.” The same is true for every Bush-era pundit who served as ideological shock troops in one of the more shameful episodes of American history. These talking heads can criticize Cuba’s controlled economy, they can criticize its leadership, they can criticize its immigration policy—but they have no grounding, intellectually or morally, to criticize its human rights record.

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.

An Israeli minister has said that a recent European Union law regarding the labelling of goods produced in Israeli settlements illegally built in the occupied Palestinian West Bank was a factor behind Tuesday’s bombing in the Belgium capital.

Ofir Akunis (image left), minister of science, technology and space, said that Europeans had lost sight of “terrorism of extremist Islam” by focusing on boycotting Israeli goods instead.

This supposed letting down of Europe’s guard had allowed an armed gang to strike at the heart of Europe with three bombings in Brussels, which killed at least 26 people, he inferred.

“Many in Europe have preferred to occupy themselves with the folly of condemning Israel, labelling products, and boycotts. In this time, underneath the nose of the continent’s citizens, thousands of extremist Islamic terror cells have grown,” Akunis wrote on Facebook.

“There were those who repressed and mocked whoever tried to give warning. There were those who underestimated. To our sorrow, the reality has struck the lives of dozens of innocent people.”

His reference to EU boycotts follows a decision by European MPs in Brussels for new guidelines regarding the labelling of products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Israel has said that labelling the “origin of goods” from illegal settlements from occupied Palestinian territories was “unacceptable discrimination”.

“The terrorism of extremist Islam strikes all those who do not accept its authority,” Akunis added.

תנחומים כנים לעם הבלגי, למשפחות הנרצחים והחלמה מהירה לפצועים.
הטרור של האיסלאם הקיצוני מכה בכל מי שלא מקבל את… https://t.co/wpCO5BxPvh

— Ofir Akunis (@OfirAkunis) March 22, 2016

(Sincere condolences to the Belgian people and the families of the murdered, and a speedy recovery to the wounded. The terrorism of extremist Islam strikes all those who do not accept its authority)

He suggested Europeand refocused their attention on “Islamic extremism” to prevent further attacks.

His comments have been met with scorn on social media.

Israel’s @OfirAkunis speaks on behalf of bigots and extremists. No surprise. Europe is for freedom, not repression! https://t.co/mDxbeEUm2A

— Lucie Krahulcova (@nomadiclucie) March 22, 2016

Disgusting comment from Israeli Science Minister and Netanyahu confidant Ofir Akunis (Likud) https://t.co/ZHEVCYjK5G

— Elizabeth Tsurkov (@Elizrael) March 22, 2016

let it not be said that israeli politicians are limited in their ability to be complete asses @OfirAkunis https://t.co/r4nFKM4sNl

— Ben Waxman (@benwaxman) March 22, 2016

General Mills has announced it will start labeling products with genetically modified (GMO) ingredients, becoming the second major food company to make the transition following Campbell Soup’s decision last month.

The news comes as another blow to Big Food following the Senate’s rejection of Sen. Pat Roberts’ (R-Kan.) Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act (SAFE) Wednesday. The bill, dubbed by opponents as the Denying Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act, would have prevented states—namely Vermont—from requiring labeling of GMOs and stopped pending state laws that require labeling to go into effect.

We need a national solution for GMO labeling https://t.co/JWHzxMwoBh pic.twitter.com/Obo9t5aAP1

— General Mills (@GeneralMills) March 18, 2016

Jeff Harmening, head of General Mills’ U.S. retail operations, addressed the national GMO debacle in a letter and explained that since his cereal company will be forced to label GMOs in Vermont by July 1—which is when the state’s labeling mandate takes effect—it should also extend GMO labeling to products sold across the nation.

He wrote in a letter, We need a national solution for GMO labeling, posted on the company website:

I have been eagerly awaiting a resolution of the GMO labeling debate in Washington and am disappointed that a national solution has still not been reached.

As the discussions continue in Washington, one thing is very clear: Vermont state law requires us to start labeling certain grocery store food packages that contain GMO ingredients or face significant fines.

We can’t label our products for only one state without significantly driving up costs for our consumers and we simply will not do that.

The result: consumers all over the U.S. will soon begin seeing words legislated by the state of Vermont on the labels of many of their favorite General Mills products.

The Cheerios maker’s announcement was praised by GMO labeling proponents. Scott Faber, the Environmental Working Group group’s senior vice president of government affairs, said the decision reflects the sentiment of the majority of Americans who want to know if they’re eating GMOs.

“Nine out of 10 Americans want the right to know whether their food contains GMOs—just like consumers in 64 other nations,” Faber said. “Like General Mills, we hope Congress will craft a national, mandatory GMO labeling solution and welcome the opportunity to work with industry to find a solution that works for consumers and works for the food industry.”

General Mills announced it will label products with genetically modified ingredients. https://t.co/hpXEJBDb5A pic.twitter.com/rsldcbwE4P

— Just Label It (@justlabelit) March 18, 2016

Gary Hirshberg, chairman of the Just Label It campaign and Stonyfield Farm, also praised General Mills for the move:

General Mills has shown real leadership by committing to provide consumers basic information about their food. More than 60,000 consumers thanked Campbells when they announced their commitment to greater transparency, and I am sure consumers will reward General Mills for trusting consumers to make their own choices. I applaud their leadership for recognizing that consumers simply want to know what’s in their food and how it’s grown.

Senators on both sides of this issue now need to realize that the market place is moving far faster than our legislators, and that the time has come to enact uniform mandatory legislation that makes it easy for consumers to see at a glance whether their foods contain GMOs. If large companies like General Mills and Campbells are accepting that this is what consumers want, then so should our political representatives.  It is now time to put this debate behind us and realize that the citizens have spoken.

Besides Campbell Soup, a number of major American companies, such Ben & Jerry’s, Chipotle and Whole Foods have either abandoned GMOs or require labeling. Coincidence or not, Campbell has also seen its stock price rise in after making its announcement to ditch GMOs.

According to Green America’s GMO Inside, General Mills’ food products are “chock full of corn, soy and sugars—ingredients that are almost always genetically modified in the United States,” including America’s favorite cereal, Cheerios.

Harmening maintains that genetically engineered foods are safe for human consumption, saying in his letter:

“All sides of this debate, 20 years of research, and every major health and safety agency in the world agree that GMOs are not a health or safety concern,” but adds that “at the same time, we know that some consumers are interested in knowing which products contain GMO ingredients.”

The labeling of GMOs has been a contentious food fight in recent years. Food and beverage trade organizations such as the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), which represents more than 300 food and beverage titans, argue that a 50-state patchwork of GMO labeling policies would be prohibitively costly.

However, as EcoWatch exclusively reported, despite the GMA slapping numerous lawsuits and spending millions in lobbying against mandatory labels at the state and federal level, an internal document indicates that GMA member companies are preparing a transition to labeling their GMO products, or at least in Vermont.

The United States is very proud of the progress their SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) have made on the battlefield in Syria’s northeastern region against IS (Islamic State). In a hearing before a US congressional committee recently, US Army generals extolled the fighting prowess of these fighters. They portrayed the fighters, mostly Kurds, to be persistent and tenacious despite suffering heavy losses, a characteristic the generals and the US in general seemed very eager to exploit.

However, looking at an actual map of the Syrian conflict, it appears that these Kurdish fighters and their allies on the battlefield are not working on behalf of the United States as the US would like to claim, but are instead coordinating with other Syrian forces fighting to reestablish stability (and more importantly, unity) within the country.

Salients emerging from Kurdish-held territory reach out in offensives into IS and “rebel” held territory, like tentacles of a leviathan to meet up with the Syrian Arab Army reaching out from their respective fronts. Together they have encircled, cut off and sent IS and other militant factions fleeing in disarray. Together, their collective efforts have finally helped turn the tide of what has been a destructive war threatening to leave Syria divided and in perpetual turmoil just as Libya was in 2011 and onward.

When Russia entered the conflict upon the request of the Syrian government, Russian forces began coordinating and supporting Kurdish fighters as well. The duality of Russian and American support behind the Kurds has become a complex issue for analysts and causal observers alike.
Illustrating just how bizarre America’s claims are regarding its “backing” of Kurdish fighters in Syria and its taking responsibility for their successes, Reuters’ article, “Kurds’ advance in Syria divides U.S. and Turkey as Russia bombs,” would even go as far as claiming:

The rapid advance of U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, taking advantage of Russian air strikes to seize territory near the Turkish border, has infuriated Ankara and threatened to drive a wedge between NATO allies.

Clearly Kurdish fighters are advancing because of Russian military assistance, not American, and while Reuters claims a wedge may be driven between Turkey and the US, it has only been Russia that has attempted to hold Turkey accountable for its aggression against Syria’s Kurds, not the US.

Syria’s Kurds, at least the majority who have taken up arms, seem to understand that further division for Syria as the US clearly desires, would be a disaster, not an opportunity.

Encouragement by the United States for the Kurds to fight the Syrian government or to carve out their own autonomous, independent region would be the partial fulfillment of Washington’s “Plan B” for Syria, failing outright regime change.

While an independent Kurdish state would sound like the culmination of a long-desired dream for the Kurdish people it would be in reality the beginning of a much darker national nightmare.

Independent Kurdistan Would be the “Next Israel”  

Geopolitically, an independent Kurdish state either in Syria or created out of an amalgamation of Kurdish regions in Syria and Iraq, would be many times weaker than any of the states they would be achieving independence from.

An independent Kurdistan would be incapable of defending itself from more aggressive offensives launched by Turkey who would no longer have to worry about provoking Baghdad, Damascus or their regional and international partners such as Iran and Russia. The United States, the chief agitator encouraging Kurdish independence, has already proven complete disinterest in truly protecting the Kurdish people from Turkish aggression both within Turkey’s borders and well beyond them. In fact, the US appears to be cynically using Turkish aggression as a “stick” to be held in contrast to whatever “carrots” are being offered in exchange for Washington’s tighter control over Ankara’s leash.

An independent Kurdistan would look a lot like Israel, or perhaps Qatar or Bahrain. It would be small, composing perhaps almost the same minuscule population of Israel with no more than 10 million people, and exist as a dependent faux-nation in need of constant and substantial foreign aid both militarily and economically (provided by the United States).

Like Israel, this Kurdish state would be governed by proxies selected by Washington. Either through internal division or the constant threat of aggression from abroad, this Kurdish state, like Israel, would be plunged and intentionally left in perpetual conflict. This conflict could even be sustained by creating aggressive foreign policies like Israel has adopted, creating a “siege mentality” among the Kurdish people and justifying long-term military dependency on the US.

While Kurdish populated regions have significant oil reserves, they will be dependent on foreign corporations to extract them and like the oil barons of the Persian Gulf, revenue will be at the mercy of global markets and those special interests who control those markets.

The United States, as it has done to Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies, would leave an independent Kurdish state in a precarious position intentionally, requiring it to depend on US backing. While Israel is often accused of being a regional bully (and it most certainly is), its menace is directly proportional to the immense financial aid and weapons it receives from the US and Europe.

Nations like Saudi Arabia which are vastly larger in territory than a potential Kurdish state would be, and double or triple its potential population, still depend on the United States for military weapons and regional protection. There is no reason to expect a Kurdish state to form under any other sort of arrangement.

Nothing Like Independence

It would in fact, be nothing like independence, or even autonomy. It would be perpetual, servile dependency on the special interests that helped create it solely for the purpose of using it to further divide and diminish the influence of any one single nation state in the Middle Eastern region.

As the British did before them, the United States is an expert in Balkanizing regions, and nations within regions. What is touted as “revolution,” “freedom” and “independence” often ends up becoming decades of instability, internal conflict and dependence on the US who had sold the idea of nation-making in the first place.

And while the US promises the Kurds a utopian future state, they have simultaneously promised overlapping spheres within the region to other allies, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and even Israel. The diabolical brilliance of this arrangement allows the US to create future conflicts, divisions and weakness among all players in the region, between friends and foes alike, ensuring it alone maintains hegemony over a collection of infighting subordinates.

A Better Path for Syria’s Kurds 

Both Damascus and Syria’s Kurds benefit from a strong, unified Syria. While Syria’s Kurds may desire and even seek greater representation or autonomy, their place within the Syrian state is both an asset for Damascus and Damascus an asset for the Kurds.

Turkey currently constitutes a common enemy. Syrian soldiers and Kurds alike have suffered the effects of Turkish aggression, both directly through armed aggression ordered by Ankara, and indirectly through the ongoing proxy war Syrian soldiers and Kurdish fighters are entrenched in against waves of foreign-backed fighters.

While Syria’s Kurds are suffering greatly because of Turkey today, they do not stand a chance against Ankara’s aggression tomorrow as an independent state without Damascus and its obligation to defend all within its borders, including Kurdish regions targeted by Turkey.

The same could be said for Kurds in Iraq, who have been lured away from Baghdad and in league with the United States, inebriated with promises of riches and power after establishing their own state. Perhaps as a preview for Syria’s Kurds to consider, as the schism between Baghdad and Iraq’s Kurds grows, Baghdad becomes increasingly unable and perhaps even unwilling to marshal forces to protect their northernmost region against Turkish incursions leaving the Kurds at their mercy with only the US and its various layers of machinations to depend on.

And just in case Baghdad did want to prove its commitment to Iraqi Kurds, they likely couldn’t as they desperately find themselves fighting IS on all fronts. A divided Iraq faces many years of fighting and instability, fighting and instability that will steal from Kurds and Arabs alike a peaceful and prosperous future.

Considering this, we see yet another geopolitical dimension in the use of IS by the US and its regional allies, using it as a means to apply pressure directly against its enemies and create tensions in parallel between potential alliances that could strengthen the region.

The deconstruction of Iraq (or even Libya) should serve as a warning to all in the region the danger of taking up arms against their own government and inviting the sort of chaos Syria is now steeped in. Nations like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain who depend entirely on the US and Europe for their continued existence should also serve as a warning for those in a position to establish their own independent state, that while the promises made by the US sound tempting, reality manifest clearly is not.

Ulson Gunnar is a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

One might expect that only historians would care to revisit the 1948 war that created Israel. And yet the debate about what constitutes truth and myth from that period still provokes raw emotions.

Much rests on how those events are reconstructed, not least because the shock waves have yet to subside. Israelis fear, and Palestinians crave, a clearer picture of the past because it would powerfully illuminate the present. It might also influence the international community’s proposed solutions for the conflict.

That is why the unearthing of an Israeli soldier’s letter from 1948 detailing what was probably the war’s worst massacre – one long buried by Israel – is of more than historical significance.

It comes as Moshe Yaalon, the defence minister, this week accused Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organisation that exposes military abuses, of “treason” for collecting evidence from the army’s current whistle-blowers.

Western understandings of the 1948 war – what Palestinians term their Nakba, or catastrophe – are dominated by an enduring Israeli narrative. Israel’s army, it is said, abided by a strict moral code. Palestinians left not because of Israel’s actions but on the orders of Arab leaders.

In this rendering, the Palestinians’ mass dispossession was the fault of the Arab world – and a solution for the millions of today’s refugees lies with their host countries.

For decades Israel’s chief concession to the truth was an admission that a massacre took place just outside Jerusalem, at Deir Yassin.

Israel claimed the atrocity was the exception that proved the rule: a rogue militia killed more than 100 villagers, violating Israel’s ethical codes in the chaotic weeks before statehood was declared.

Palestinians have always known of dozens of other large massacres of civilians from 1948 carried out by the Israeli army. The barbarity, they say, was intended to terrorise the native population into flight. This account puts responsibility on Israel for taking the refugees back.

But history is written by the victor.

In recent decades a few brave Israeli scholars have chipped away at the official facade. In the late 1990s a Haifa University student collected testimonies from former soldiers confirming that over 200 Palestinians had been massacred at Tantura, south of Haifa. After the findings were made public, he was pilloried and stripped of his degree.

A decade ago, the historian Ilan Pappe wrote a groundbreaking book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, arguing that massacres like the one at Tantura were exploited to drive out Palestinians. He and others noted the suggestive titles of military operations such as “Broom” and soldiers’ orders to “clean” areas.

Pappe now lives in academic exile in the UK.

The biggest obstacle to shifting Israeli and western perceptions of 1948 has been the lack of a clear paper trail connecting the political leadership to the massacres. Israel locked away bundles of documentation precisely not to jeopardise the official narrative.

But things are changing slowly.

Last year a key deception was punctured: that Israel urged many of the war’s 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return. In a letter to Haifa’s leaders shortly after the city’s Palestinians were expelled, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, demanded that any return be barred.

Now another letter, located by Israeli historian Yair Auron and published last week for the first time in English by the Haaretz newspaper, trashes the idea of an ethical Israel army.

Written by Shabtai Kaplan, a soldier and journalist, the letter confirms long-held suspicions of a massacre – one that dwarfs Deir Yassin – at Dawaymeh, near Hebron. Soldiers executed hundreds of men, women and children who offered no resistance.

The massacre, near the end of the war, was carried out by elite troops under the command of Yitzhak Sadeh. He developed the Israeli army’s famous doctrine of “purity of arms”.

Kaplan argues that the Dawaymeh massacre was part of “a system of expulsion and destruction”, with a clear goal: “The fewer Arabs who remain, the better.”

Kaplan’s letter was consigned to the vaults, as were so many other documents from 1948 that officials considered too damaging.

Nearly seven decades later, in an age of 24-hour news and social media, Israel is still desperately trying to conceal its darkest episodes by bullying the army’s current whistle-blowers.

Last week Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched an investigation into Breaking the Silence. On Sunday Netanyau called the collection of soldiers’ testimonies “intolerable”, indicating that he may try to ban the group.

It is hard not to see parallels between the cover-ups of 1948 and those of today. Breaking the Silence’s disclosures, especially those relating to Israel’s series of attacks on Gaza, each of which has left hundreds of civilians dead, similarly give the lie to the army’s continuing claims of ethical behaviour.

In his 1948 letter, Kaplan observed of the failure by the political leadership to hold anyone to account for the massacres: “Inaction is in itself encouragement.”

Israel’s politicians hoped then that the Palestinians could be quickly terrorised from their lands. Decades later, the atrocities continue – and to the same end. But Israel must face facts: the days when such systematic brutality could be kept under wraps are now over.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

ISIS militants conducted a wave of suicide attacks on the YPG and SDF centers in the Southern parts of Salouk town, Northern Raqqa. There is yet no confirmed information about casualties and damage. [in comparison to media coverage of the suicide attacks in Brussels]

In a separate development, ISIS launched an offensive against Kurdish units located in the village of Jantrari near Ain Issa town. Three militants and two Kurds were killed during the clashes there. The Kurdish forces hold the area.

100-man strong group of al-Nusra militants arrived in Binnish. The militants reportedly told the citizens about their soon departure for Aleppo to conduct warfare against the pro-government troops.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) units continued advance on the Deir Ezzor-Mayadeen road and seized part of it after a heavy firefight with ISIS near the Thayyem Oil Fields. The SAA is pushing in direction of Mohassan.

The SAA and its allies are continuing operations to liberate Palmyra. Yesterday, the Syrian forces liberated Palmyra Triangle what allowed them to set the ground for direct offensive on Palmyra. Clashes between ISIS and the SAA are also ongoing at Jabal Al-Tar.

Militants opened fire on Russian humanitarian aid convoys in Harasta in Damascus Countryside and Kafarnan in Homs countryside, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on Mar.22. Neither the members of the Center nor the Syrians who participated in the humanitarian activity were injured.

The Iraqi popular forces, al-Hashed al-Shaabi, in Anbar Province reported dozens ISIS militants were killed during the clashes with 300-strong group of ISIS militants in al-Karma District East of Fallujah, 62 km West of Baghdad. The operations are ongoing in the area.

Nineveh Province Operations Commander Brigadier General Najm al-Jabouri announced on Mar.22 that the Iraqi security forces and popular mobilization units are ready to launch the operation to liberate Mosul. According to reports, the Iraqi Air Force’s planes dropped thousands of leaflets on the city calling the residents to be prepared for the military operation against ISIS.

 It would indeed be a great achievement to see a woman president of the United States; a strong but compassionate woman, who could ensure that America would be a force for peace in the world and a creator of a strong economy at home.

Instead, we have as a presidential candidate, a confirmed warmonger driven by a desire to be as macho as any male dictator. She is prepared to instigate conflict wherever she thinks fit to prove that, just as she recommended the break-­up of Syria and the de-stabilisation of Libya that made it a failed state which now threatens the entire Middle East, she would make Israel into an aggressive, armed fortress: a militarised American satellite state in the Middle East from where she could despatch F35 war planes around the world to target, bomb and fireball civilian and military installations, (at the direction of the AIPAC lobby), thereby provoking the probability of global war.

Is this what America and the international community really want for ourselves and our children?

At one time, the Democratic Party of America was a party of peace: ­ a strongly principled coalition that believed implicitly in human and civil rights, both at home and abroad. That belief sadly has temporarily been suspended as maybe 50% of Democrats mistakenly think that an aggressive, resentful woman (who would rather be a man), might strengthen the US economy and keep America great.

Sadly, she no more has the ability to do that than she has the ability to make a pork chop, kosher.

Hillary Clinton is desperate to prove that she has both balls and brains. Is this description sexist? Emphatically not! A female president of the United States would be an amazing achievement both for gender equality and human rights and, of course, for America. But this vengeful woman would be a terrible choice.

The deliberate destruction of the rich Libyan oil producing state to facilitate its takeover by ISIL Islamic terrorists who now threaten Europe and the world, was the last great ‘achievement’ of this putative presidential candidate. Let us ensure, for our own safety, that the United States and the world are spared any more.

  © EUNewsdesk   London   2016  (but freely distributable)           [email protected]

What do you think this chart means?

(The post-recession economy is worse than we thought, Fortune)

It means the U.S. economy is in the throes of the lousiest recovery since World War 2.

“But how can that be”, you ask? “After all, hasn’t the Fed kept interest rates at zero for seven years while hosing down the entire financial system with more than $4 trillion?

Yep, they sure have, but their so called monetary stimulus has failed to lift the economy out of the doldrums or produce the robust recovery that they promised. Instead, US gross domestic product, (GDP) has been plodding-along at an abysmal 2.2% since 2009, which is far below the 3.6% average of the prior 60 years. Bottom line: There’s no chance the economy is going to break out of its long-term stagnation unless policymakers dramatically change their approach. Here’s a snapshot of the Fed’s handiwork from an article at Fortune Magazine. Take a look:

Fortune:

“As you can see, the revisions generally show a more anemic record of post-recession growth than we thought. From 2011 through last year, the U.S. economy, on average, grew just 2% per year, well below its post-war average of roughly 3% growth.” (The post-recession economy is worse than we thought, Fortune)

It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe the Fed can dump more than $4 trillion into the financial system and not even hit their 2% inflation target? How is that possible? I thought more money meant more inflation? Was I wrong?

Yes and no. You see, the Fed’s policies HAVE created inflation, just not the kind of inflation that revs up activity. What the Fed has created is asset inflation, soaring stock and bond prices that eventually lead to financial instability and painful periods of adjustment. The S&P has more than doubled since 2009, while the Dow Jones has actually tripled. Stock prices have skyrocketed while Wall Street speculators have made an absolute killing. It’s only working slobs who haven’t benefited from the Fed’s policies because none of the money has trickled down to the real economy where it could do some good. Instead, it’s all locked up in the financial system where its inflated one gigantic bubble after another.

Here’s what the Fed’s money pumping operation looks like on paper:

Source: MarketOracle.co.uk

See how the black line lurches skyward with every new round of QE? That’s how the policy works. The rich get richer while working people try to muddle by on fewer hours, shittier wages, pricier health care, and zero retirement savings. Is it any wonder why Bernie Sanders has caught fire?

Now if you look closely at the chart, you’ll see that the Fed stopped pumping money into the system in October 2014, about a year and a half ago. Since that time, stocks have gradually edged higher which suggests that current prices accurately reflect strong underlying fundamentals. But does anyone really believe that?

No, not really. Everyone thinks stocks are in a bubble. In fact, the Fed can’t even mention “tightening” without sending the markets off a cliff. For example, in December–after months of telegraphing its intention to lift rates by a measly 25 basis points– the Fed raised rates to half a percent, a full percentage point below the current rate of inflation. (which means the Fed is actually subsidizing lending.) Even so, the markets had a major coronary which sent stocks tumbling for the worst beginning of a year in history.

Why?

Because everyone knows the prices are fake. It’s all just froth from zero rates and QE, every bit of it. And there’s no bottom either, that’s why the Fed is so worried, because if the market does a sudden about-face and stocks start to nosedive, there’s no telling where they’ll wind up. We could see the Crash of the Century in matter of weeks. Nobody really knows for sure.

There was an excellent article on this topic a few weeks ago at Yahoo called “The Fed caused 93% of the entire stock market’s move since 2008”.

According to economist-analyst Brian Barnier, stocks have climbed to stratospheric levels because, “the Federal Reserve took to flooding the financial market with dollars by buying up bonds.”

Okay, but if the Fed is responsible for 93 percent of the rally, then how far will stocks have to drop before prices reflect fundamentals?

A very long way indeed, longer than anyone even cares to imagine. This is why the Fed’s HAS NOT and probably WILL NOT sell any of the $4.5 trillion assets currently on its balance sheet. They’re too afraid that investors will see it as a sign that the Fed is ending its support for the markets, which will trigger a vicious round of panic selling. In other words, the Fed’s going to be stuck with a bloated balance sheet until Judgment Day if not longer.

But let’s get back to our original question: Why have stocks continued to edge higher when the Fed stopped its money-pumping operations back in 2014?

Answer: Stock buybacks.

Check out this chart I found at David Stockman’s Contra Corner. It helps to illustrate how stocks are rising, not because of strong fundamentals, but because bigshot CEOs have borrowed heavily from the bond market to buyback their own shares. That’s right, corporate bosses have been piling on the debt to goose their stock prices so they can cream hefty profits in the form of executive compensation. It’s blatant manipulation, but it’s all perfectly legal. Check it out:

(Chart Of The Day: The Perfect Correlation——Stock Buybacks And The S&P 500 Since 2010, Contra Corner)

This is what’s driving the market higher. Not the fake jobs numbers, not the phony housing rebound, and certainly not confidence in Yellen’s lousy recovery. It’s all based on cheap money, financial engineering, and fraud. That’s today’s stock market in a nutshell.

Now take a look at this shocker from Bloomberg:

“Standard and Poor’s 500 Index constituents are poised to repurchase as much as $165 billion of stock this quarter, approaching a record reached in 2007.” (There’s Only One Buyer Keeping S&P 500’s Bull Market Alive, Bloomberg)

$165 billion of stock this quarter, translates into $660 billion per year. That’s a boatload of money and enough to drive the market higher unless retail investors call it a day and bail out. And retail investors are bailing out. According to a recent report by Bank of America (featured on Zero Hedge):

“BofAML clients were net sellers of US stocks for the seventh consecutive week… Hedge funds and private clients were also net sellers…

BofA’s summary: “clients don’t believe the rally, continue to sell US stocks” and they were selling specifically to corporations whose repurchasing activity is near all time highs: “buybacks by corporate clients accelerated for the third consecutive week to their highest level in six months, which is also above levels at this time last year.” (Buyback Blackout Period Starts Monday: Is This The Catalyst That Ends The S&P Rally?, Zero Hedge)

SELL. SELL. SELL. It seems like the only one that isn’t headed for the exits is the big corporate honchos who want one-last big payoff before the market goes Sayonara. Here’s more from Bloomberg:

“Corporate buybacks are the sole demand for corporate equities in this market,” David Kostin, the chief U.S. equity strategist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said in a Feb. 23 Bloomberg Television interview.” (Bloomberg)

“The sole demand”? You mean the only one buying these crappy stocks is the companies issuing the shares?

That’s right, and you can blame it all on the friendly folks at the Fed. If it wasn’t for the Fed’s zero rates and $4 trillion in QE, this latest suicidal-wave of speculation never would have happened. Let’s face it, if rates were normal, CEOs wouldn’t be able to borrow money to buy their own shares. It would just be too expensive, so the problem wouldn’t even exist. Cheap money creates bubbles, and the Number 1 producer of cheap money in the world today is, you-guessed-it, Janet Freaking Yellen.

So what’s the ultimate objective here, what is the Fed really trying to achieve? Surely, after seven years of doing the same thing over and over again, the Fed isn’t expecting a different result, is it?

No, of course not. After all, the Fed isn’t insane, far from it. The Fed knows exactly what it’s doing. They know that their monetary policy is “pushing on a string” and will have no impact on jobs, business investment or growth, just like they know that QE won’t boost inflation as long as wages are kept in check. They know this, because they’ve seen the same outcome in every country where they’ve used this combo of easy money and austerity. Keep in mind, the Central Bank cabal has implemented this same program in the UK, the EU, Japan and the US. In every case, the political class has put a damper on growth (by cutting government spending) while the CBs have pumped trillions into the financial system. And the result has been exactly what you’d expect; the investor class has raked in billions while the economy languishes on life support. What more proof do you need?

Like we said, this phenomenon is not limited to America either. It’s a global restructuring of the dominant western economies away from a democratic model where representative governments set policy. The new order represents basic changes in the political economy, an economy that now serves the exclusive interests of the top one percent. Welcome to the Fed’s Brave New World.

The key here for the deep-state elites– who control the whole apparatus behind the central bank smokescreen– is inflation. As long as inflation stays low, central banks can continue to conveyor-belt more wealth to the tycoons on top. This is why the economy cannot be allowed to grow, because if the economy grows too fast and more people find work, then wage pressures continues to build which forces the CBs to raise rates.

Elites can’t allow that, because higher rates threaten to sabotage their easy money gravy train. So the economy has to be strangled with austerity so the uber-rich can rake off more lucre for themselves. That’s why the economy is going to remain mired in the doldrums for the foreseeable future. It’s the policy.

This is the hidden motive behind austerity. It has nothing to do with the nagging concern about federal debt or bulging deficits. That’s baloney. It’s about curbing inflation so the oligarchs get a bigger piece of the pie. End of story.

Like we said earlier, the Fed knows exactly what it’s doing, just like all the CBs know what they’re doing. This isn’t hard to understand. It’s a fairly straightforward, but devious plan to restructure the economy so handful of obscenely-wealthy plutocrats end up controlling everything. That’s the main objective. They want it all.

So how do we turn this thing around?

Unfortunately, that’s where I’m stuck.

Two attacks on a US firebase in northern Iraq, which killed one US Marine and wounded several more, have led to revelations about a substantial escalation of the US military intervention in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the Pentagon has deployed more than 5,000 soldiers in Iraq, some 20 percent more than the current “cap” of 3,870 troops publicly announced by the Obama White House. The Daily Beast web site gave the total as 5,325.

The revelations of additional US forces came after ISIS attacked a Marine Corps position in Makhmour, about 70 miles south of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the largest urban area controlled by ISIS in either Syria or Iraq.

ISIS mortars slammed into the base, dubbed Firebase Bell, killing Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin and wounding several more Marines. Some of the wounded had to be evacuated out of the country in order to receive proper treatment.

Cardin, 27, from Temecula, California, was on his fifth deployment in a war zone. He had served three tours of duty in Afghanistan and one previous tour in Iraq before he was airlifted into Makhmour last month as part of the deployment of the US Marines 26th Expeditionary Unit from the USS Kearsarge, a troop carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf.

On Monday, a small ISIS unit attacked the base, home to 200 Marines, with small arms fire. They were driven off without casualties. At that point, Pentagon spokesmen acknowledged the existence of Firebase Bell, the first US-only facility to be set up in Iraq since the formal end of the US military occupation of the country in December 2011.

The Marine base sits adjacent to Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga positions in the area where the Iraqi government is assembling forces for a planned offensive against Mosul, expected later this year. The 200 soldiers at Firebase Bell operate 155mm artillery to provide long-range support for Iraqi Army and Kurdish troops and US Special Forces.

The Obama administration has classified the deployment of the Marines and many other soldiers as “temporary” in order to claim that the number of troops in Iraq is below the current ceiling of 3,870 that it reports to Congress.

Colonel Steve Warren, the top US military spokesman in Baghdad, told the press Monday, “People come through on a temporary basis and go above and below the force cap all the time, but we remain under our force cap.”

Nancy Youssef, a Daily Beast reporter, noted that Cardin’s death had revealed

“a familiar, disturbing pattern in this war—one where the US military does not reveal what it is asking of troops until it has to, usually when a service member is killed. Up until Cardin’s death, the US military said its troops were only on heavily fortified bases; that its forces were not part of any offensive operations; that they were properly secured; and that frontline troops are counted in publicly released tallies of those deployed in Iraq. But Saturday’s attack revealed that none of that was accurate.”

The purpose of the official secrecy and lying is not military security. ISIS was well aware of the existence of the firebase, which it targeted with mortar shells. In any case, as one official admitted, it is hard to hide 200 heavily armed Marines stationed only 10 miles from enemy lines.

The purpose was to conceal from the Iraqi and American people what the US government and Pentagon are doing in Iraq. President Obama has repeatedly declared that he brought an end to combat in Iraq and that he would not send US combat forces back to that country. But this is what, in fact, is happening.

Iraq’s Joint Operations Command denied Monday that US Marines were involved in combat in Iraq, declaring, “There is no credibility for the rumors talking about the deployment of American fighting troops in certain sites and camps in Baghdad or elsewhere.”

Colonel Warren also denied that the deployment in Makhmour constituted a combat mission. “They won’t kind of go off and conduct any type of mission on their own,” he told reporters. “They don’t really have that capability anyways. They’re just providing coverage, right? They’re providing fire support coverage for the several thousand Iraqi soldiers and the several hundred advisers.”

Nonetheless, he admitted that the Marines had been deliberately attacked by ISIS. “I think they were targeted specifically,” he said. “We’re in a dangerous place and there’s a war going on. So we have to expect there will be attacks.”

Sergeant Cardin was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. As the Wall Street Journal wrote in its report on Cardin’s death, “The transfer of a regular Marine unit into a combat zone marks stepped-up efforts by the US to combat the extremist group.”

Other press reports noted that the US government had previously claimed that ISIS used mustard gas against Kurdish troops stationed in Makhmour last year. Establishing a base for the US Marines on the same site makes nonsense of the pretense that US forces are not playing a ground combat role in the war against ISIS.

The Associated Press reported, “Makhmour is expected to become a major focus of any future offensive to gain control of Mosul, and Iraqi army reinforcements have begun arriving there in recent weeks in preparation for the operation.”

The top State Department official in the region, Brett McGurk, said the offensive had already begun, in the sense that US-backed Iraqi forces were edging toward Mosul. “It’s already started,” he told a forum at the American University of Iraq at Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdish-ruled zone of northern Iraq. “It’s a slow, steady squeeze,” he said, adding, “It’s going to be a long campaign.”

The exposure of previously secret US military facilities in northern Iraq follows reports earlier this month that the Pentagon was operating two secret airstrips in northern Syria, inside the region along the Syrian-Turkish border controlled by the Syrian Kurdish PYG.

One airstrip, at Rmeilan, in the far northeastern corner of Syria near the Iraq border, was doubled in length in order to accommodate US cargo planes bringing supplies for the PYG and US Special Forces troops working with them. The other airstrip, near Kobani, was reported March 6 to be under construction.

Como se faz para justificar a guerra se não existe um inimigo que nos ameaça? Simples, basta inventá-lo ou fabricá-lo. É o que ensina o general Philip Breedlove, o chefe do Comando Europeu dos Estados Unidos que está para passar a outro  general estadunidense o bastão do Comando Supremo na Europa.

Na sua última audiência no Pentágono, ele adverte que “ao Leste, a Europa tem diante de si uma Rússia que ressurge e é agressiva, a qual representa uma ameaça existencial a longo prazo”.

Ele modifica assim a realidade: a nova guerra fria na Europa, contrária  aos interesses da Rússia, foi provocada com o golpe da Praça Maidan, pela estratégia dos Estados Unidos e da Otan, que continua a alimentar as tensões para justificar o crescente deslocamento de forças para a Europa oriental.

Na Ucrânia, foi constituído um comando conjunto multinacional para o treinamento “até 2020” das forças armadas e dos batalhões neonazistas da Guarda Nacional, de que se ocupam centenas de instrutores da 173ª Divisão dos EUA transferidos de  Vicenza, acompanhados por britânicos e canadenses.

O Comando Europeu dos Estados Unidos, sublinha Breedlove, trabalha com os aliados para “contrapor-se à Rússia e preparar-se para o conflito, se necessário”.

Ao Sul, adverte o comandante supremo aliado na Europa, “a Europa tem diante de si o desafio da migração em massa provocada pelo colapso e a instabilidade de Estados inteiros, e pelo Isis, que se espalha como um câncer ameaçando as nações europeias”.   Sustenta, assim, que “a intervenção da Rússia na Síria complicou o problema, pois fez pouco para se contrapor ao Isis e muito para apoiar o regime de Assad”.

Modifica novamente a realidade: foram os EUA e a Otan que provocaram com a guerra o colapso do Estado líbio e a instabilidade do sírio, e a consequente migração em massa, favorecendo a formação do Isis, funcional a sua estratégia, que fingiram combater, enquanto a intervenção russa na Síria tem o apoio das forças do governo e golpeou duramente o Isis, fazendo-o retroceder.

Agora que a Rússia, uma vez conseguido o primeiro objetivo, redimensiona o seu engajamento na Síria, a Otan, sob o comando estadunidense, aumenta a sua presença militar no Oriente Médio.

Em 29 de fevereiro, o secretário geral da Otan, Stoltenberg, assinou com o Kuait um acordo que permite criar a primeira escala aeroportuária da Aliança Atlântica no Golfo, seja para a guerra no Afeganistão, seja para a “cooperação da Otan com o Kuait e outros parceiros”, sobretudo a Arábia Saudita apoiada pelo Pentágono na guerra que acarreta massacres de civis no Iêmen.

Em 2 de março, em Abu Dabi, Stolternberg reforçou a “cooperação com os Emirados Árabes Unidos para enfrentar desafios comuns à segurança”.

Em 1º de março, ele recebeu  em Bruxelas o rei Abdullah II, para fortalecer a “parceria da Otan com a Jordânia”.

Em 18 de março, recebeu Al Zayani, secretário geral do Conselho de Cooperação do Golfo (Arábia Saudita, Bahrein, Emirados Árabes Unidos, Kuait, Omã, Catar), para “aprofundar a cooperação entre as duas organizações”.

Na África – enquanto se prepara a operação que, com o pretexto de libertá-la do Isis, visa a ocupar a região da Líbia econômica e estrategicamente mais importante – está em curso do Senegal ao Golfo da Guiné o exercício Obangame/Saharan Express, de que participam com finalidades de “antiterrorismo e antipirataria”, forças navais dos EUA, da Europa, África e até do Brasil. Dirigido pelo quartel-general de Nápoles das U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, cuja missão é “promover os interesses nacionais dos Estados Unidos, a segurança e a estabilidade na Europa e na África”.

Manlio Dinucci

Fonte: Chi ci minaccia veramente? Il Manifesto

Tradução de José Reinaldo Carvalho, para Resistência.

Manlio Dinucci é jornalista e geógrafo.

– See more at:

Se ha insistido en promover la idea de que la recuperación de la economía de Estados Unidos viene cobrando fuerza desde hace tiempo. Incluso funcionarios de alto nivel de organismos financieros internacionales llegaron a declarar que la economía norteamericana había conseguido desacoplarse de la tendencia de bajo crecimiento que prevalece en el resto de los países industrializados. Sin embargo, ese optimismo desenfrenado contrasta con la realidad: la inflación no consigue aumentar de modo significativo y el desempleo se ha vuelto crónico en más de 30 estados de la Unión Americana, con lo cual, persisten los peligros de la deflación y una nueva recesión.

La economía norteamericana ha incrementado los riesgos de convertirse en el epicentro de la próxima recesión global. A pesar de que la tasa de interés de los fondos federales (‘federal funds rate’) se mantiene en un nivel históricamente bajo, entre 0,25 y 0,50 por ciento, los bancos continúan negándose a otorgar crédito a las empresas. Es que los banqueros no confían en que los préstamos les serán devueltos, simplemente no encuentran señales contundentes de recuperación en la esfera productiva.

En estos momentos, a los magnates de las finanzas de Estados Unidos les resulta más rentable realizar fusiones y adquisiciones (‘mergers & acquisitions’) entre corporaciones, adquirir sus propias acciones, o bien comprar bienes raíces en los países emergentes. El incremento de la productividad no es suficiente, la inversión empresarial es demasiado débil y los salarios permanecen estancados. En consecuencia, la inflación sigue muy por debajo del objetivo del 2 por ciento. Esta situación tiene desesperada a la presidenta de la Reserva Federal (FED), Janet Yellen, quien ya no encuentra cómo dinamizar la economía.

El proceso de recuperación es tan frágil que a mediados de marzo el Comité Federal de Mercado Abierto (FOMC, por sus siglas en inglés) de la FED dejó intacta la tasa de interés de los fondos federales. Recordemos que apenas en diciembre pasado, cuando se llevó a cabo el primer aumento de la tasa de interés de referencia en casi una década, Dean Turner, analista de la firma de servicios financieros UBS, pronosticó que los integrantes del FOMC iban a subir por lo menos cuatro veces los tipos de interés a lo largo de 2016.

Sin embargo, hoy los inversionistas bursátiles más optimistas consideran que como máximo habrá dos incrementos: siempre y cuando el mercado laboral mejore y la inflación aumente, será durante la segunda mitad del año cuando la FED eleve otra vez la tasa de interés de referencia en no más de un cuarto de punto porcentual. Es que el panorama ahora es más sombrío. Toda vez que la confianza puesta en la recuperación de la economía global bajo el liderazgo de la locomotora norteamericana se ha venido desvaneciendo, incluso hay quienes anticipan que Estados Unidos volverá a caer en recesión.

De acuerdo con los cálculos del equipo de asesores de Citigroup a cargo de Willem Buiter, la economía mundial únicamente se expandió 2 por ciento durante el último trimestre de 2015, la cifra más baja desde que la zona euro padeció los mayores estragos de la crisis de deuda soberana durante los años 2012 y 2013. A los economistas de Citigroup no deja de sorprenderles que los países industrializados, aquellos que venían disfrutando de un crecimiento más sólido del Producto Interno Bruto (PIB) en los meses recientes, ahora se estén desacelerando dramáticamente, en especial Estados Unidos.

Para el famoso empresario norteamericano Jim Rogers, el escenario es todavía más pesimista. A su juicio, existe una probabilidad de ciento por ciento de que la economía de Estados Unidos vuelva a sumergirse en la recesión a lo largo del año en curso. “No hay que prestar atención a las cifras del gobierno, hay que prestar atención a los números reales”, declaró en una entrevista.

Sucede que durante los primeros tres meses del año la economía estadounidense manifestó nuevas señales de vulnerabilidad. La evolución del mercado de trabajo no es tan boyante como todo el mundo piensa. De acuerdo con los datos publicados por el Departamento del Trabajo, la nómina no agrícola añadió un récord de 242,000 empleos en febrero, con lo cual, la tasa de paro oficial se mantuvo por segundo mes consecutivo en 4,9 por ciento, el registro más bajo de los últimos ocho años. Por añadidura, según los datos actualizados de los meses previos, en enero las contrataciones aumentaron a 172,000, mientras que en diciembre de 2015 subieron a 271,000, una revisión al alza de 30,000 empleos en ambos casos.

Aparentemente, todo se desenvolvía de modo favorable para la economía norteamericana. El incremento de la nómina no agrícola del mes pasado superó con creces los 230,000 puestos de trabajo, el promedio mensual obtenido a lo largo de 2015. Sin embargo, de acuerdo con las propias cifras del Departamento del Trabajo, 80 por ciento de los nuevos empleos de febrero corresponden a los sectores con los salarios peor pagados: cuidado de la salud, asistencia social, comercio minorista, servicios de alimentación y servicios educativos privados. Por otro lado, si se contabilizan aquellas personas que han abandonado la búsqueda de empleo (1,8 millones) así como las ocupadas a tiempo parcial (6 millones), el subempleo alcanza una tasa de 9,7 por ciento.

Es evidente que Estados Unidos no goza de “pleno empleo”. En la actualidad 36 estados de la Unión Americana padecen de desempleo crónico, pues su tasa de paro promedio (en términos anuales) fue superior en 2015 que en 2007. De hecho, una investigación realizada por Danny Yagan y publicada por la Universidad de California (Berkeley) hace unos días, apunta que bajo el ritmo actual de recuperación, no será sino hasta el año 2020 cuando el mercado de trabajo de las regiones más deprimidas vuelva a la normalidad: más de una década después de la Gran Recesión, la misma que amenaza con regresar más fuerte que nunca.

Ariel Noyola Rodríguez

Ariel Noyola Rodríguez : Economista egresado de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

The impact of the strategic defeat of last year is still very strongly shaping various reactions within the Greek left. Some people seem content with superficial explanations of what happened and return to habitual ways of thinking and acting; others sense the strategic depth of the defeat and turn inward to disappointment and demoralization. Still others are trying to learn from the ‘SYRIZA experience’ in order to make themselves more useful to people in the future. All of us sense the dangers lurking in front of us but we are far from having a common and feasible strategy.

In a situation like this, political priorities change and ‘novel’ tasks emerge. For example, people far beyond those affiliated with the traditional left are scattered and in disarray, but also full of energy, determination and skills. What should they do? Another urgent task is how to transmit the ‘SYRIZA experience’ abroad, facilitating the left in other countries in the fight against neoliberalism and increased hostility of the elites. ‘Novel’ tasks require a different mentality and operational qualities from the ones we used to deploy through traditional political action.

But first we need: (i) a thorough understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the ‘SYRIZA experience’, and (ii) an open, bold and innovative process of arriving at the new conditions of doing politics. These are some preliminary thoughts in this direction.

The Failure

SYRIZA failed to stop austerity and neoliberal transformation in Greece. One could argue that SYRIZA also betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the popular classes and those fighting against financial despotism. It chose to remain in power, thereby ‘normalizing’ the coup we witnessed last summer and accepting neoliberal coordinates that shape governmentality today in Europe.

SYRIZA’s choice deprived the people of a crucial ‘tool’ in this fight by its painful defeat: the political representation of non-compliance with financial despotism. SYRIZA eliminated the chance of a ‘tactical withdrawal’, a collective process of reassembling our forces that could take into account the escalation of the fight provoked by elites – and forming a more effective and resilient ‘popular front’ that would build its resources to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy in the future.

overnment in the months after the agreement, shows that there is no middle ground between financial despotism and democracy and dignity; if you try to reach such middle ground, you are quickly converted into an organic component of the biopolitical machine aimed at dehumanizing our societies. Arguing that the implementation of the agreement is the only way out of the present situation is just a reformulation of the neoliberal core-argument that There Is No Alternative; no strategy for continuing the fightback against financial despotism.

However, there is a danger of underestimating the brutal strategic defeat that we all suffered in 2015, hiding from ourselves the extent of our current impotence as regards any serious challenge to financial despotism. We must dare to perform an extensive reassessment of our methodology and tools if we want to be relevant in these new conditions. And to do so, we should not preoccupy ourselves with the self-evident negative nature of SYRIZA’s choice and comfort ourselves that this is the source of our problems. The choice SYRIZA made is – among other things – a symptom of the deeper, structural weaknesses of the left.

Tsipras and Juncker. CC.

Today in Greece a ‘Left government’ is implementing austerity, leftwing people are confused and ‘The Left’ is turning into a pro-memorandum political force in people’s minds. Nationalists and fascists have remained the only ‘natural hosts’ of popular rage and resentment, the expected emotional outcomes of the burial of hope we witnessed last summer. Greeks are sensing that the future of their society is severely compromised.

The majority of Greeks have been sentenced to misery and despair through the imposition of newer harder austerity measures without any real hope for the future. If we add to the economic and social disaster that austerity is inflicting on us the huge waves of refugees that are entering Greece – especially the complex and contradictory ways in which their drama impacts on the abused psychic economy of the Greek population – and add also the fear of increased geopolitical instability in the region, then it seems certain that prosperity, stability and peace has left Greece for the identifiable future.

These are exactly the suffocating conditions that prevail in a society before it explodes – due to a random incident – deepening even further the decline, and plunging existential depths. It is like we are walking on thin ice from now on in Greece. In moments like this we have to remain calm and think clearly if we want to arrive at what is needed to adapt and to be effective.

The Sad Case of Europe

Greek Red Cross helps refugees trapped at Idomeni on the Greece-Macedonia border. Demotix/Giorgios Cristakis. All rights reserved.

The neoliberal EU and Eurozone has transferred a bundle of important policies and powers that once appeared to belong to the nat

ion state out of the reach of the people. At the same time, a vast array of neoliberal regulations and norms govern the function of the state. In the EU and Eurozone today, the elected government is no longer the major bearer of political power. In the case of Greece, democratically electing a government is like electing a junior partner in a wider government in which the lenders are the major partners.

The junior partner is not allowed to intervene and disturb decisions on such crucial economic and social issues as fiscal policy, banks, privatizations, pensions etc. If it does intervene and demand a say on these issues, then the people who appoint it are going to suffer the consequences. The elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – have managed to gain unchecked control over the basic functions of the society. It is up to their anti-democratic institutions to decide whether a society will have a functional banking system and sufficient liquidity to run or not.

That’s what happened to Greece; that’s the core argument of the president of Portugal behind his initial decision to appoint a pro-austerity minority government: I am preventing unnecessary pain. Pain that will be caused by the naivety and dangerous ignorance of the people and political powers that still insist on people’s right to have access to crucial decisions, while at the same time they do not have the power to shape these decisions.

It is evident today that the EU is an openly anti-democratic institutional structure. The left must embrace the crude reality: in Europe a new kind of despotism is emerging fast.

The Time Lag of the Left

In western societies, the left, but not only the left, of a robust democratic constitution has been trained to do politics within the coordinates of a post-war institutional configuration. We assumed that the elites were committed to accepting the democratically shaped mandate of an elected government. If they did not like the policies that it promoted, they had to engage in a political fight; opposition parties must convince the people that this policy is neither desirable nor successful and use the democratic processes for a new government of their preference to be elected.

Graffiti in Athens. Photo by Carl Packman. Used with his permission.

But was this ever truly the case even for western societies after the Great War? This is surely a debatable issue. However, it is sufficient to assume that this was at least the dominant conception of political functioning that shaped the methodology and strategy of political agency over the last decades, even if it does not correspond fully to reality.

According to this conception, the post-war global balance of forces inscribed in state institutions a considerable amount of popular power, so that people without considerable economic power nevertheless have access to crucial decisions. Of course, the quality and the range of the access was a constant issue of class struggle. The elites were obliged to fight according to the rules (or at least to appear to do so) and at the same time they were working deliberately to diffuse a kind of institutional configuration contaminated by popular power. In recent decades (not accidentally after the fall of the Soviet Union) they made decisive steps toward diffusing this kind of power and hence limiting the ability of the popular classes to influence crucial decisions. Today the elites feel confident enough to openly defy democracy. Democracy is no longer a sine qua non.

Based on the premise that the framework in which politics is being performed hasn’t changed significantly, SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: supported social movements, built alliances, won a majority in the parliament, formed a government. We all know the results of such a strategy now. The real outcome was totally different. There was virtually no change of policy.

Prepare for Landing

A strategy that wishes to be relevant to the new conditions must take on the duty of acquiring the necessary power to run basic social functions. No matter how difficult or strange this may sound in light of the traditional ways of doing politics, it is the only way to acquire the necessary power to defy the elites’ control over our societies.

Is this feasible? My hypothesis is that literally every day human activity – both intellectual and practical – is producing experiences, know-how, criteria and methods, innovations etc. that inherently contradict the parasitic logic of profit and competition. Moreover, for the first time in our evolutionary history, we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach that we are bound to progress our collective intelligence in this regard if we put our minds to it.

Of course we are talking about elements that are not developed sufficiently yet. Elements that may indeed have been nurtured in liberal or apolitical contexts often functionally connected to the standard economic orthodoxy. However, the support of their further development, their gradual absorption in an alternative, coherent paradigm governed by a different logic and values, and finally their functional articulation in alternative patterns of performing the basic functions of our societies is just a short description of the duty of any left that wishes to take up a clear, systematic and strategically broadbased orientation.

Based on people’s capacities, proper alignment, connection and coordination it is possible to acquire the necessary power to at least be in a position to assume the basic functions if needed. We can do this by ‘extracting’ the embodied capacities of the people and putting them into use for the liberation of society.

For those who are frankly skeptical of the possibility of laying the groundwork for such a process, let’s see the potential in the stark case of Greece.

SYRIZA at its peak had approximately 35,000 members, the various solidarity networks included thousands of people and from experience we know that plenty of people were available to help SYRIZA with their expertise if there had been suitable processes to ‘extract’ their embodied capacities in an efficient way (which was not the case). Furthermore, massive unemployment provides us with huge numbers of people who would be willing to participate in networks of a different nature as long as we can build and expand processes of this kind in a systematic way. So, it is possible to pursue such a path as long as we apply the proper methodological and organizational principles in our way of doing politics.

In the worst case scenario, we will achieve some degree of resilience; people will be more empowered to defend themselves and hold their ground. In the best case, we will be able to regain the hegemony needed: people could mobilize positively, creatively and massively, even decisively to reclaim their autonomy.

Redesign the ‘Operating System’ of the Left

We know that the popular power once inscribed in various democratic institutions is exhausted. We do not have enough power to make the elites accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions. More of the same won’t do it. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; we need to reshape the ground. And to do that we have to expand the solution space by shifting priorities: from political representation to setting up an autonomous network of production of economic and social power (NESP).

We must modify the balance between representing people’s beliefs and demands and coordinating, facilitating, connecting, supporting and nurturing people’s actions. Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a toxic anti-democratic European political environment designed to be intolerant to people’s needs, we must contribute heavily to the formation of a strong ‘backbone’ for resilient and dynamic networks of social economy and co-operative productive activities, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, democratically functioning digital communities, community control over functions such as infrastructure facilities, energy systems and distribution networks. These are ways of gaining the degree of autonomy necessary to defy the control of elites over the basic functions of our society.

It is not only in Greece that there is a growing exclusion of people from having a job or a bank account, having a ‘normal life’. Modern society in general is in decline. From history we know that societies in decline tend to react in order to survive. It is up to us to grasp this and start building networks that can perform basic social functions in a different way – one that is democratic, decentralized and based on the liberation of people’s capacities. First, this would allow people who are being excluded today to survive. Second, this could begin a transition toward a better and more mature society. And last but not least, there are no empty spaces in history, so if we do not do this, the nationalists and the fascists – with their own militarized ways of performing these basic functions – may step in to conclude the decline.

Shifting the Battlefield

Our opponents have already spotted the shifting nature of the battlefield and have moved to new unclassified ways of organizing and acting. They develop new kinds of institutions (a Greek example www.corallia.org) compatible with the emerging environment of fast flows of information, digital frameworks of action and production etc. They also explore new methods and models; for example, “open innovation” models have emerged in the last few years to enable the R&D departments of big multinational companies to cope with the current distributed nature of knowledge and expertise that exceeds past means of control and usurpation of human intellectual creativity and innovation.

We have to create new popular power if we want to bring about substantial change or make ourselves resilient instead of just handling the remaining, seriously depleted if not already exhausted popular power inscribed in the traditional institutions. The question is what does it look like to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing traditional democratic functioning – to restore it by newly transforming it? In other words, what are the modifications needed in our political practice for the constitution and expansion of NESPs?

These modifications may be classified in three categories: political imagination, methodology and organizing principles. From my experience, the very same people who energetically claim that we need to be more innovative, better adapted and more efficient, when they actually do politics, reproduce priorities, mental pictures, methods and organizational habits that they already know are insufficient or inadequate. There are ingrained norms in terms of methodological guidelines that decisively shape the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. In the same vein, we believe in and fight for the promotion of the logic of cooperation and democracy against the logic of competition, but in practice our organizations suffer severely in terms of cooperation and democracy on the operational/organizational level. We need to recognize these blind spots and set up a process of identifying best practices, methods and regulations – both from the experience of our collectivities and from expertise in management, leadership, organizational complexity and network systems theory etc. – in order to operationally upgrade our forces.

Furthermore, our actions and initiatives are not properly connected up, but fragmented and isolated, destined to face the same difficulties again and again. We need to upgrade our operational capacities through appropriate nodes of connection, facilitating smooth flows of know-how and information, transferring best practices, building databases and accumulating knowledge and expertise in an easily retrievable and useful way. Actually, this is the advantage of multinational and large corporations in general, in comparison to others: they have a vast social network and powerful databases that gives them the necessary tools to plan and pursue their goals while their smaller competitors seem in disarray in a global environment of rapid changes. We need these qualities if we want to be really useful today.

What About Political Representation?

The function of political representation is a fundamental one in complex societies. It’s the function that political parties mostly perform and that shapes everyday thinking regarding what ‘politics’ is about. The task here is not to revive neglected aspects of politics – like building popular power – or to reinvent collective and individual qualities; the aim is to explore novel ways of performing the function of political representation in order to upgrade significantly the political leverage of the people.

Of course, building popular power will also invigorate and possibly transform the institutional framework, giving substantial meaning back to political representation. But, the expansion of a network of the sort we are discussing here and the changes it could generate at various levels of the social configuration must be reflected on the function of political representation itself. We need to evaluate and explore concepts like the ‘commons’. Advancing a project to shape political representation as ‘commons’ could give us valuable insights into new ways of performing vital functions that transcend the traditional, institutional framework of representative democracy.

Democratizing the State?

The left talks too much about the democratic transformation of the state. In practice, the driving concept is the restoration of state functions as they were before the neoliberal transformation. But the expansion of a network of economic and social power under people’s control could unlock our imagination toward more advanced and better targeted reforms of state institutions. In theory this is an old idea: the transformation of the state is a complementary move to the self-organized collectivities of the people outside it, driven by these forms of self-governance.

Actually, this is exactly what our opponents did consistently and persistently during the last decades: they were designing and implementing reforms in various levels of state institutions based on the methods, the criteria and the functioning of their own ‘social agents‘, namely the corporations and their own understanding of the nature of public space, namely the market. This is exactly the ‘mechanics’ of transformation that various intellectuals and leaders of the left described in detail a long time ago. Perhaps, by shifting our priorities we will be able to revive old but useful ideas that have been forgotten in practice.

Mind the Gap

The ‘SYRIZA experience‘ will be worthless if we do not resist the temptation to replace one mistake with another. The failure of SYRIZA – the failure of focusing solely on traditional electoral politics to radically change the dominant neoliberal framework – creates favorable conditions for notions like ‘self-referential alternativism‘ and ‘vanguard isolationism‘ to emerge and preoccupy the minds and hearts of those who are willing to continue fighting.

But choices like these just repeat what SYRIZA did, justifying fully the threat of our opponents: either you will be marginal or you will become like us! The existential threats and crucial questions regarding their future that our societies face today have nothing to do with a strategy of building ‘arcs‘ that aim to safeguard the ‘Left‘ or any other identity.

Entering the ominous battlefield of the twenty-first century, the left will either be relevant and useful for the defense of human societies, or it will be obsolete.

Dr Andreas Karitzis is a former SYRIZA member and former member of its Central Committee and Political Secretariat. He is a founding member of the “Hub” for social economy, empowerment and innovation. He blogs at karitzis.wordpress.com.

In the weeks leading up to the agreed upon cessation-of-hostilities (CoH) agreement between the US and Russia, it was John Kerry’s diplomacy that was instrumental in “downgrading” the truce from a more forceful and legally binding ‘ceasefire’ agreement to the less intensive ‘cessation-of-hostilities’ now taking effect.

As described by Kerry:

“So, a ceasefire has a great many legal prerogatives and requirements. A cessation of hostilities does not. A ceasefire in the minds of many of the participants in this particular moment connotes something far more permanent and far more reflective of sort of an end of conflict, if you will. And it is distinctly not that. This is a pause dependent on the process going forward.”

So why the insistence on non-permanence? Especially if, as Kerry says, the ultimate objective is to “obtain a durable, long-term ceasefire” at some point in time?

According to the 29-year career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, India’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey M. K. Bhadrakumar, it is plainly because

“the Russian military operations have met with devastating success lately in strengthening the Syrian regime and scattering the Syrian rebel groups,” leading “the US and its regional allies” to “stare at defeat.” Therefore, they “forthwith need an end to the Russian operations so that they can think up a Plan B. The Geneva talks will not have the desired outcome of President Bashar Al-Assad’s ouster unless the tide of war is reversed.” Therefore, “a cessation of hostilities in Syria is urgently needed.”(1)

Judging by the fact that top US officials began announcing that Russia would break the deal immediately after it was agreed upon while calling for further measures to “inflict real pain on the Russians”, Bhadrakumar’s assessment that a pause, and not a permanent halt, was sought in order to regroup and eventually reverse the tide of war seems to be quite apt. As well there has been an almost ubiquitous media campaign in the US to prime the public for accusations of a Russian infraction, from which a breakdown of the deal would follow; the narrative portrayed is filled with “doubts” and “worries” and “statements from US officials” about how Russia isn’t serious and will likely break the agreement.

Furthermore, outwardly Russia is much more optimistic and invested in the deal, President Putin hopefully promoting it while engaging in a blitz of diplomacy to support it, while on the other hand the US has been less vocal and much quicker to doubt its outcomes.

However, this downgrading from a ‘ceasefire’ to a ‘cessation of hostilities’ actually violates past agreements.

In UN Security Council Resolution 2254, in which it was articulated that member states be committed to the “sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic,” while calling on them to suppress ISIS, al-Nusra, and “all other individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities associated with Al Qaeda or ISIL”, it was also agreed upon that the Security Council “expresses its support for a nationwide ceasefire in Syria.” (emphasis added)

Given the about-face, Lavrov was visibly agitated, stating that “Resolution 2254 talks about the ceasefire only. This term is not liked by some members of the International Syria Support Group. What I’m referring to is how something that has been agreed upon should be implemented rather than try to remake the consensus that has been achieved in order to get some unilateral advantages.”

The “unilateral advantages” likely are in reference to the pause-and-regroup strategy Bhadrakumar previously articulated.

Despite this Russia agreed to the downgraded CoH, however, in the week leading up to the agreement there was a major hurdle to overcome, namely whether al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, would be protected as a party to the truce.

Long has there been a tenant of US propaganda which claims that a sort of “third force” of “moderate opposition fighters” exists, separate and distinct from the extremists and al-Qaeda affiliates. Yet when push came to shove the main stumbling-block in the way of the CoH was the oppositions demand that any truce be “conditional on the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front no longer being targeted.” Sources close to the talks would tell Reuters that this insistence was the main “elephant in the room” preventing a settlement.

Even more telling is the fact that this opposition demand only came after the US had insisted upon it. Indeed, while relentlessly pushing the “moderate rebel” narrative it was official US policy to push for the protection of al-Qaeda.

According to The Washington Post: “Russia was said to have rejected a U.S. proposal to leave Jabhat al-Nusra off-limits to bombing as part of a cease-fire, at least temporarily, until the groups can be sorted out.” (emphasis added)

Nusra is the Rebels

Responding to arguments posited that al-Nusra should be included in the truce, given that they operate in areas where other rebels are and thus Russia can use this as an excuse to bomb them, Max Abrahms, Professor at Northeastern University and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, explains that these recent developments show that Nusra and the other rebels are one in the same.

“If you’re pro-rebel in Syria, you’re pro-al Qaeda in Syria,” Abrahms writes. “The rebels are now begging for Russia to stop bombing their al-Qaeda partner.”

Indeed, it was the “moderate” US-backed FSA factions that were the biggest advocates of their al-Qaeda partners being included in the truce.

Major Ammar al-Wawi, Secretary General of the Free Syrian Army and head of the FSA’s al-Ababil Brigade in Aleppo, said that al-Nusra was the FSA’s “partner”, and that al-Qaeda was an ally of most of the groups brought together by Saudi Arabia underneath the Higher Negotiation Committee (HNC) banner.

Nusra has fighters on the ground with rebel brigades in most of Syria and is a partner in the fighting with most of the brigades that attended the Riyadh conference.

And therefore, while the ceasefire is good in principle, it is not good if it does not include al-Nusra, because “if the ceasefire excludes Jabhat a-Nusra, then this means that the killing of civilians will continue since Nusra’s forces are among civilians.” Al-Wawi seems to forget that the reason Nusra is a terrorist organization is specifically because of its indiscriminate attacks and disregard for civilian lives.

According to the spokesman for Alwiyat al-Furqan, one of the largest FSA factions operating under the Southern Front umbrella, the FSA “will not accept a truce that excludes Jabhat al-Nusra.” The spokesman later goes on to call Nusra “honorable”, along with the equally honorable Salafi-Jihadists groups Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam.

Ahrar, it should be noted, only presents itself as being different from al-Qaeda, in actuality it is not, it is a Salafi-Jihadi group which espouses a reactionary andapocalyptic Islamist ideology that has been complicit in sectarian mass murders of Alawites throughout Syria. On the other hand, Jaish al-Islam, in the words of their former leader, regards al-Nusra as their “brothers” whom they “praise” and “fight alongside.” Jaish al-Islam as well is infamous for parading caged civilians throughout warzones, using them as human shields. The current leader of the group, Mohammed Alloush, was named as the chief negotiator to represent the rebel opposition in talks with the UN.

Yet, according to the FSA, “If today we agreed to exclude Jabhat a-Nusra, then tomorrow we would agree to exclude Ahrar a-Sham, then Jaish al-Islam and so on for every honorable faction. We will not allow the threat of being classified as a terrorist organization to compromise the fundamentals of the revolution for which the Syrian people rose up and for which we have sacrificed and bled.”

One wonders, if the exclusion of al-Qaeda from the ceasefire is tantamount to “compromising the revolution”, what would choosing al-Qaeda as partners be called?

Muhammad a-Sheikh, spokesman for an FSA faction in Latakia, as well thanked Nusra for its “role in trying to lessen the pain inflicted on the Syrian people”, of all things.(2)

Yet all of this gets recycled within the US media as al-Nusra merely being “intermingled with moderate rebel groups”, as the Washington Post puts it. While the narrative purports that the FSA consists of “moderates” reluctantly forced to endure an al-Qaeda alliance for military expediency, in reality much of FSA conduct throughout the war has not been much different from that of the recognized extremists.

In the case of Aleppo, while one man describes how al-Nusra beheaded one of his brother-in-laws, ripped the other to pieces between an electricity poll and a moving car, and kidnapped the other, another man describes how “Free Syrian Army fighters burned down their house – leaving one daughter with terrible burns” after the man refused to join them. He said they attempted to abduct one of his daughters, but were unsuccessful as neighbors intervened.

Another Aleppo resident writes that “Turkish-Saudi backed ‘moderate rebels’ showered the residential neighborhoods of Aleppo with unguided rockets and gas jars.”

Indeed, FSA groups were so brutal at times that these “moderates” were feared even more than other recognized extremists.

“Pilloried in the West for their sectarian ferocity… jihadists were often welcomed by local people for restoring law and order after the looting and banditry of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army,” writes Patrick Cockburn, the leading Western journalist in the region.(3)

For people paying close attention this is unfortunately not that surprising.

According to a recent poll conducted by ORB, it was found that most Syrians more or less hold both ISIS and the FSA in equal disdain, 9% saying the FSA represents the Syrian people while 4% saying that ISIS does. The similarity in opinion is reflective of the similarity in conduct.

Jihadi ‘Wal-Mart’

The not-so-popular FSA groups are routinely described as a separate and distinct entity apart from al-Nusra and ISIS, yet in actuality the lines between the groups have always been extremely porous.

“Due to porous links between some Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels, other Islamist groups like al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, and ISIS, there have been prolific weapons transfers from ‘moderate’ to Islamist militant groups,” writes Nafeez Ahmed, Britain’s leading international security scholar.

These links were so extreme that “German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, who spent 10 days inside the Islamic State, reported last year that ISIS is being “indirectly” armed by the west: “They buy the weapons that we give to the Free Syrian Army, so they get western weapons – they get French weapons… I saw German weapons, I saw American weapons.”

Recently the BBC’s Peter Oborne conducted an investigation into these claims and came across evidence that the “moderate” FSA were in essence being utilized as a conduit through which Western supplies were funneled to extremists.

Oborne spoke to a lawyer who represents Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish national who went to join the rebel ranks in 2012 and was subsequently arrested for terrorist offenses. Based on her clients own first-hand observations while embedded with the rebels, trucks referred to as NATO trucks were observed coming in from Turkey, which would then be unloaded by the FSA and the arms then distributed quite generally without any specificity of the exact recipient. The weapons would be distributed “to whoever was involved in particular battles.”

Similarly, in 2014 US-backed Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF) commander Jamal Maarouf admitted that his US-handlers had instructed him to send weapons to al-Qaeda. “If the people who support us tell us to send weapons to another group, we send them. They asked us a month ago to send weapons to [Islamist fighters in] Yabroud so we sent a lot of weapons there.”

Battlefield necessity was dictating the weapons recipients, not humanitarian concern for victims of terrorism.

Eventually charges brought against Mr. Gildo were dropped. The reason was because he planned to argue that he had fought on the same side the UK government was supporting As it was explained before the court, if it is the case that the government “was actively involved in supporting armed resistance to the Assad regime at a time when the defendant was present in Syria and himself participating in such resistance it would be unconscionable”, indeed an “affront to justice”, “to allow the prosecution to continue.”

In a similar case a man named Moazzam Begg was arrested in the UK under terrorism charges after meeting with Ahrar al-Sham. However, his case too was dropped, the courts understanding that if he was guilty of supporting terrorism than so was the British state. “I was very disappointed that the trail didn’t go through,” Begg said. “I believe I would have won… what I was doing… was completely in line with British policy at the time.”

Career MI6 agent and former British diplomat Alastair Crooke extrapolates further on this phenomena of the West’s principle allies playing such a crucial role in arming the jihadis.

“The West does not actually hand the weapons to al-Qaeda, let alone ISIS,” he said, “but the system that they have constructed leads precisely to that end. The weapons conduit that the West directly has been giving to groups such as the Syrian Free Army (FSA), have been understood to be a sort of ‘Wal Mart’ from which the more radical groups would be able to take their weapons and pursue the jihad.” This constitutes a sort of ‘supermarket’ where rebels can go and receive weapons, the weapons always migrating “along the line to the more radical elements.” The idea was to “use jihadists to weaken the government in Damascus and to drive it to its knees to the negotiating table.” Exactly the same kind of policy used in Afghanistan during the 1980s, when conduits such as the Pakistani ISI were used to funnel weapons to the mujahedeen.

Yet these Western weapons were not just going to al-Qaeda and Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS too was shopping at the “moderate” “supermarket.”

In his book “The Rise of Islamic State”, Patrick Cockburn writes,

“An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.”(4) (emphasis added)

The result of all of this was a deep alliance between the US-backed “moderates” and al-Qaeda, as well as a rebel opposition dominated by ISIS and al-Nusra.

Nusra’s FSA

Recently a leader of the Nusra group appeared in a video presenting an FSA commander with a gift while saying that there is no difference between the FSA, Ahrar al-Sham, and al-Qaeda. “They are all one,” he explains. The Nusra field commander goes on to thank the FSA for supplying Nusra with US-made TOW anti-tank missiles, which were given to the FSA directly, of course, from the CIA.

A month prior to these revelations reports started to surface about the unfolding situation in “rebel-held” Idlib. Despite the repressive dress codes and savage Islamist laws it became apparent that the FSA was only operating under the authority of the more powerful al-Qaeda rebels.

Jenan Moussa, a journalist for the UAE based Al Aan TV channel who recently had visited the area, reported that Nusra allows the FSA to operate in Hama and Idlib because the FSA groups there get TOW missiles from the West. The reason they are allowed to operate is that the “FSA uses these TOW in support of Nusra.”

Investigating the situation further, veteran journalist Gareth Porter concludes from a range of sources that in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo every rebel organization is in fact part of a military structure controlled and dominated by al-Nusra.

“All of these rebel groups fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities with it,” Porter writes.

In the case of the rebel capture of Idlib, “Although some U.S.-supported groups participated in the campaign in March and April 2015, the “operations room” planning the campaign was run by Al Qaeda and its close ally Ahrar al Sham.” As well, before the Idlib campaign, “Nusra had forced another U.S.-supported group, Harakat Hazm, to disband and took all of its TOW anti-tank missiles.”

Clearly al-Nusra was subordinating the “moderates.”

The reality began to emerge in December of 2014 when US-backed rebels, supplied with TOW missiles, teamed up with Nusra and fought under their command in order to capture the Wadi al-Deif base. Al Qaeda was “exploiting the Obama administration’s desire to have its own Syrian Army as an instrument for influencing the course of the war.”

Andrew Cockburn reports that “A few months before the Idlib offensive, a member of one CIA-backed group had explained the true nature of its relationship to the Al Qaeda franchise. Nusra, he told the New York Times, allowed militias vetted by the United States to appear independent, so that they would continue to receive American supplies.”

“In other words,” Porter writes, “Nusra was playing Washington,” while Washington was “evidently a willing dupe.”

This all comes down to the fact that the savage and brutal al-Qaeda fighters were proving to be militarily effective, leaving a trail of torture and atrocities, and battlefield successes, in their wake.

Explaining the mindset, Ed Husain, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that the influx of Al-Qaeda and various jihadis “brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results.”

Because of this, Porter explains, “instead of breaking with the deception that the CIA’s hand-picked clients were independent of Nusra, the Obama administration continued to cling to it.” The United States basing its policy on the “moderates” was “necessary to provide a political fig leaf for the covert and indirect U.S. reliance on Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise’s military success.”

Ever since the Russian intervention began, the US has continued to embrace this deceptive narrative, claiming that Russia is targeting the “moderate” opposition. This narrative, and the publics belief in its validity, “had become a necessary shield for the United States to continue playing a political-diplomatic game in Syria.”

Yet, as Patrick Cockburn has reported for quite some time, “The armed opposition to President Assad is dominated by Isis, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the ideologically similar Ahrar al-Sham.” Of the smaller groups the CIA openly supports, they “only operate under license from the extreme jihadists.”

Several rebel groups, 5 of which belong to the FSA, have recently united under the leadership of the former emir of the al-Qaeda-linked Ahrar al-Sham. A longtime al-Qaeda member who sits on al-Nusra’s elite council explained that “The Free Syrian Army groups said they were ready for anything according to the Islamic sharia and that we are delegated to apply the rulings of the sharia on them”, essentially meaning that the FSA had subordinated themselves to al-Qaeda.

It has been further revealed that all of the Syrian groups operative in Aleppo had recently declared Ba’yaa (loyalty) to the Ahrar al-Sham emir Abu Jaber.

Ba’yaa, it should be noted, means total loyalty and submission, much like what follows from pledging loyalty to ISIS.

Official Policy

At least by as far back as August of 2012, the best US intelligence assessments were reporting that the jihadists and extremists were controlling and steering the course of the opposition. Then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Michael T. Flynn, would confirm the credibility of these reports, saying that “the intelligence was very clear” and that it wasn’t the case that the administration was just turning a blind eye to these events but instead that the policies were the result of a “willful decision.”

Despite all of this, US officials still continue to maintain that “Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria, launched last fall, has infuriated the CIA in particular because the strikes have aggressively targeted relatively moderate rebels it has backed with military supplies, including antitank missiles.”

However, according to the CIA and the intelligence communities own data, this is false.

Back in October of 2012, according to classified US intelligence assessments, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar”, which wereorganized by the CIA, were
“going to hard-line Islamic jihadists.”

A year earlier, immediately after the fall of Gaddafi in October of 2011, the CIA began organizing a “rat line” from Libya to Syria. Weapons from the former Libyan stockpiles were shipped from Benghazi to Syria and into the hands of the Syrian rebels. According to information obtained by Seymour Hersh, “Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.”

In a highly classified 2013 assessment put together by the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), an “all-source” appraisal which draws on information from signals, satellite, and human intelligence, it was concluded that the US program to arm the rebels quickly turned into a logistical operation for the entire opposition, including al-Nusra and ISIS. The so-called moderates had evaporated, “there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad,” and “the US was arming extremists.”

DIA chief Michael Flynn confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of warnings to the civilian administration between 2012 and 2014 saying that the jihadists were in control of the opposition.

“If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,” Flynn said.

Yet, as Flynn stated previously, it was a “willful decision” for the administration “to do what they’re doing.”

By summer of 2013, Seymour Hersh reported that “although many in the American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists,” still “the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming.”

According to a JCS advisor, despite heavy Pentagon objections there was simply “no way to stop the arms shipments that had been authorised by the president.”

“I felt that they did not want to hear the truth,” Flynn said.

So what Russia is bombing in actuality is an al-Qaeda, extremist dominated opposition embedded with CIA-backed rebels operating under their control. The not-so-moderates only operate under license from, and in support of, the Salafi jihadists, openly expressing their solidarity with them, labelling them as “brothers”, and begging the UN to protect them. Concurrently the US and its allies continue to support the terrorist-dominated insurgency, US officials openly planning to expand their support to al-Qaeda-laced rebels in order to “inflict pain on the Russians”, all while Turkey and Saudi Arabia openly support al-Qaeda. All of this occurring because of the United States reliance upon “Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise’s military successes” and their “deadly results”, in order to further the policy of using “jihadists to weaken the government in Damascus” and to “drive it to its knees at the negotiating table.”

The function of the “moderates” in essence being the logistical and public relations front for the “not-so-moderate” al-Qaeda units winning the battles.

Speaking at Harvard University, Vice President Biden infamously and candidly summarized what had been going on, saying that it was our allies who were “so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war,” that they “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

When asked why the United States was powerless to stop nations like Qatar from engaging in this kind of behavior, “a former adviser to one of the Gulf States replied softly: “They didn’t want to.”

So it should be no wonder why the US tried to push through a provision including al-Nusra in the current ceasefire agreement, nor why they would seek to protect their most viable ally in pursuance of their Syria policy.

It should be no wonder that it has been, and continues to be, official US policy to protect al-Qaeda.

Notes:

1.) For further analysis, see Moon of Alabama, February 20, 2016, “U.S. Ignores Own UNSC Resolution – Tells Russia “Stop Bombing Al-Qaeda!”http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/02/us-ignores-own-unsc-resolution-tells-russia-stop-bombing-al-qaeda.html.

2.) Syria Direct, “Five rebel spokesmen, commanders react to ‘cessation of hostilities’ to take effect Saturday.” February 25, 2016.http://syriadirect.org/news/five-rebel-spokesmen-commanders-react-to-cessation-of-hostilities-to-take-effect-Saturday/#.Vs-kDMO3y9U.twitter.

3.) Cockburn, Patrick. “Jihadists Hijack the Syria Uprising.” The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (Brooklyn, NY, 2015), pg. 84-5. Print.

4.) Cockburn, Patrick, “The Rise of ISIS”, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (Brooklyn, NY, 2015), pg. 3. Print.

Every year, it’s the same beat-up story. The pro-Israel Zionist lobby AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) invites  to its annual convention and all the top knobs in Washington show up.

This year, President Obama had more important things to do and made a historical visit to Cuba. Eighty-eight years ago, the last sitting US President, Calvin Coolidge, paid a visit to this island nation that is still embargoed by the US because it didn’t give way to US pressure.

This year, it was the turn of the American presidential candidates to go on the AIPAC pilgrimage, except for Bernie Sanders. Trump, Clinton, Cruz and Kasich were all thrilled to bits about Israel. They outbid each other in their subservience to Israel. Sanders, the only Jew in the race, did not show up and scathingly criticized the Israeli government for its occupation and  its “disproportionate responses to being attacked”. He criticized the bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps in the 2014 war with Hamas and demanded an end of the blockade on Gaza. He, at least, was honest and did not pay rhetorical lip service to an occupation regime that apparently shares the same values as the US.

Donald Trump, the front-runner of the Republican Party, welcomed without any marked enthusiasm by 18 000 Israel fans, turned to upstage Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, not to speak of John Kasich. Trump got standing ovations even when he castigated Hillary Clinton “as a total disaster, by the way”. The audience was thrilled by Trump when he called US President Barack Obama “the worst thing that ever happened to Israel”. Obama and Clinton “treated Israel very badly”.

Trump also wants to cancel the Iran deal. Although Trump’s appearance lasted only 25 minutes, he won the audience over by his simple pro-Israel rhetoric. The following statement opened the hearts of the crowd; “I speak to you today as a lifelong supporter and true friend of Israel. I’m a newcomer to politics but not to backing the Jewish state.” Suddenly, all his racist and xenophobic ramblings seemed forgotten, although the leadership of AIPAC had a sore head about Trump’s appearance.

Hillary Clinton spoke before Trump and she did everything to outdo him by not only lambasting him but also by calling to elevate the US-Israel alliance to “the next level”. That she wants to see Benyamin Netanyahu right away after becoming President does not speak in her favor. She supports a memorandum that would boost military aid to Israel. She reiterated her tough stance on Iran, calling for sanctioning any Iranian violation of the nuclear deal not excluding military force. Years ago, Clinton threatened Iran with total annihilation if the country would attack Israel. No Iranian leader has ever called for an attack on Israel. She appealed to the emotions by mentioning the wave of stabbings by Palestinians and blamed the Palestinian leadership for inciting violence, celebrating terrorists and rewarding the families of murderers. She denounced again the BDS campaign.

Ted Cruz and John Kasich tried even to outdo Hillary Clinton. Cruz wants to rip-up the Iran deal and block federal funding to BDS supporters. Cruz announced not to be “neutral” but stand “unapologetically with Israel”. He wasn’t even ashamed of drawing an analogy between the nuclear agreement with Iran and the Munich Agreement of 1938. Before him, Netanyahu has also drawn such an absurd analogy.

Ohio’s governor, John Kasich, promised to defend Israel from an imagined Iranian nuclear threat, and said the US should suspend the deal. He also called for the US to recognize Jerusalem as the “eternal capital of Israel”.

From this adulation of the State of Israel, one might get the impression that the candidates are competing for the highest office in Israel and not in the US. It seems as if the presidential candidates do not care about their own country and the American people.

Three explosions killing  34 people. Some 200 people were injured, according to early reports.

Two detonations at Brussels Zaventem airport, one of them the police said was from a suicide bomber, the sign of a Muslim Jihadist – naturally. Witnesses also reported shooting and ‘yelling in Arabic’. First count dead toll resulted in 14 people killed at the airport. Another explosion in the metro station Maelbeek in the EU district, close to the heart of Brussels murdered 20 people and injured 73.

Another False Flag, a western fabricated terror attack? 

Soon the police might find one of those conveniently lost passports or IDs, from Syria, Iraq or Yemen, or another one of those terror-spreading countries the west is trying hard to bring under control?  All to justify in Europe more police state, more military clampdown – the educated western people – or western educated people (you figure out the difference) –  will not only go for it, they will ask for it. Fear is the name of the game.

In the meantime, the Belgian government has ordered a clamp-down on police and journalists reporting on the case. [No mention in the media of the State sponsors of terrorism including the role of Turkey and Saudi Arabia in supporting the Islamic State (ISIS-Daesh) in liaison with Washington and NATO headquarters in Brussels.]

The public must be kept in the dark, ‘to facilitate the investigation;’ lest contradictory reports, as there usually are in false flag operations, may plant doubt in people’s minds. That must by all means be prevented.

Surprisingly, Sputnik news reports without questioning that Daesh / IS has already claimed responsibility for the blasts – and that the attack came just ‘days after Salah Abdeslam, the [alleged] mastermind behind the November Paris Attacks, was arrested in Belgium’. Could it not be a constructed coincidence?

A make-believe? A further dulling of the public’s minds? – How come, official government statements are taken for truth without further research or investigation, even by the so-called progressive media?

Did anybody see and analyze the Daesh claim?

– Did anybody look into the guilt of Salah Abdeslam?

– And if he is indeed guilty, who was behind him, who ordered him?

– We need independent sources to analyze these horrendous allegations that people without questioning believe.The traditional CIA-FBI and local security forces are not reliable; they work on orders; they have their screenplays mapped out. Of course the Government would not let anybody independent access their ‘files’, the documentation of the facts and research the crime. The people must request independent access to these data.

France’s President Hollande, even using the pretext of last year’s two ‘terror attacks’ in Paris, has so far been unable to gather enough votes in Parliament to enshrine the permanent State of Emergency in the French Constitution.

Is this a benign sign of waking up? After this Brussels attack, it may be a walk in the park, a no-brainer, a given – to push this constitutional amendment through the French legislators; not even ‘push’, it will likely just ‘glide’ through. No doubt in Belgium too.

This Brussels horror attack is a double-whammy for the instigators. It may convince people becoming increasingly more doubtful, and – Brussels being the headquarters of the EU – it may give the ultra-ultra neolibs of the EU Parliament and EU Commission an extra boost. Interesting – how two neoliberal and neo-colonial neighbors, pals in extracting their fortunes in West Africa, can cooperate when it goes to achieving more evil objectives.

People are being killed. There is no mercy. Even ‘their own’. The Evil empire delivered already multiple examples. And they keep coming, as we watch in awe.  There are no scruples for killing for a specific objective: global dominance over resources, people — and money-money-money.

Fear is the name of the game. People blinded and in the midst of fear – under the shock, accept any doctrine – more police protection, ‘we give you our civil rights and remaining ‘freedom’, but please take care of us.’ Military regimes will be installed at the demand of the people.

Where and what horror will be next?  Germany – Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt – or rather a lesser known place needing attention?

To what are German leaders amenable to please the Masters in Washington? – Or else, Vienna and Geneva may be candidates, the homes of the UN and UN agency headquarters. Geneva, hosting currently the ‘Syrian Peace Talks’ might be particularly attractive for the ‘Jihadists’. It would give Washington and their vassals more arguments to invade Syria, Iraq, Yemen, to fight the very evil people they have created, trained, funded and armed – and to bomb what’s left of these countries into oblivion.

Fortunately, there is Putin and Russia. Russian people have time and again brought sacrifices to save humanity, intervening for peace, far beyond protecting their own borders. A recent example is Syria; seventy years ago the Soviet army crushed Hitler, ending WWII on the Continent.

This low-horizon high-caliber world elite keeps using the same pattern of aggression and the same lie-propaganda justification for their aggressions – and the people keep falling into the same trap. Will there be no stopping until the monster itself is stopped? Only a people’s revolution can do that. We are far from it. Consumerism and oblivion for comfort has made the western world brain-dead, literally.

Does humanity need a bloodbath to wake up – or is there hope that truth will reach the conscience of individuals who then bond in expanding solidarity – in such a way that policemen and women, as well as soldiers will start recognizing that they are used by this elusive group of elitists, the cream of the crop of humankind, the chief manipulators of the universe, as mere cannon fodder, or at best, as slaves to defend their obscene wealth and power?

Will they eventually wake up to the fact that they are part of ‘Us, the People’ – the 99.99% whom they are ordered to crush and crush again, whenever they, the movers and shakers behind the Empire of Chaos feel a looming danger? When that happens large scale across the globe, and in rare and isolated cases it did, hope for change towards a peaceful cohabitation of nations and people may be on the horizon.

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

Friday marks the anniversary of the Parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. Over the course of three centuries, Britain became the largest slaving nation in the world and the slave trade grew to become Britain’s largest and most profitable industry. Britain generated an estimated equivalent of four trillion pounds on the unpaid labour of slaves.

Britain owes its very existence as a first world nation to the African slave trade. Great Britain’s economic way of life was formed by slavery: about it revolved, and on it depended, most of Britain’s other industries.

Fathers became ostentatiously wealthy constructing slave ships or owning huge plantations in the Caribbean; when they died, their sons inherited that wealth and chartered banks that have endured to this day such as Barclays Bank, they built factories, British railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments. In due course, they donated their slave profits to build libraries, museums, botanical gardens, and British universities.

Slavery did not only build Britain, it civilized her.

At the height of the British Empire, London was the cultural and economic capital of the world, and today London remains one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential cities.

However, before the British slave trade began in the 1500s, over 90 percent of medieval London’s population was illiterate and the city had largely forgotten the technical advances of the Romans some 900 hundred years before. There were no street lamps or paved streets in London and garbage and human waste were simply thrown into the streets.

Between 1348 and 1665, there were 16 outbreaks of the plague in London, at times killing almost half of the city’s inhabitants. Most houses were made of wood, mud and dung. All of this occurred at a time when the great empires of the world were Black African empires, and the educational and cultural centers of the world were predominately African.

Whilst Europe was experiencing its Dark Age, which was a long period of intellectual, economic and cultural backwardness, Africans were experiencing an almost continent-wide renaissance. The leading civilizations of this African rebirth were the Benin Empire, Kingdom of Ghana and the Mali Empires.

Between the early 1500s and the early 1800s, millions of slaves were kidnapped from Ghana, Mali and accross West Africa. By the mid-18th century, Britain was the biggest slaving nation, and Britain’s major ports, cities and canals were built on invested slave money.

Beyond any doubt it was the slave trade that raised London from an uncivilized medieval city to be the richest and most prosperous city in the world.

Slavery was integral to Great Britain’s economy from the Royal family to the Church of England on downwards. Britain’s slavers were defended before god by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and before parliament by politicians, like William Gladstone, himself the son of a wealthy plantation-owner.

In his famous 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, the Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams illustrates how profits from slavery “fertilised” many branches of London’s economy and spurred England’s industrial revolution.

The processing and distribution of produce such as tobacco, sugar and cotton produced on plantations resulted in massive investment in British quaysides, warehouses, factories, trading houses and banks. Banking is currently Britain’s biggest industry and apart from the Barclays Brothers, who were slave traders, we also know of Barings and HSBC, which can be traced back to slaver Thomas Leyland’s banking house. The Bank of England’s founding is also inextricably linked to slave profits. Sir Richard Neave, who was the director of the bank for half a century, was also the chairman of the plunderous Society of West India Merchants.

British historian Robert Blackburn calculates that in 1770, total investments in the domestic British economy stood at £4 million, (or about £500 million in today’s money). This investment included the building of roads and canals, of wharves and harbours, of all new equipment needed by farmers and manufacturers, and of all the new ships sold to merchants in a period of one year.

Around the same time, British slave-based plantation and commercial profits came to £3.8 million (or about £450 million in contemporary terms). Clearly, slave based profits were so significant that they literally bankrolled Britain’s development and ascent into a first world nation.

The modern civilized world owes its very existence to the most uncivilized institution of slavery. In fact, slavery is not a product of Western civilization; Western civilization is a product of slavery. By fuelling the industrial revolution and propelling the mercantile expansion of the British Empire, slavery built the foundations of modern British civilization.

Throughout the ages monuments have epitomized and defined civilizations. Slavery had a profound impact on the development of British architecture from the great many monuments and statues across London, which celebrate Britain’s deep involvement in transatlantic slavery to the construction of countless ostentatious country houses.

Famous London landmarks and areas are also deeply intertwined with slavery. For instance, Sir Hans Sloane, whose statue stands in Sloane Square, was a principle shareholder of the plunderous Royal Africa Company, whose sigil was an Elephant and Castle, which gave its name to an area in south London. Sloane was also the President of the Royal Society and founder of the British Museum.

Museums are a quintessential symbol of modern civilization. Prior to the era of British slavery, museums tended to be small and private, open only to the aristocracy of a given nation. During the height of British slavery in the 19th century, the modern museum as we know it began to take shape. With plunder streaming in from all corners of the British Empire, the modern museum was born. The British Museum was created largely as a repository for artifacts looted from Africa between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Arguably the greatest contribution that slavery made to British civilization was how slaves freed up time for British slave owners and their families to engage in social activities and sustained experiments that led to inventions that propelled the industrial revolution. For instance, slavery financed the experiments of James Watt, inventor of the first really efficient steam engine.

Many historians agree that slavery was also crucial in developing British democracy, since it allowed men greater time for public participation.

Slave ships were also the principle reason for Britain’s explosion in medical advances. British slave ships were essentially floating laboratories, offering medical researchers a chance to examine the course of various diseases in somewhat controlled, quarantined environments. British doctors and researchers gleaned priceless epidemiological information on a range of diseases including malaria, smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, dysentery, typhoid, and so on, from the bodies of dying and dead slaves. Conditions on slave ships were so bad that, in his 1789 speech opening the parliamentary debate on the slave trade William Wilberforce estimated that half of the slaves, or six million souls, transported never made it to their destination.

As Professor Eric Williams explains, Britain ultimately abolished slavery, not for moral reasons, but simply because abolition was now more profitable than continuing sugar plantations. A century of sugar cane raising had exhausted the soil of the islands, and the plantations had become unprofitable. It became more profitable for British slave owners to simply sell the slaves to the government than to continue operations.

In 1833 the British Government paid slave-owners the equivalent of £17 billion in compensation, or roughly 40 percent of the national budget. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s cousin Sir James Duff was one of many British slave owners who received his share of billions of pounds for having had the privilege of exploiting slaves to enrich himself. The slaves themselves received nothing by way of compensation.

The Caricom group of Caribbean nations has recently put pressure on David Cameron for Britain to formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations. Mr. Cameron’s recent response before the Jamaican Parliament was to refuse to apologize and to tell Jamaicans to simply “move on”.

According to one estimate by Harpers Magazine, slaves between 1619 and 1865, when slavery was ended performed 222,505,049 hours of forced labor. Compounded at interest and calculated in today’s currency, this adds up to trillions of dollars. In fact, more riches flowed to Britain from the slave economy of Jamaica than all of the original American thirteen colonies combined. It is little wonder why David Cameron is keen to ignore any discussion with Jamaica about fair reparations.

Every year representatives of the German Finance Ministry and representatives of European Holocaust survivors meet to discuss reparations.

So far, Germany has paid $89 billion in compensation to Jewish victims of Nazi crimes. The Jewish claim to reparations is clearly just and so too is the Caribbean’s claim to slavery reparations. So one wonders if Mr. Cameron would tell Jewish victims not to accept reparations money and to simply “move on” as he told Jamaicans?

The racial hypocrisy of the British government is clear: European Jews deserve billions in compensation but Africans deserve not even an apology, despite modern British capitalist civilization owing its very existence to slavery.

Nations must not be defined merely by what they decide to remember, but more importantly by what they choose to forget. During slavery, ordinary Britons may not have known the brutal subtleties of how sugar lumps arrived at their tables, but people today must not forget how the brutality of slavery not only built the prosperous Great Britain that we know today, but also how it civilized her.

Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University. Contact him on [email protected]

Brussels Airport 9news.com

A series of terror attacks hit Brussels on March 22. Two blasts rocked the departure hall of Brussels’ Zaventem Airport at about 8am local time reportedly killing at least 13 people, injuring 35. According to Belgian broadcaster VRT, a suicide bomber was responsible for one of the blasts.

Three suicide belts packed with explosives have been also found at the Brussels airport by police. A gunfire and Arabic shouts have been reported before explosions.

Transcript

A blast at the Maalbeek metro station followed the explosions in airport killing 10 and injuring 15 more. The Maalbeek station is located near a number of important EU buildings such as Berlaymont building, which houses the EU Commission and the Council of the European Union. Minutes after the blast at Maalbeek, explosions were reported to have taken place at Schuman and Arts-loi metro stations.

The security alert has been raised to the top — fourth — level throughout the country following the blasts. Public transport and airport in Brussels has been shot down. The French-Belgian border has also been closed, control has been increased at nuclear sites.

These events comes just four days after the capture of Salah Abdeslami n a police riot for playing a key role in the Paris attacks in November. On Monday, Belgian’s Foreign Minister, Didier Reynders, announced on a security forum that Abdeslami thought to have plotted more future attacks on Belgian soil. The official revealed that Abdeslami is linked with a wide terror network in Brussel. The Belgian authorities have found more than 30 people involved in the terrorist attacks in Paris, where 130 people were killed.

However, the obtained information hasn’t allowed the authorities to prevent attacks which highlight the willingness and capability of militants to conduct terror attacks in the EU. We remember much of the planning for the November attacks in Paris was also conducted in Belgium. A terror threat has become especially high in Europe because high number of terrorist arrived in the EU with refugees.

After Nuclear Deal, Wall Street Still “Wants Iranian Blood”

Leading up to U.S. President Obama’s visit to Cuba the private media in the United States made a lot of noise about Cuba’s human rights record.

Conservative and liberal pundits alike called for Obama to take the Cuban revolutionary government to task.

Human rights did, of course, come up but both Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro did not deliberate much on the issue, choosing instead to focus on the new relationship between their countries.

The most memorable moment on the question of human rights came not from Obama but rather when a CNN reporter Jim Acosta asked President Raul Castro about “political prisoners” in Cuba.

“Give me the list of political prisoners right now and I’ll release them. Give me the names If we have those political prisoners they will be released before tonight ends,” said Raul Castro in response.

When it comes to the question of human rights, however, it is important to begin by understanding that the United States and Cuba have vastly different conceptions of what constitutes human rights.

This difference was made clear by Raul Castro himself.

“We believe that civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights are indivisible, interdependent and universal. We cannot conceive a government does not defend and guarantee the right to health, education, social security, food and development, equal pay and the rights of children,” said President Raul Castro.

But even from the U.S. perspective, the human rights abuses occurring on Cuban soil are not being committed by the Cuban government but rather the U.S. government at their illegal detention center in Guantanamo Bay.

Previously, the Cuban leader said he was not going to accept double standards on the issue of human rights, however the CNN reporter failed to ask about human rights violations that have been documented by activists at the U.S.-run military prison in Cuba.

Last month, Obama presented a long-awaited plan to close the controversial prison the issue along with the lifting of more than 50 years of an economic blockade on the island nation is one of the main conditions that Raul Castro has set to fully restore relations with Washington.

The U.S. detention camp of Guantanamo entered its fifteenth year of operation this year, according to activists since it opened on January 11, 2002, 9 prisoners have died in the facility.

Prisoners at the infamous U.S.-run prison have asked authorities to halt the inhumane practice of force-feeding hunger strikers.

During his 2008 reelection campaign, Obama promised to close the prison citing the damage it causes to the U.S. reputation abroad. However, the president backed away from implementing his promise later on due to stiff opposition by the greater Republican majority in Congress.

Washington says the prisoners at the facility are terror suspects, but has not pressed charges against most of them in any court. Many detainees have gone on hunger strikes to protest their conditions at the prison, set up after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

A recent US Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearing considering the nominations of General Joseph Votel and Lieutenant General Raymond Thomas for command of US Central Command and US Special Operations Command respectively, exposed the absurdity of America’s war on the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS).

While the Syrian Arab Army backed by Russian airpower successfully cuts off entire armies of terrorists from their supplies abroad, while encircling and eradicating them within Syrian territory, the US appears instead to be attempting to stretch out ISIS’ existence while maintaining the illusion of fighting the terrorist organization for as long as possible.

During the hearing, several times US senators including US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) would credit US operations for the recent setbacks faced by ISIS, including pressure recently placed directly on Al Raqqa – the defacto capital of ISIS in eastern Syria.

In reality, all of these setbacks are instead a result of Syrian and Russian efforts to interdict supplies flowing into Syria primarily from NATO-member Turkey, US-ally Jordan, and back and forth from Iraq. Beyond allegedly high-profile targeted killings, little to nothing has been done by the US to actually degrade ISIS’ fighting capacity.

Russian warplanes have in particular, mercilessly bombed ISIS and Al Qaeda logistical networks to the point of drawing out from the geopolitical shadows their foreign sponsors, including Turkey which went as far as downing a Russian jet as it operated along the Syrian-Turkish border.

As Syrian and Russian forces choke off supplies crossing Syria’s borders bound for ISIS and Al Qaeda positions, the West and its regional partners have become increasingly desperate and transparent in their efforts to reverse what is the inevitable end of the conflict.

Senators and Generals Show No Interest in Stopping ISIS 

The SASC hearing was particularly telling, because while ISIS was regularly brought up, it was clear from listening to the senators and the two generals providing testimony, that the real goal was still overthrowing the Syrian government and rolling back the influence of Russia and Iran in order to maintain American hegemony in the region and around the world. ISIS is merely an excuse to remain in the region to continue pursuing these goals.

Despite US participation in the recent Syrian ceasefire and upcoming peace talks, both the senators and the generals talked about removing Syrian President Bashar al Assad, as well as the next iteration of America’s train and equip program for fighters being sent into Syria to perpetuate the violence.

And even as the entire committee plotted the overthrow of the Syrian government, they continuously acknowledged not only ISIS’ presence in the country, but its expansion into other nations, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya – three nations the US has destroyed – with Libya being the latest and regarded several times during the hearing as “ungovernable.”

Libya’s “ungovernable” present state was cited as the primary reason for ISIS’ “sudden” appearance in the North African nation. None of the senators nor the two generals, however, mentioned just how Libya became ungovernable in the first place – not even Senator McCain who literally walked, hand-in-hand, with the future rank and file of ISIS in Libya as they took over the country after the overthrow of the government in Tripoli.

The failure of the US military for 16 months to target and destroy ISIS’ oil infrastructure in Syria was also mentioned, though the rest of their logistical network in Syria or beyond, or their foreign sponsors, were never brought up.

What the hearing illustrated once again was that it is the US plowing the fields – turning nations into failed-states – and then sowing the seeds of perpetual chaos with heavily armed, well-funded, and well backed mercenary forces to transform entire regions of the world into divided, weak, and perpetually fighting, perpetually shifting conflict zones from which the West’s enemies can be removed, and regimes more to their liking can be installed.

In the one hour plus hearing, nothing resembling a tangible strategy for confronting and defeating ISIS was discussed.

Generals who have spent their lives in the military, from military families talked about the impotence of airstrikes alone in Syria to degrade ISIS’ fighting capacity – never once mentioning the fact that they have standing armies both in Turkey and Jordan more than capable of strangling completely ISIS’ logistical lifelines and preventing the torrent of foreign fighters repeatedly referenced during the hearing from reinforcing ISIS positions in Syria.

Instead of holding accountable US’ allies who are clearly underwriting ISIS’ continued and formidable fighting capacity as well as its expansion beyond Syria’s borders, several times the committee agreed to work even closer with these allies in what is clearly a disingenuous war on ISIS.

It is unlikely General Votel or Lieutenant General Thomas do not know how to identify the source of an enemy’s fighting capacity or how to effectively cut it off. Indeed, they know precisely how to defeat ISIS, but anyone can still watch the hearing – archived online on the US government’s own website for all to see – and understand that the goal is not to fight and defeat ISIS – it is to reorder the region in such a manner as to maintain US influence and protect US “interests” across it.

Fighting ISIS is but a pretext to remain involved in Syria, Iraq, and now Libya and Afghanistan. Both the senators of the committee and the two generals present all agreed that Nigeria, Somalia, and perhaps nations beyond would also see ISIS gaining footholds within their borders giving the US a free hand to pursue them in what they called “transregional” operations.

While nations like Russia and China are building economic relationships with the nations of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), giving them footholds and influence throughout it, the US seems to be predicating their continued presence in MENA upon addressing perpetual chaos.

However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this chaos they are “addressing,” is chaos of their own intentional creation. It is difficult to imagine that this sort of foreign policy is sustainable, and in a way, the committee acknowledged that too. When asked by the committee if they also believed that it looked like Russia was going to achieve its goals in Syria, both generals without hesitation agreed.

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

A newly-released Hilary Clinton email confirmed that the Obama administration has deliberately provoked the civil war in Syria as the “best way to help Israel.”

In an indication of her murderous and psychopathic nature, Clinton also wrote that it was the “right thing” to personally threaten Bashar Assad’s family with death.

In the email, released by Wikileaks, then Secretary of State Clinton says that the “best way to help Israel” is to “use force” in Syria to overthrow the government.

The document was one of many unclassified by the US Department of State under case number F-2014-20439, Doc No. C05794498, following the uproar over Clinton’s private email server kept at her house while she served as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.

Although the Wikileaks transcript dates the email as December 31, 2000, this is an error on their part, as the contents of the email (in particular the reference to May 2012 talks between Iran and the west over its nuclear program in Istanbul) show that the email was in fact sent on December 31, 2012.

The email makes it clear that it has been US policy from the very beginning to violently overthrow the Syrian government—and specifically to do this because it is in Israel’s interests.

“The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad,” Clinton forthrightly starts off by saying.

Even though all US intelligence reports had long dismissed Iran’s “atom bomb” program as a hoax (a conclusion supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency), Clinton continues to use these lies to “justify” destroying Syria in the name of Israel.

She specifically links Iran’s mythical atom bomb program to Syria because, she says, Iran’s “atom bomb” program threatens Israel’s “monopoly” on nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

If Iran were to acquire a nuclear weapon, Clinton asserts, this would allow Syria (and other “adversaries of Israel” such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt) to “go nuclear as well,” all of which would threaten Israel’s interests.

Therefore, Clinton, says, Syria has to be destroyed.

Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. What Israeli military leaders really worry about — but cannot talk about — is losing their nuclear monopoly.

An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that nuclear monopoly but could also prompt other adversaries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go nuclear as well. The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today.

If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself.

It is, Clinton continues, the “strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria” that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel’s security.

This would not come about through a “direct attack,” Clinton admits, because “in the thirty years of hostility between Iran and Israel” this has never occurred, but through its alleged “proxies.”

The end of the Assad regime would end this dangerous alliance. Israel’s leadership understands well why defeating Assad is now in its interests.

Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly.

Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.

Clinton goes on to asset that directly threatening Bashar Assad “and his family” with violence is the “right thing” to do:

In short, the White House can ease the tension that has developed with Israel over Iran by doing the right thing in Syria.

With his life and his family at risk, only the threat or use of force will change the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s mind.

The email proves—as if any more proof was needed—that the US government has been the main sponsor of the growth of terrorism in the Middle East, and all in order to “protect” Israel.

It is also a sobering thought to consider that the “refugee” crisis which currently threatens to destroy Europe, was directly sparked off by this US government action as well, insofar as there are any genuine refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria.

In addition, over 250,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict, which has spread to Iraq—all thanks to Clinton and the Obama administration backing the “rebels” and stoking the fires of war in Syria.

The real and disturbing possibility that a psychopath like Clinton—whose policy has inflicted death and misery upon millions of people—could become the next president of America is the most deeply shocking thought of all.

Clinton’s public assertion that, if elected president, she would “take the relationship with Israel to the next level,” would definitively mark her, and Israel, as the enemy of not just some Arab states in the Middle East, but of all peace-loving people on earth.

If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself.

It is, Clinton continues, the “strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria” that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel’s security.

This would not come about through a “direct attack,” Clinton admits, because “in the thirty years of hostility between Iran and Israel” this has never occurred, but through its alleged “proxies.”

The end of the Assad regime would end this dangerous alliance. Israel’s leadership understands well why defeating Assad is now in its interests.

Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly.

Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.

Clinton goes on to asset that directly threatening Bashar Assad “and his family” with violence is the “right thing” to do:

In short, the White House can ease the tension that has developed with Israel over Iran by doing the right thing in Syria.

With his life and his family at risk, only the threat or use of force will change the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s mind.

The email proves—as if any more proof was needed—that the US government has been the main sponsor of the growth of terrorism in the Middle East, and all in order to “protect” Israel.

A Palestinian delegation presented documents to the International Criminal Court to try Israel – and possibly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – for war crimes.

The delegation, acting on behalf of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, recounted the history of Israeli settlements and presented cases against Israeli operations in Hebron and East Jerusalem. Its claims spanned from water deprivation to environmental damage to abuse of Palestinian prisoners. The Dawabsha family, killed in their sleep during a firebombing, and Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a teenager kidnapped and burned alive, were brought up as specific cases of war crimes.

Meetings happened for the first time in Amman, Jordan, from Saturday until Monday and will result in a definitive decision on four cases that were already filed with the ICC. If ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda finds that there is enough evidence to open an investigation, the process – the most far-reaching incrimination of Israel for war crimes– could last years.

Palestine joined the ICC in January 2015, despite pressure by Israel and the United States – neither a signatory to the court – to block it. One of the legal groups presenting the documents, Al-Haq, received multiple phone threats this month against its staff.

The ICC was forced in November to review its decision on the Mavi Marmara, a flotilla carrying Turkish activists that was shot at on its way to Gaza, after Bensouda closed the case in 2014.

Just days after arresting French-born Belgium national  and terror suspect Salah Abdeslam in Brussels, a coordinated terror attack unfolded in the very same city, killing 34  and injuring many more.

NBC News has already announced that European officials are linking the attack to ISIS, though it is unclear whether or not Abdeslam’s network – which carried out the November 2015 Paris terror attacks – was directly involved.

Abdeslam’s “Terror Ring” 

Police in Brussels were still hunting for several other alleged accomplices of Abdeslam, including Najim Laachraoui and Mohamed Abrini.

Laachraoui and Abrini, like virtually every other suspect involved in a string of terrorist attacks across North America, Europe, and Australia, were well known to Western security agencies, having both been documented as having traveled to Syria to fight against Damascus under ISIS, with Abrini having been arrested and jailed several times in the past, and Laachraoui already having a 2014 international arrest warrant issued for him in connection to a trial involving recruiting Europeans to fight for ISIS.

The International Business Times would report in their article, “Manhunt for last Isis Paris attacks fugitives: Who are Najim Laachraoui and Mohamed Abrini?,” that:

Mohamed Abrini, 31, is among Europe’s most wanted fugitives since he was filmed with Abdeslam at a petrol station on a highway to Paris on 11 November aboard a Renault Clio that was used in the attacks two days later. Described as “armed and dangerous” in a European arrested warrant the Belgian-Moroccan is believed to have travelled to Syria after serving short stints in jail for petty crime and robberies.

The Independent would report in an article titled, “Najim Laachraoui: Belgian police launch manhunt for suspect who could have made suicide belts for Paris attacks,” that:

Laachraoui is thought to have studied electro-mechanical engineering at a Catholic high school in Schaerbeek, the Institut de la Sainte-Famille d’helmet, graduating in 2012. He was already known to be in Syria in 2013, and was the subject of an international arrest warrant in 2014.

And because Laachraoui’s DNA is alleged to have been found at several scenes linked to the terror network, it appears that he too may have been in custody at least long enough to provide a DNA sample as a reference to now match him to evidence collected in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks.

And even regarding Abdeslam himself, the BBC would report in their article, “Paris attacks: Who were the attackers?,” that:

Some reports have said he spent time in prison for robbery where he met suspected ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He had earlier been sacked as a technician on the Brussels tram system, for missing work. Dutch police said they had detained Salah Abdeslam briefly in February, fining him €70 (£49) for possession of cannabis.

In other words, all of the suspects have been under the nose, on the radar, and in the prisons of Western security agencies on and off for years, yet were still able to carry out at least one high profile terrorist attack – possibly two, and with the vast majority of the suspects involved having traveled to Syria to fight alongside ISIS before inexplicably being allowed to re-enter Europe and rejoin society without consequence – as if inviting them to take their extremism to the next level.

Brussels Bombing Already Being Linked to ISIS

The Guardian’s “Brussels attack: were they revenge for Abdeslam’s arrest?,” attempted to link the bombings in Brussels to the arrest of Abdeslam and the Paris attack terror network. The op-ed acknowledges that these terrorist attacks are being carried out by locals – Europeans – using local resources.

Should the Brussels attack be linked to this same terror network, it will greatly complicate efforts by some to leverage this tragedy to further their agendas against refugees and even to change the dynamics of the war in Syria itself.

Europeans are clearly already being radicalized and then leaving to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and then returning – rather than a torrent of foreigners streaming in from abroad and carrying out violence against European targets.

Should the Brussels attack turn out to be the work of this ISIS-linked terror group, considering the familiarity European security agencies had with all the suspects long before even the 2015 Paris attacks, indicates criminal negligence at best, and complicity at worst.

But even if the attacks are the work of foreign ISIS militants, one should consider the West’s admitted role in the creation and perpetuation of ISIS in the first place.

The West Created ISIS as a Weapon of Geopolitical Coercion 

ISIS’ own alleged agenda of transforming the world into a “caliphate” is cartoonishly absurd. In reality, it is clear that ISIS shows up and exercises force in regions of the world the US and its allies cannot intervene in directly. This includes North Africa, the Middle East, and even as far as Asia.

Far from a “conspiracy theory,” it would be the US’ own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that would admit as much in a leaked 2012 report (.pdf) which stated:

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).

To clarify just who these “supporting powers” were that sought the creation of a “Salafist” (Islamic) principality” (State), the DIA report explains:

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

Between this admission, and an earlier exposé in 2007 by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker piece titled, “The Redirection” where US and Saudi plans to use Al Qaeda to wage proxy war on Syria and Iran were revealed, it is clear that both Al Qaeda and ISIS are being used by the West to wage war on Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, and even Moscow.

ISIS supply lines clearly, even admittedly run from NATO territory in Turkey where the US and its regional allies have categorically failed to interdict them and even appear to be aiding and abetting the flow of men and materiel into ISIS-held territory in Syria and Iraq. These supply lines are what has allowed pressure to be continuously placed upon Damascus and its allies over the past 5 years in ways nonexistent “moderate rebels” couldn’t.

In Indonesia, as Jakarta clearly began re-balancing toward Beijing, ISIS carried out its first deadly attack on the Southeast Asian nation. Thailand’s similar re-balancing also prompted threats from the US that an “ISIS attack” was imminent.

In Europe, where the flames of a “clash of civilizations” are being furiously and intentionally fanned, ISIS serves as a constant implement to empower extremists on both sides, while drowning out the voices of unity, moderation, and peace in the middle. It allows for a growing police state and xenophobic tendencies to flourish at home, while justifying further war abroad.

While some Western newspapers are already trying to frame the Belgium attack as “incompetence” by European security agencies, there must be a better explanation as to why this “war with ISIS” continues to drag on, when the source of ISIS’ fighting capacity appears to be within rather than beyond the West – and aiding rather than opposing Western special interests.

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

Dramatic loss of life in the terror attacks in Brussels: 34 killed and more than 180 wounded according to the latest reports. 

Prior to the conduct of a police investigation, in the hours following the attacks, the Western media went into overdrive, intimating without evidence that the Islamic State (ISIS) operating out of Raqqa, Northern Syria was responsible for the attacks. 

According to the Independent “Isis supporters have been celebrating the Brussels attacks online [social media] as speculation mounts that the group is behind a wave of deadly attacks in the Belgian capital.”

The report is based on information emanating from social media, which does not constitute a  reliable source of information.

An unkown self-proclaimed news agency (Amaq Agency) allegedly representing the ISIS provided the following report:

This mysterious agency was then immediately quoted by Reuters in an authoritiative report.

In turn, alleged supporters of ISIS on twitter were quoted. According to the Jerusalem Post (March 21, 2016):

Hackers have claimed that a number of Islamic State supporters’ social media accounts are being run from internet addresses linked to the [UK  government] Department of Work and Pensions.

A group of four young computer experts who call themselves VandaSec have unearthed evidence indicating that at least three ISIS-supporting accounts can be traced back to the DWP.

Every computer and mobile phone logs onto the internet using an IP address, which is a type of identification number.

The hacking collective showed Mirror Online details of the IP addresses used by a trio of separate digital jihadis to access Twitter accounts, which have been used to spread extremist propaganda.

At first glance, the IP addresses seem to be based in Saudi Arabia, but upon further inspection using specialist tools they appeared to link back to the DWP.  ..

[T]he British government sold on a large number of IP addresses to two Saudi Arabian firms.

After the sale completed in October of this year, they were used by extremists to spread their message of hate.

Jamie Turner, an expert from a firm called PCA Predict, discovered a record of the sale of IP addresses, and found a large number were transferred to Saudi Arabia in October of this year.

He told us it was likely the IP addresses could still be traced back to the DWP because records of the addresses had not yet been fully updated.

What the Daily Mirror report suggests (as well as other reports) is that the IP addresses of the ISIS are indirectly linked to the British government, i.e. 1) the identity of the ISIS social media is  invariable known to police authorities, and 2) The ISIS social media are sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which is also involved in the recruitment and training of terrorists in liaison with US-NATO.

It is worth noting that the British government has acknowledged its responsibility:

The Cabinet Office has now admitted to selling the IP addresses on to Saudi Telecom and the Saudi-based Mobile Telecommunications Company earlier this year as part of a wider drive to get rid of a large number of the DWP’s IP addresses. (Mirror, op cit cit, emphasis added)

The State Sponsors of Terrorism

The events in Brussels raises the broader question: who is behind the ISIS?

Israel intelligence sources (DEBKA) in a 2011 report confirmed the role of NATO operating out of its Brussels headquarters and Turkey’s high command in the training and recruitment of terrorists:

NATO headquarters in Brussels and the Turkish high command are meanwhile drawing up plans for their first military step in Syria, which is to arm the rebels with weapons for combating the tanks and helicopters spearheading the Assad regime’s crackdown on dissent. … NATO strategists are thinking more in terms of pouring large quantities of anti-tank and anti-air rockets, mortars and heavy machine guns into the protest centers for beating back the government armored forces. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011)

This initiative, which was also supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, involved a process of organized recruitment of thousands of jihadist “freedom fighters”, reminiscent of  the enlistment of  Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war:

Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (Ibid, emphasis added)

These mercenaries were subsequently integrated into US and allied sponsored terrorist organizations including Al Nusrah and ISIS.

And then in August 2014, Obama launched his counter-terrorism campaign. Yet the evidence confirms that instead of destroying the ISIS, the US and its allies including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel were in fact protecting the ISIS.

Again according to the Daily Mirror in a 2015 report, the counterterrorism campaign was conducive to ISIS doubling the territory under its control, until the launching of the Russian intervention in late September 2015.

Sheer Incompetence of  the US Air Force (doubtful) or Washington’s complicity in protecting the terrorists?

Recently the release of the Hillary Clinton email archive as well as leaked Pentagon documents confirm that the US and its allies were supportive of ISIS, which are according to press reports, the alleged architects of the Brussels attacks.

The 7-page Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document dated August of 2012, points to US complicity in supporting the creation of an Islamic State:

Palestinian and human rights advocates were aghast over remarks made by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention on Monday, saying that her speech represented “everything that is bad” with U.S. imperialism and policy in the Middle East.

During the address, Clinton vowed to take the U.S.-Israel relationship to “the next level”—a level which seemingly includes more war and imperialism, few, if any, rights for Palestinians, and definitely no economic boycotts of Israel.

Striking a hawkish tone, Clinton warned the powerful lobby group against rival candidates who want to “outsource Middle East security to dictators” and “cede the mantle of leadership for global peace and security,” and instead vowed even more “security and intelligence cooperation.”

“As president, I will make a firm commitment to ensure Israel maintains its qualitative military edge,” she said. “The United States should provide Israel with the most sophisticated defense technology so it can deter and stop any threats. That includes bolstering Israeli missile defenses with new systems like the Arrow Three and David’s Sling. And we should work together to develop better tunnel detection, technology to prevent armed smuggling, kidnapping and terrorist attacks.”

As observers noted, as she ran down the list of “evolving threats,” the former U.S. secretary of state resorted to common neoconservative talking points, declaring:

As we gather here, three evolving threats — Iran’s continued aggression, a rising tide of extremism across a wide arc of instability, and the growing effort to de-legitimize Israel on the world stage — are converging to make the U.S.-Israel alliance more indispensable than ever.

We have to combat all these trends with even more intense security and diplomatic cooperation. The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever and more determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries and to advance our shared values.

Touting her “deep, personal commitment” to the “Jewish state,” Clinton then said that “one of the first things I’ll do in office is invite Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] to visit the White House.”

The speech proved that, on matters of Israel, Clinton is “running to the right” of GOP front-runner Donald Trump, as noted by Mondoweiss‘ Philip Weiss, who wrote that the remarks were “filled with red meat for Israel supporters” and “contained scant reference to the peace process.”

Later, Clinton doubled down on her previous pledge to dismantle the growing international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, linking the campaign against Palestinian apartheid to anti-Semitism, saying “we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.”

“I’ve been sounding the alarm for a while now,” Clinton continued. “As I wrote last year in a letter to the heads of major American Jewish organizations, we have to be united in fighting back against BDS.”

Clinton then specifically called on young people “on the front lines” to resist efforts to boycott Israel, saying: “I hope you stay strong. Keep speaking out. Don’t let anyone silence you, bully you or try to shut down debate” —to which Naomi Dann, media correspondent for Jewish Voice for Peace, responded:

.@HillaryClinton please STOP enlisting young people as soldiers on the ‘frontlines’ to silence the mvmt for Palestinian rights #AIPAC2016

— Naomi Dann (@naomi_dann) March 21, 2016

Though unsurprised by the candidate’s vigorous support for the policies and tactics of the Israeli state, observers pointed to the remarks as a frightening indicator of what a Clinton presidency could mean for the Middle East.

everything that is bad about Israeli policy AND US imperialism is being praised by #HillaryClinton right now at #AIPAC2016 — Naomi Dann (@naomi_dann) March 21, 2016

Can’t say it enough: the ability/willingness of progressives to simply ignore all this is breathtaking https://t.co/KedgwLmNj9 — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 21, 2016

Hillary Clinton at #AIPAC2016 pledged to “provide Israel w/ the most sophisticated defense technology so it can deter & stop any threats.”

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) March 21, 2016

Expect many more hundreds of children to be massacred under a Hillary presidency.

— Rania Khalek(@RaniaKhalek) March 21, 2016

Has even one single Clinton supporter denounced the disgusting speech she gave today? https://t.co/lgTe1qdT2i

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 21, 2016

 

In a statement to Common Dreams, Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said that the dialogue at the convention “is a reminder of the current limits of the mainstream discourse on Israel, which rely on racist and Islamophobic tropes to justify unquestioning support for Israel.”

“From Democrats to Republicans, the message is the same,” Vilkomerson continued. “More arms for Israel, a stronger relationship between Israel and the U.S., no mention of Palestinian rights, and no recognition of the impossible contradiction of being both democratic and Jewish when the state is predicated on maintaining systems of unequal rights and rule by military occupation.”

Watch the entire speech below:

Je risque de subir des attaques ad hominem pour avoir transmis ces informations qui vont contredire les mythes qu’entretiennent tant les progressistes que les conservateurs au sujet du gouvernement états-unien, mais tout ceux qui reconnaissent que la presse a, jusqu’à maintenant, nié avoir caché le fait incontestable que George W. Bush a consciemment menti et falsifié les preuves concernant les armes de destruction massive de Saddam, ceux-là vont étudier ces informations et leur source de manière équitable et sans préjugés et les considérer comme exactes et honnêtes.

Parfois, pour atteindre la vérité d’une situation, il est nécessaire de se baser sur le témoignage de gens que l’on pourrait ordinairement juger comme méprisables. Le FBI ne serait pas capable de résoudre de nombreux cas sans cela, ni moi non plus, et c’est triste à dire. Ne rejetez donc pas ce qui va suivre si les informations viennent d’un enquêteur que, personnellement, je déteste, comme cela peut être aussi votre cas.

Je pense que le libertaire Roger Stone, qui est le plus talentueux des enquêteurs du parti Républicain, après avoir été le plus talentueux des magouilleurs de Richard Nixon, après avoir débusqué l’hypocrisie d’Eliot Spitzer qui payait des prostitués, après avoir travaillé pour des hommes politiques que je déteste et détruit les carrières de ceux que j’admirais, Roger Stone, donc, est une star du journalisme d’investigation. Je sais aussi, après toutes ces années, que tous ses reportages sur les magouilles dénoncées ont été, alors que le temps passait, confirmés. En résumé, même si je n’aime pas l’homme et suis en désaccord avec ses idées politiques, je respecte son travail de journaliste. Alors voilà ce qu’il annonce au cours d’une courte interview avec le complotiste Alex Jones (un autre libertaire), le samedi 12 mars, et je pense que le pays entier doit entendre les informations de Stone, au moins pour y réfléchir :

Une rapide transcription de son interview :

Je pense que tout le pays a entendu les nouvelles à propos des violentes manifestations [au discours de Trump] dont la responsabilité a été mise sur les partisans de Bernie Sanders…  C’est une opération sous fausse bannière. Ce ne sont pas des partisans de Sanders. C’est une opération dirigée par des supporters de Hillary Clinton, payée par George Soros et Move-On, par David Brock de Media Matters for America, fondation aussi financée par George Soros et par le discret milliardaire Jonathan Lewis. Lewis fut identifié par le Miami New Times comme un homme mystérieux. Il a hérité d’environ un milliard de dollars de son père Peter Lewis… [Fondateur de la Progressive Insurance Company]. Jonathan Lewis a, de manière intéressante, retiré son soutien au Comité national démocrate à cause de la loi sur l’immigration qu’il jugeait injuste envers les homosexuels. De toute façon, c’est une opération réalisée pour Hillary Clinton. L’idée de base, clairement visible, est d’éloigner les électeurs de Sanders d’un potentiel report sur Trump. En d’autres termes, ils réalisent que les électeurs ayant perdu leur travail à cause de tous les traités mondialistes de libre-échange qui ont asséché le pays, et qui auraient voté pour Sanders, risquent de reporter leurs voix sur Trump quand Sanders sera hors jeu ; tout ceci est donc une tentative pour disqualifier Trump et le faire passer pour un être toxique, raciste, bigot; tout ceci est une tromperie. Ce jeu trouble est dirigé par Brock. Brock était, autrefois, un ami et camarade dans la lutte pour la liberté mais il a basculé du mauvais côté, avec les Clinton, pour l’argent, beaucoup, beaucoup d’argent et ceci est, malheureusement, sa petite magouille. Par contre il y a eu des fuites dans leur opération et mes sources sont très fiables. Tout ce travail collaboratif à Washington est une opération de Hillary Clinton. Franchement, Je ne vois pas vraiment Bernie Sanders ayant quoi que ce soit à voir avec cela. Je ne suis pas d’accord avec Bernie, mais je le respecte et ce n’est pas son travail ni celui de son équipe.

Jones explique alors pourquoi il respecte les enquêtes de Stone puis dit :

Quand j’ai vu tous ces gens avec des chemises Bernie criant «à l’attaque», vous voyez, des gens tirant en l’air en gueulant «nous soutenons Bernie», c’est visiblement une manière de le descendre, d’en faire un révolutionnaire radical, de rendre, par comparaison, Hillary meilleure et aussi de faire passer Trump pour un raciste quand les médias vont filmer cela. Vous avez tout à fait raison… Pour être clair : vous avez des sources à l’intérieur disant que c’est Soros/Brock Media Matters, qui reconnaissent agir sous direction de la Maison Blanche, qui tiennent des réunions hebdomadaires, il y a l’ancien directeur de transition d’Obama… Nous avons assisté la montée en pression de la campagne présidentielle cet été, cet automne, qui entache toute l’élection. Et voila où nous en sommes. C’est la salve d’ouverture…

[Stone continue]

Je pense qu’Hillary comprend que Trump va perdre le vote de certains Républicains de l’establishment s’il est investi. D’un autre côté, cela a peu d’importance à cause de sa large gamme d’électeurs. Juste maintenant, dans l’Ohio, les démocrates et indépendants de la Vallée Mahoning, ces gens qui ont perdu leur boulot à cause des grands traités mondialistes de libre-échange sont tous en train de voter pour Trump dans la primaire républicaine. Et on a été témoin de la même chose dans le Michigan. Ce qui fait réaliser à Clinton que les électeurs pour cause économique de Sanders, ne sont pas des électeurs d’extrême-gauche, elle ne va pas les récupérer. Ils ne vont pas suivre Hillary, ces ouvriers en col bleu qui viennent de réaliser qu’ils ont été sacrifiés au nom de l’économie du nouvel ordre mondial, ils sont une cible facile pour Trump. Et cela terrifie Clinton, d’où cette petite manœuvre, cette magouille de David Brock pour résoudre deux problèmes à la fois. Cela permet de casser Bernie parce que, après tout, ces personnes sont violentes, et cela disqualifie Trump pour un vote potentiel en le montrant comme un raciste ou un bigot. C’est une vraie danse kabuki. Et je pense qu’il est important que Trump réalise que ce n’est pas une campagne de Sanders qui perturbe ses meetings, c’est une opération menée par Hillary Clinton.

[Jones demande plus de détails. Stone continue]

Hillary Clinton a chargé un certain membre du Congrès d’aborder le milliardaire John Lewis pour participer aux frais de cette opération. Ce n’est pas que pour Chicago. Vous allez voir ces bruyants manifestants, ces comploteurs, se montrer à d’autres meetings de Trump… Voila à peu près tout ce que je puis dire…

Voila l’interview.

La campagne de Hillary Clinton va énormément bénéficier de cette tactique :

1. Cela éloigne le débat des sujets économiques pour le réorienter vers le racisme, les conflits ethniques.
2. Cela associe Sanders à des supporters violents.
3. Cela associe Trump au racisme en ayant des supporters de Bernie noirs qui perturbent les meetings de Trump.
4. Alors que Sanders, son opposant actuel, et Trump, son futur opposant, sont diffamés, Hillary s’en sort indemne.

Ces explications ont donc du sens et correspondent tout à fait à la personnalité de Hillary Clinton. J’y crois donc.

Eric Zuesse

Article original en anglais : Credible Account Says Clinton Is Behind Violent Protests at Trump Rallies, Washington’s Blog, le 12 mars 2016

Traduit par Wayan, relu par Ludovic pour le Saker Francophone.

The deal struck last Friday between the European Union’s 28 heads of government and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to facilitate the mass deportation of refugees arriving in Greece came into force on Sunday.

The agreement, negotiated at a special two-day summit with the authoritarian Turkish regime, aims to seal off Europe’s borders to the millions of desperate people fleeing war and social misery produced by a series of wars and military interventions led by the imperialist powers. It represents a flagrant violation of international law by effectively abolishing the right to asylum, leaving the refugees at the mercy of the Turkish government.

During the first day of the new regulations, an additional 1,500 refugees arrived on the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios, bringing the total stranded in the country to more than 50,000. These new arrivals, and all those who subsequently reach Greece across the Aegean Sea, are to be returned to Turkey following a farcical asylum procedure which is intended to be completed within 48 hours. In exchange, the European Union (EU) pledged to accept Syrian refugees already in Turkey on the basis of a “one in, one out” principle, up to a maximum of 72,000.

Greek officials and volunteers assisting the refugees on the islands have described chaotic conditions at camps and warned that the agreement may not be enforceable. Giorgos Kyritsis, coordinator for immigration policy in Athens, told the press that Syriza Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras presented a plan at a cabinet meeting on Saturday afternoon which demanded the immediate implementation of the EU-Turkey deal. “But in practice, structures are needed, personnel must be prepared and that takes a bit longer than 24 hours,” the official said.

Military and security forces will play a prominent role in enforcing the deal. EU members are to send up to 1,500 officers with the EU’s border protection service Frontex, whose task will be to carry out the repatriation of refugees to Turkey. The Greek army was deployed to Lesbos on Saturday to move refugees to camps on the mainland.

NATO’s operation in the Aegean Sea aimed at intercepting refugee boats and turning them back to Turkey is to be expanded to cover a longer stretch of coastline.

The same European powers which have routinely invoked “human rights” concerns to justify one military intervention after another in the Middle East and North Africa are denying refugees the right to seek protection from the persecution and war which these very policies have produced. This is being justified on the spurious grounds that Turkey, a country engaged in a low-level civil war against the Kurdish population and ruthless repression of political opponents, should be designated a “safe third country.”

Even if the new regulations are fully implemented, the minuscule figure of 72,000 refugees will be reached in a matter of weeks, at which point the EU has vowed to suspend the resettlement programme. Moreover, it remains entirely unclear which EU members will accept the initial 72,000 refugees, since no commitments were included in the deal.

Those refugees deported to Turkey will virtually have no hope of ever reaching Europe, since the deal contains a provision to put asylum applications from people who have previously entered Europe “illegally” to the bottom of the pile.

Turkey will receive up to €6 billion in financial assistance from the EU over the coming two years for its role in accepting refugees deported from Greece, even though Davutoglu has made clear his government’s intention to repatriate them to their home countries. In addition, Turkey is also being offered the prospect of visa free travel within the EU for its 75 million citizens if it meets a series of conditions, and the opening of a new chapter in Turkish negotiations to join the EU.

The deal with the EU has strengthened Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his brutal crackdown against political opponents and journalists. On the eve of last week’s summit in Brussels, Erdogan declared bluntly in a March 16 speech that criticism of Turkey on issues like “democracy, freedom and rule of law” were groundless. “For us, these phrases have absolutely no value any longer,” Erdogan continued.

Seizing on the March 13 bombing in Ankara claimed by a splinter group of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) which left 37 dead, Erdogan announced his intention last week to expand the definition of terrorism to include MPs, journalists and activists. “Those who stand on our side in the fight against terrorism are our friend. Those on the opposite side, are our enemy,” he chillingly warned in his March 16 address.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the other heads of government who hailed the refugee deal know full well that Erdogan’s statements amounted to an open declaration that Ankara intends to deploy the full force of the state against refugees and anyone else who dares to oppose government policy. The EU will be directly complicit in such repression by expelling refugees to a police state regime which has not even fully implemented the UN Refugee Convention.

Erdogan followed up his explicit defence of the authoritarian methods employed by his government with comments yesterday that sought to place the blame for the refugee crisis on the European powers’ failure to intervene militarily in neighbouring Syria. “All those who have not accepted a no-fly zone and a zone cleared of terror in Syria, and everyone who complains about the refugees are two-faced and hypocritical,” he said.

Turkey’s push for a no-fly-zone in northern Syria is aimed above all at countering efforts by the Kurdish fighters combatting Islamic State militants from establishing a contiguous territory on the Turkish border, which Ankara fears would become the basis for a separate Kurdish state.

The adoption of such a policy, under conditions where Russian aircraft have intervened on the side of the Assad regime, would be the deployment of NATO air power and other forces along the lines of the 2011 regime-change operation in Libya. Notwithstanding recent moves by Moscow to draw down its forces deployed in Syria, a direct NATO intervention in the Syrian civil war of this character poses the real threat of a military clash between US-led NATO and Russian forces.

The unanimity among EU heads of government on Friday’s deal could not disguise the fact that deep divisions persist in the bloc. The closure of the Balkan route to refugees without travel documents and the agreement to send all refugees arriving in Greece back to Turkey have resulted in alternative routes being considered, including passage through Albania before crossing the Adriatic Sea to Italy. The Austrian government vowed last month to impose border controls on the Brenner motorway on its border with Italy, one of the busiest routes between southern and northern Europe.

Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Münchau warned that the EU-Turkey agreement amounted to a further step in the disintegration of the free movement of people within the Schengen zone and ultimately of the EU itself. Noting that Italy could once again become the main entry point for refugees, he wrote,

“France, Switzerland and Slovenia can be counted on to reintroduce controls at that point. Italy would then be cut off from the Schengen passport-free travel area, of which it is a member, and Schen­gen would become a small club of north European countries—possibly a model for a future eurozone. This would be the first step in the fragmentation of the EU.”

Münchau condemned the agreement because he claimed that the EU had lost its “moral high ground” and had sold “its soul to strike a deal with Turkey.”

“[T]he EU is paying Turkey €6bn and opening up a new chapter in EU accession negotiations—this with a country whose leadership has just abrogated democracy. The EU is further set to allow visa-free travel to 75m inhabitants of Turkey. The EU not only sold its soul that day, it actually negotiated a pretty lousy deal.”

In truth, the EU was not compelled to sell out its principles in order to entrust the authoritarian regime in Ankara with the carrying out of its dirty work. The readiness of all of the member states to sign off on a plan to expel refugees to Turkey starkly exposes the reactionary nature of the EU, an institution through which Europe’s imperialist powers organise attacks on workers and the most vulnerable sections of society, and carry out their aggressive foreign policy objectives.

This is precisely why Münchau, like a number of other commentators in the bourgeois press, is wringing his hands in frustration over the deal with Turkey. For decades, the European powers have exploited their “moral high ground” to justify one imperialist war after another, from the bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 to the ongoing efforts to topple the Assad regime. The further erosion of the European powers’ humanitarian pretensions will only intensify the challenge of selling new wars, such as the well-advanced plans for military operations in Libya, amid growing polar opposition to war and social inequality.

Come si fa a giustificare la guerra se non c’è un nemico che ci minaccia? Semplice, basta inventarlo o fabbricarlo. Ce lo insegna il generale Philip Breedlove, il capo del Comando europeo degli Stati uniti che sta per passare a un altro generale Usa il bastone di Comandante supremo alleato in Europa. Nella sua ultima audizione al Pentagono, avverte che «ad Est l’Europa ha di fronte una Russia risorgente e aggressiva, la quale pone una minaccia esistenziale a lungo termine». Capovolge in tal modo la realtà: la nuova guerra fredda in Europa, contraria agli interessi della Russia, è stata provocata col putsch di piazza Maidan dalla strategia Usa/Nato, che continua ad alimentare le tensioni per giustificare il crescente spiegamento di forze nell’Europa orientale. In Ucraina, è stato costituito un Comando congiunto multinazionale per l’addestramento «fino al 2020» delle forze armate e dei battaglioni neonazisti della Guardia nazionale, di cui si occupano centinaia di istruttori della 173a Divisione Usa trasferiti da Vicenza, affiancati da britannici e canadesi. Il Comando europeo degli Stati uniti, sottolinea Breedlove, lavora con gli alleati per «contrastare la Russia e prepararsi al conflitto se necessario». A Sud, avverte il Comandante supremo alleato in Europa, «l’Europa ha di fronte la sfida della migrazione di massa provocata dal crollo e dalla instabilità di interi Stati, e dell’Isis che si diffonde come un cancro minacciando le nazioni europee». Sostiene quindi che «l’intervento della Russia in Siria ha complicato il problema, poiché ha fatto poco per contrastare l’Isis e molto per sostenere il regime di Assad». Capovolge di nuovo la realtà: sono stati Usa e Nato a provocare con la guerra il crollo dello Stato libico e l’instabilità di quello siriano, e la conseguente migrazione di massa, favorendo la formazione dell’Isis funzionale alla loro strategia, che hanno finto di combattere, mentre l’intervento russo in Siria a sostegno delle forze governative ha duramente colpito l’Isis facendolo arretrare. Ora che la Russia, conseguito il primo obiettivo, ridimensiona il suo impegno in Siria, la Nato sotto comando Usa estende la sua presenza militare in Medio Oriente. Il 29 febbraio, il segretario generale della Nato Stoltenberg ha firmato col Kuwait un accordo che permette di creare il primo scalo aeroportuale della Alleanza atlantica nel Golfo, sia per la guerra in Afghanistan, sia per «la cooperazione della Nato col Kuwait e altri partner», soprattutto l’Arabia Saudita sostenuta dal Pentagono nella guerra che fa strage di civili nello Yemen. Il 2 marzo, ad Abu Dhabi, Stolternberg ha rafforzato la «cooperazione con gli Emirati Arabi Uniti per affrontare le comuni sfide alla sicurezza». Il 17 marzo, ha ricevuto a Bruxelles re Abdullah II, per rafforzare la  «partnership» della Nato con la Giordania». Il 18 marzo, ha ricevuto Al Zayani, segretario generale del Consiglio di cooperazione del Golfo (Arabia Saudita, Bahrain, Emirati Arabi Uniti, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar), per «approfondire la cooperazione tra le due organizzazioni». In Africa – mentre si prepara l’operazione che, con la motivazione di liberarle dall’Isis, mira a occupare le zone della Libia economicamente e strategicamente più importanti – è in corso dal Senegal al Golfo di Guinea l’esercitazione Obangame/Saharan Express, cui partecipano in funzione «antiterrorismo e antipirateria», forze navali di Usa, Europa, Africa e anche Brasile. Diretta dal quartier generale di Napoli delle U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, la cui missione è «promuovere gli interessi nazionali Usa, la sicurezza e stabilità in Europa e Africa».

Manlio Dinucci

Existen varios aspectos en esta guerra cultural, en su sentido más amplio, que en estos momentos se está librando contra la cultura socialista de Cuba. Uno de esos aspectos es la guerra masiva de los medios de comunicación de Estados Unidos y la campaña de desinformación política en el tema de los derechos civiles en Cuba como parte de los derechos humanos.

A sólo unos días de la llegada de Obama a Cuba, la nueva relación Cuba-EE.UU. está entrando en una fase decisiva y difícil. Como parte de otro análisis histórico profundo de las relaciones Cuba-EE.UU., el Dr. Elier Ramírez Cañedo, uno de los historiadores más destacados de Cuba y un experto en la confrontación e intentos de “normalización” entre los dos países, escribió una observación muy sagaz acerca del comentario que hizo Obama el 19 de diciembre de 2014. En el contexto del deseo de EE.UU. de provocar cambios en Cuba, el presidente Obama dijo: “…cómo cambian las sociedades es específico de cada país, es específico culturalmente”.

Ramírez Cañedo dedujo:

“Ante esta abierta declaración de guerra cultural, entendiendo la cultura en su sentido más amplio, más allá de lo artístico y literario, sería ingenuo pensar que la historia no será –de hecho ya lo está siendo– una de las dianas fundamentales de quienes pretenden socavar desde dentro la cultura socialista en Cuba”.

Además, escribió en el mismo artículo lo siguiente:

 “Pero si algunos en Cuba o fuera de ella, sobre todo en las filas revolucionarias, caen en el error de olvidar o despreciar la importancia del estudio y conocimiento profundo del pasado en las circunstancias actuales, sería hacer el juego a quienes ahora con nuevos ropajes persisten en sus objetivos de destruir la Revolución Cubana desde sus mismas raíces”.

La perspicacia de Ramírez Cañedo acerca de la guerra contra la cultura socialista de Cuba a que se refiere su artículo, ha sido confirmada en varias ocasiones. Por ejemplo: el periódico The New York Times publicó una columna el 12 de marzo de 2016 con el título “Cultural Gap Impedes U.S. Business Efforts for Trade in Cuba” (Brecha cultural obstaculiza los esfuerzos del sector de negocios de EE.UU. para comerciar en Cuba). Entre otros puntos, el artículo se enfoca en las restricciones impuestas por Cuba en defensa de su soberanía y su sistema socioeconómico contra los empeños de los empresarios estadounidenses. En otras palabras, The New York Times parece estar preocupado acerca de la cultura socialista de Cuba. Al referirse a la determinación de mantener sus principios, el artículo lamenta que “Cuba ha dejado bien claro que no cambiará la forma de realizar su actividad comercial para ajustarse a las necesidades de los Estados Unidos”.

La guerra masiva política y de los medios de comunicación

Existen varios aspectos en esta guerra cultural, en su sentido más amplio, que en estos momentos se está librando contra la cultura socialista de Cuba. Uno de esos aspectos es la guerra masiva de los medios de comunicación de Estados Unidos y la campaña de desinformación política en el tema de los derechos civiles en Cuba como parte de los derechos humanos.

El discurso de EE.UU., directa o indirectamente y a regañadientes, reconoce los logros de Cuba en el ámbito de los derechos sociales, como un subgrupo de los derechos humanos, en relación a salud, educación, cultura y deporte. Sin embargo, acusa a Cuba de violar los derechos civiles y políticos, haciendo referencia, por ejemplo, a su frecuentemente citado doble estándar del “derecho a la libertad de expresión, la libertad de prensa y de protestar” basado en el pensamiento único estadounidense. Por lo tanto, según esta explicación anecdótica, Cuba no es una democracia dado que viola los derechos civiles y políticos, y por extensión, los derechos humanos.

Sin embargo, los derechos civiles, tales como los derechos políticos, conforman una parte importante del cimiento que salvaguarda y promueve la gama completa de los derechos humanos. El derecho civil más significativo concedido a los cubanos y exigido por ellos, es participar en su propio sistema político. Esta tradición, aunque no perfecta y por lo tanto siempre en evolución, se remonta a la lucha colectiva revolucionaria de masas que llevó al triunfo de la Revolución Cubana, y por ende, al poder político del pueblo en enero de 1959. Es imposible olvidar esta historia.

Derechos civiles

Este legado ha continuado de muchas formas y al mismo tiempo tratando siempre de mejorar la democracia participativa. Si los cubanos no hubieran tenido, y no tuvieran ahora, la capacidad de ejercitar su propio poder político, ¿cómo podrían haber obtenido y garantizado otros derechos humanos? Por ejemplo, si los cubanos no hubieran ejercido sus derechos políticos individuales en la década del 50 para ganar el poder político, ¿hubieran podido alcanzar, en primer lugar, los derechos sociales, tales como el derecho a la salud, la educación, la cultura y el deporte?

Desde 1959, el Gobierno Revolucionario de Cuba se esfuerza para fomentar la participación del pueblo para mejorar esos derechos civiles sociales. Por su parte, los ciudadanos se empeñan para fortalecer su poder político real en aras de proteger y actualizar sus derechos humanos sociales, económicos y culturales. Existe suficiente espacio en la cultura socialista cubana para que este debate y acción fructifique y propicie que el socialismo cubano pase de una fase a la siguiente. Sin embargo, esta democracia en movimiento es ignorada por los círculos gobernantes de los Estados Unidos.

Washington y la mayoría de los medios de prensa más influyentes de EE.UU. reconocen solamente esos derechos civiles políticos como parte de los derechos humanos definidos y exigidos por lo que ellos llaman la “sociedad civil” de Cuba. Esta “oposición” muy marginal, es dependiente ideológica y financieramente de Estados Unidos, que ha sido quien la creó. El objetivo es funcionar como un caballo de Troya de los Estados Unidos para destruir la Revolución Cubana desde adentro.

Por supuesto, este grupo marginal, no se puede considerar una base para socavarla. En consecuencia, para reforzar el caballo de Troya, los Estados Unidos, también tienen su mira puesta en más de 500.000 trabajadores cuentapropistas. Ese sector en crecimiento de la sociedad cubana es percibido erróneamente por los vecinos norteños de Cuba como una quinta columna natural de reclutas para “el estilo de vida y valores” estadounidenses (capitalismo y dependencia de los EE.UU.) con el objetivo de debilitar la cultura socialista cubana. Estados Unidos puede subestimar el patriotismo de la gran mayoría de los cubanos, incluyendo la cantidad creciente de cuentapropistas, a quienes los Estados Unidos llama injustamente el “sector privado”, como si estuviera separado de la sociedad cubana y de su cultura socialista, que por supuesto no lo está.

Los derechos civiles de la oposición fabricada por los Estados Unidos y de otros sectores de la sociedad que pueden injertarse en ellas desafían los derechos civiles y políticos de la gran mayoría del pueblo cubano.

Retos en el horizonte

En Cuba existen varios elementos que complican la situación actual debido al descongelamiento  iniciado por ambos países el 17 de diciembre de 2014.

Ramírez Cañedo está preocupado, y con mucha razón, acerca de que individuos “en las filas revolucionarias” caigan víctimas de esta guerra cultural alimentada por Estados Unidos. Esto ocurriría, tal como lo ve el autor de este artículo, entre otras cosas, si se olvida el pasado de Cuba en lo concerniente a los derechos civiles, políticos, sociales y humanos. En consecuencia, la gente caería en la trampa de referirse a la dicotomía falsa entre los derechos civiles/políticos y otros derechos humanos, tales como salud, educación, cultura y deporte.

La situación se ha hecho más compleja fuera de Cuba. Antes del 17 de diciembre de 2014, muchos comentaristas se mostraron muy opuestos a la política de Estados Unidos hacia Cuba. Había una brecha entre los comentaristas y Washington. La situación ha cambiado ahora. Algunos de ellos se han convertido en la vanguardia de la política Cuba-EE.U. de Obama, olvidando que EE.UU. ha cambiado solamente las tácticas. Se han transformado en apologistas de la nueva política, que sirve para alcanzar finalmente su objetivo estratégico de socavar la Revolución Cubana, ahora desde su interior.

Una de las bases políticas/ideológicas de esta nueva vocación es decir, en efecto, que: “Admitimos que Cuba ha alcanzado grandes logros en los derechos sociales como salud y educación como parte de los derechos humanos, pero en Cuba se violan los derechos civiles y políticos”. Por lo tanto, los derechos civiles políticos son contrapuestos a los derechos sociales, económicos y culturales. Por su parte, algunas personas guardan silencio en cuanto al carácter revolucionario de los derechos civiles políticos de Cuba, y así, en forma deliberada o no, colaboran con los Estados Unidos en su guerra cultural contra Cuba.

Por su parte, Granma, el periódico oficial cubano escribió correctamente, en un editorial decisivo y tajante el 8 de marzo de 2016 que “Cuba defiende la indivisibilidad, interdependencia y universalidad de los derechos humanos civiles, políticos, económicos, sociales y culturales”.

Entonces, la pregunta es: ¿la visita de Obama a Cuba brindará a los cubanos la oportunidad de ganar terreno contra la guerra cultural, o permitirá a EE.UU. penetrar en la sociedad cubana? ¿O ambas situaciones forman parte del panorama que se vislumbra en el horizonte?

Arnold August 

Fuente original en inglés : Obama in Cuba: Will the Visit Advance the US Cultural War Against Cubans? Global Research, 13 mars 2016

Artículo traducido por Franklin Curbelo. Cuba Debate

The unedifying spectacle of US presidential candidates being obliged to present themselves before The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)  lobbyists, is an affront to democratic society and to over 300 million ordinary Americans.  For this is no ordinary lobby representing the views of a typical American constituency in the interests of the United States of America.

This week, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as with Barack Obama before them, will be required to bow and scrape before a right­-wing audience of Netanyahu supporters whose only concern is how much money; F16/F35 jet fighters; helicopter gunships; anti­-missile arrays; phosphorus chemicals and cluster bombs can they get the American taxpayer to pay for in order to maintain Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East and the extension of its illegal settlement project in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that has already induced nearly 600,000 Israelis to leave their homes in Israel to settle on Palestinian land.

Screenshot: Salon.com March 22, 2016

These advanced weaponry and armaments are also utilised to enforce the now six year old illegal blockade of essential goods into Gaza in co-operation with Egypt’s current military dictatorship:  the demands for ever-increasing American military equipment and funding being the explicit mission of AIPAC members headed by Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

There would appear to be only one solution and that is to declare AIPAC and its associated lobbyists for Israel as, collectively, a ‘Foreign Agent’ that overtly acts in the interest of a foreign state and one that should be either proscribed or controlled under the already existing provisions of US legislation.

© EUNewsdesk   London   2016  (but freely distributable)           [email protected]

Video and transcript

China is taking steps to protect its economic interest and political influence in the Central Asia. On Mar.1, Beijing proposed a joint counter terrorism mechanism with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan as a project to boost regional security.

This initiative is clear signal that China is seeking to become more involved in security issues beyond its borders. In long terms, it will also fuel China’s political influence in the region.

China’s economic interests in the region is spreading through the region largely because of its One Belt, One Road initiative. The goal of the initiative is to develop rade and transit links among Central and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe. However,many of those interests could easily be undermined by local threats especially in Central and South Asia.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan militant groups have increase operations and the whole region is suffering from instability fueled by social problems and corruption of local governments.

China’s counterterrorism project is meant to address the growing threat militancy in the region. There are no details of the proposed mechanism’s structure, scope or funding. Nonetheless, Afghanistan has already voiced its support for the idea. Others regional countries have also shown great interest in stabilizing Afghanistan to prevent terrorist groups and refugees from flowing across their borders. It’s likely that the initiative’s potential members want to ensure that China’s $45 billion investment package for infrastructure, energy and transit projects called ” the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor” is realized. In comparison with other China’s activities in the region, the newest counterterrorism project creates a multilateral security framework leading only by China. Considering the mechanism would not fall under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s authority, it could be concluded that China is ready to increase the stakes in order to increase its expansion in the region.

However, proposing a counterterrorism mechanism is not the same as establishing one. It would be wrong to expect that the project will become successful rapidly.

According to experts, the most possible first steps are intelligence sharing and increasing cross-border counterterrorism capabilities which will boost coordination of of counterterrorism operations conducted in border areas.

Moreover, world powers involved into the region, especially the US, would have mixed feelings about China’s plans.

The US has been already expanding its presence in the Central Asia using the Afghan crisis to involve more Central Asian states into own sphere of influence. Meanwhile, the US is developing alliances in order to counter China in the Asia-Pacific region with special attention to the South China Sea. Thus, the proposal itself marks an important shift in Beijing’s role in this geopolitical standoff. China has given a clear signal that it’s ready to defend its foreign reach.

The different security and military initiatives could become a common part of its One Belt, One Road project.

(Please read Part I and Part II prior to this article)

Theoretical Review

Identifying The Targets:

The first two parts of the series introduced new concepts to the Hybrid War theory and successfully tested them on the Syrian and Ukrainian cases. This proved that a certain methodology does in fact exist for explaining and analyzing Hybrid Wars, and excitingly, this rubric can proactively be applied in attempting to predict the places where this form of post-modern warfare could be directed next. To refer to Part I, one must first recall the Law of Hybrid Warfare:

The grand objective behind every Hybrid War is to disrupt multipolar transnational connective projects through externally provoked identity conflicts (ethnic, religious, regional, political, etc.) within a targeted transit state.

Considering this, the next step is to identify the major multipolar transnational connective projects ongoing or planned all across the world. Once this has been done, each transit state is assessed for the greatest number of vulnerable socio-political overlaps as according to the following six factors:

* ethnicity

* religion

* history

* administrative boundaries

* socio-economic disparity

* physical geography

From there, all that’s left to do is pinpoint the most socio-politically vulnerable transit states and set out to reverse engineer the conditions necessary for emphasizing key demographics’ anti-government “separateness” from the central authorities. Cultural anthropologists, historians, NGO activists, media and marketing experts, and “independent researchers”, among others, play a vanguard role in this social preconditioning process and can also be of integral use to US intelligence in explaining the most efficient methods to be employed in ideologically penetrating their targeted audiences’ psyches. Concurrent with this, varying degrees of structural preconditioning are also practiced in order to intensify the artificially constructed divide between the state and the strategic elements of its citizenry.

Civilizational And Civic Patriotism:

Hybrid War is essentially the weaponization of chaos theory, which itself is disproportionately dependent on the initial conditions prior to the destabilization’s onset. As has been discussed, the socio-political vulnerabilities in each target state are important indicators in gauging the potential success of the oncoming regime change operation, but the six main factors are difficult to modify (let alone in a short timeframe) if they don’t play to the full advantage of the aggressor. Due to this, social and structural preconditioning take on an enhanced role, as ideas and economic trends are a lot easier to interfere with and change than ethnic composition and provincial boundaries, for example. Both of these constituent characteristics (affected respectively by social and structural preconditioning) can strongly impact on the target citizenry’s civilizational and/or civic patriotism, which is the strongest defense that a state has in repelling Hybrid War.

It’s at this point where it’s worthy to once more recall the cases of Syria and Ukraine, as each of them proceeded along a completely divergent trajectory owing in large part to their differing level of civilizational/civic patriotism prior to the Hybrid War against them. This initial condition is undoubtedly the most critical in determining whether the destabilization will drag on for years or if it’ll be a swift and easy success.

The Syrian people have one of the world’s most vehement civilizational patriotisms, and this in turn amplified their country’s resiliency to resisting the multidimensional Hybrid War aggression being waged against them. As a result, the US and its allies have had to provide continual support to their proxy elements in order to unnaturally maintain the chaotic processes that they had expected to become self-perpetuating. In the event that such assistance is disrupted, it would thus directly translate into a visible weakening of the Hybrid War elements inside the country and consequently lead to their quick eradication.

Contrarily, the situation was the diametric opposite in Ukraine, where no civilizational patriotism was present (despite the rich legacy of Kievan Rus) and scarcely any civic patriotism existed. All that the US had to do was efficiently organize the proper assets and give them the signal to initiate their destabilization in unison. The chaotic processes then proceeded as theorized and began to take on a life of their own, requiring minimal guidance from that point onwards when compared to the strategic quagmire that the US crept into with Syria. The only significant intervention that the US engaged in was the false-flag sniper attack at the end of February, and it only did so because it sensed an irresistible opportunity to maximize the chaos and quickly topple the government.

To summarize this sub-section, the two glaringly different examples of Hybrid War in Syria and Ukraine prove that the initial condition of civilizational and/or civic patriotism is the deciding factor in influencing the course of the asymmetrical conflict, and accordingly, should demonstrate todemocratic security specialists the existential importance in proactively supporting such measures within their own targeted states.

Unleashing The Wrath:

Finally, it’s relevant to touch upon the beginning stages of Hybrid War and briefly explain the tactical limitations of the theory as they apply to two specific categories of states. Concerning the initial stage similarities shared by the vast majority of states, a preconceived moment (typically something symbolic such as an historically important commemoration, a parliamentary/presidential vote, or a provoked instance of state-on-“protester” violence) or a fortuitous turn of events (e.g. Yanukovich’s last-minute decision to postpone the EU Association Agreement) is used as a signal to merge the separate cells comprising the regime change social infrastructure into a critical anti-government mass that inaugurates the Color Revolution movement and heralds the first step of Hybrid War. Should the ‘soft coup’ (often interspersed with lethal urban terrorism) fail, then the ‘hard coup’ push of Unconventional War is eventually initiated against the beleaguered government and its patriotic citizenry, thereby fulfilling the Hybrid War template.

Not all Unconventional Wars begin with Color Revolutions and not all Color Revolutions end in Unconventional Wars, but the US’ strategic aim going forward is to have the two forms of regime change seamlessly merge together into an escalatory ladder of intensified anti-government pressure whenever possible. Some societies with fully developed civil societies (relative to the globally recognized Western ‘standard’) and without many of the prerequisite socio-political vulnerabilities such as Denmark might never experience the Unconventional Warfare aspect of Hybrid War and would only likely fall victim to its Color Revolution side. However, a re-engineering of their demographics (e.g. the “refugee” crisis) could predictably change that and make them much more susceptible to a full Hybrid War.

Continuing along, states that don’t have as robust of a civil society (or none at all in the Western traditional sense), yet overly satisfy the socio-political credentials for Unconventional Warfare like the Central African Republic does, might just outright skip the Color Revolution stage and jump right into the identity warfare part of Hybrid War. As with the first example, this could also change via a demographic re-engineering of society, albeit in a different manner whereby rapid (most likely Chinese-supported) development leads to the birth of an emergent middle class that could potentially fill the ranks of Color Revolution insurgents.

In rare situations, there’s also the possibility of a “Reverse Hybrid War”, whereby an Unconventional War precedes a Color Revolution. To an extent, it can be argued that Myanmar’s drawn-out civil war created fertile conditions for the 1989 Color Revolution and subsequent rise of Aung San Suu Kyi. While it took over two decades for her to finally win full power, she eventually did nonetheless, and it’s clear that the Unconventional War environment preconditioned the masses into accepting this with time. Likewise, something similar is currently playing out in West Africa with Boko Haram. Each of the four states in the Lake Chad region are coming under sharp pressure from the terrorist group, and the violence that has resulted is creating a situation where even a disorganized Color Revolution increases the chance of its ultimate success precisely because of the target government’s preoccupation with Boko Haram.

This is especially the case with Chad, whose capital of Ndjamena is in extremely close proximity to the battleground and has already fallen victim to a few suicide bombings. A nascent Color Revolution would be the ultimate force multiplier in skyrocketing the chances that the government would be overthrown, either by Boko Haram, the urban insurgents, or a tacit and coordinated effort between the two. From a standardized theoretical standpoint, the existing Unconventional Warfighters team up with the newly active Color Revolutionaries in order to decisively shift the balance against the state and succeed in the shared regime change objective. The only alternative to this scenario would be for the military to crush the crush the “protesters” with extreme prejudice the moment they rise up before moving on to swiftly annihilate any terrorists that try to exploit the coming fray, with the same pattern holding true for Chad as it does for any other state that finds itself at risk of “Reverse Hybrid War”.

Practical Application

Taking everything that’s been reviewed so far and proven by the Syrian and Ukrainian test cases, it’s now time to practically apply the lessons of Hybrid War in predicting where it could strike next. The most impactful multipolar transnational connective projects are spearheaded by Russia and China, and the two most significant of them are the Eurasian Union and the One Belt One Road (“New Silk Road”). Their shared area of intersection in Central Asia means that that any large-scale destabilization in this region could accomplish the ‘two-for-one’ goal of offsetting both Great Powers’ ambitions in one geopolitical masterstroke, which is why there’s such a high risk of Hybrid War breaking out there sometime in the near future. Elsewhere, however, there’s no direct integrational overlap of the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership except in the Balkans, but even there, the confluence of interests is less tightly connected and developed than it is in Central Asia. It should go without saying, however, that this makes the theater the second-most likely region to fall victim to Hybrid Wars in the future out of American ‘necessity’ to preempt the conclusion of the two megaprojects of Balkan (“Turkish”) Stream and the Balkan Silk Road that could decisively tilt Europe’s strategic balance towards the multipolar world.

The other regions at risk of Hybrid War are targeted specifically because of their cooperation with China’s New Silk Road, and they include” the Greater Heartland states of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; the western part of ASEAN; the Indian Ocean archipelago state of Maldives; a large swath of trans-equatorial Africa that bridges the oceanic divide; and Brazil-Peru and Nicaragua in Latin America. The below is a map that clearly illustrates the aforementioned geographic zones most likely to be threatened by Hybrid War in the future:

Out of these identified regions (and with the exception of the ‘stand-alone’ state of the Maldives), there are core countries whose identity-based destabilization is most likely to occur due to certain context-specific reasons. Most realistically in terms of their relative probability, they are as follows: Uzbekistan in the Greater Heartland; the Republic of Macedonia in the Balkans; Myanmar in ASEAN; Djibouti-Ethiopia in Africa; and Nicaragua in Latin America. Simplifying the earlier map, here’s what it looks like with only the geopolitical triggers highlighted:

The above map does come with a caveat, however, and it’s that the core triggers in the Greater Heartland, ASEAN, Africa, and Latin America could possibly be usurped by less likely but regionally more impactful Hybrid Wars in in the countries of Turkmenistan, Thailand, Kenya-Tanzania, and Brazil. Destabilizations in these countries might even be more effective in disrupting the multipolar transnational connective projects that they’re a part of than if they happened in their aforementioned regional counterparts. Here’s a modified map that reflects the caveats:

Having revealed the core targets of Hybrid War, the forthcoming sections of the research will focus on each designated region, with an emphasis on the highlighted triggers that are expected to either set off a wider conflagration or irreversibly sabotage the transnational integrational projects that they’re a part of. The only exception to the outlined format is the Maldives, since the author has already written an exhaustive three-part analysis about its Hybrid War risk and the broader geopolitical implications of its destabilization. On that account, the next parts of the research will proceed along the order of Central Asia, the Balkans, ASEAN, Africa, and Latin America.

Each section will begin by describing the region’s geo-economic importance, or in other words, how it adheres to the Law of Hybrid War. Afterwards, a brief overview will be given whereby some of the most relevant socio-political vulnerabilities for each state will be touched upon and incorporated into broad Hybrid War scenarios. Finally, the last part specifically focuses on the core target in each region by explaining how a Hybrid War there would quickly shatter the multipolar transnational connective project that they’re a part of, and when appropriate, it discusses the comparative differences in probability and impact between the core and caveat states.

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). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare.

PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:

Hybrid Wars 1. The Law Of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Wars 2. Testing the Theory – Syria & Ukraine

When the P5+1 Nuclear Talks were completed, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was put into practice, jubilant words resounded from many places. The “reformist movement” within Iranian politics used the nuclear deal as a campaign issue and swept up victories in the recent parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, the Republican Party writhed with the anger of defeat, inviting Netanyahu to address Congress against Obama’s wishes, and screaming doomsday predictions about a “nuclear-armed Iran” after the deal was signed.

The expectation of all parties involved, and the many voices supporting the negotiation process, was that after the deal was signed, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran would become much friendlier. The nuclear deal was expected to open a new chapter of diplomacy, resolving the decades of intense hostility.

Ballistic Missile Deceptions

However, this has not taken place. The signing of the nuclear deal and the lifting of the nuclear-related sanctions imposed on Iran has been followed by swift and blatant acts of aggression against Iran — not only from the United States, but from its allies around the world.

Almost immediately after the deal was signed, US leaders began to denounce Iran’s ballistic missile system. Iran maintains ballistic missiles for the purpose of self-defense. Iran’s regional enemy, Israel, is known for erratic, unannounced attacks on its neighbors. It has invaded Lebanon five times, and it randomly attacked Iraq in 1981.

Iran’s ballistic missile defense system exists for the purpose of deterring such an attack. Iranians point out that they have not been attacked by the Israelis, who “know that over 80,000 missiles are ready to rain down on Tel Aviv and Haifa,” as Major General Rahim Safavi put it. The ballistic missile defense system exists so that the threat of a random Israeli or USA strike does not hang over the heads of the Iranian people.

However, US media relentlessly portrays the ballistic missile defense system as a threat. The United States has placed new sanctions on Iran since the nuclear conclusion based on the existence and continued maintenance of the ballistic missile system. Somehow, Iran seeking to shield itself from attack is deemed a “threat to destroy Israel.”

Iran has already given up its peaceful nuclear energy program, something it is allowed to maintain under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It appears that Israel and the leaders of the United States will not be satisfied until the country renders itself completely defenseless.

Blaming Iran for the Crimes of its Enemies

On March 3, US District Judge George Daniels ruled that Iran was responsible for the Sept. 11 , 2001 attacks on the United States. The Islamic Republic of Iran was ordered by US Federal Court to pay $10.5 billion in reparations. Seven billion would go to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and another $3.5 billion was awarded to the corporations that ensured the Twin Towers.

Daniels based his ruling on the fact that the 9/11 Commission Report’s findings: that some of the hijackers visited Iran a year prior to the attacks, and that Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah met with each other on several occasions. No further evidence of Iranian involvement or prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks was provided.

Interestingly, Judge Daniels has also ruled that the Saudi regime cannot be held liable for the 9/11 attacks, even though convicted hijacker Zacharius Mossawi said under oath that the Saudi government was involved. Almost all of the figures named as being involved were Saudi nationals. Osama bin Laden’s family remains one of the richest families in the country, and the Saudi government continues to arm Islamic extremists such as the Al-Nusra Front, previously known as Al-Qaeda in Syria. The 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report that remain classified are in the section pertaining to Saudi Arabia.

The ruling is outrageously insulting to Iran. At this very moment, thousands of Iranian fighters from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are risking their lives on the battlefields of Syria, fighting against ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, officially blamed for the attacks by the US government, were hated enemies of the Islamic Republic. Among the Wahhabi sect of the Islamic faith — practiced by the Saudi Royal Family, the Al-Qaeda organization, ISIS, and the bin Laden family — the Iranians are considered “Shia apostates.” The Saudis say that the Shia religion is a “Jewish conspiracy” against the monarchy, and this belief is promoted by all their regional allies.

The reason that violent extremists from throughout the Middle East have been recruited and sent to Syria is because they consider the Assad family which rules Syria to be “Shia apostates” — the same label the extremists give to Iran.

Saudi media frequently talks about the threat of a “Shia crescent” emerging throughout the Middle East, and rallies fanatical Wahhabis and Sunnis to fight in Syria. The conspiracy theories promoted by the Saudi regime claim that the Alawites within Syria’s Baath Arab Socialist Party, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon, the democracy movement in Bahrain, and the People’s Committees of Yemen are all part of a secret plot to create a Shia empire. Syrian Alawites are miles away from Iranian Twelver Shias in terms of belief. The democracy movement in Bahrain is a struggle for basic human rights and democracy against an absolute monarchy. The People’s Committee in Yemen includes not only Zaidi Shias, but also secular leftists and the supporters of Sunni former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, among others.

Regardless, the Saudi regime, with the support of the United States, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda, has decided to fight against this broad coalition, deeming it a conspiracy of Shia apostates.

What Drives US Policy Toward Iran?

To discover what is driving US foreign policy toward Iran, and why it has taken such a hostile turn since the signing of the historic accord, a good place to start is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The CFR is a private think tank that functions as the brain of the CIA. It is where the top academics and foreign policy experts discuss and debate world affairs — behind closed doors, with members of Congress, the military, and the executive branch. With a multi-billion dollar budget provided by the Rockefeller family, the Ford Foundation, and big oil companies like Exxon-Mobil, the Council on Foreign Relations thinks up the United States’ next global moves — which the CIA and the Pentagon then put into practice.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the public voice of the CFR, an article entitled “Time to Get Tough on Tehran: Iran Policy after the Deal” goes into depth describing the motive and methods of attack planned by US leaders. According to the authors, “The Islamic Republic is not a conventional state making pragmatic estimates of its national interests but a revolutionary regime.” The authors predict that the revolution born in 1979 will eventually collapse, declaring that “until then…there can be no real peace between Washington and Tehran.”

The strategies put forward for attacking Iran and working towards its overthrow — regardless of any policy changes by the Islamic Republic — include a call to “isolate and coerce” the country. The CFR calls for the forming of a new “anti-Iran coalition” of Gulf States, and speaks of escalating the sale of military technology to the Gulf State autocracies that surround Iran. It talks of enabling and supplying the absolute monarchies that do business with US oil companies with missile defense systems similar to Israel’s Iron Dome.

Attacking Friends of Iran

The article talks about weakening Iran by attacking its allies in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. The article describes the potential for hurting Iran this way, saying that Iran’s support for these forces “carry the risk of over-extension” and could be “financially draining.”

The article also poses Iran as a threat not because of anything the country is doing — but because its existence can inspire others. The article states: “Its successes inspired a wave of radicals throughout the Middle East.” Essentially, if Iran maintains its independent economy and revolutionary government, other countries may be inspired to rise up and fight for these things.

It should be no surprise that after the nuclear deal was signed, Saudi Arabia executed Ayatollah Nimr Al-Nimr, the Shia cleric who led peaceful protests for democratic reform. It should also be no surprise that the US-aligned regime in Nigeria assaulted the Shia religious stronghold in Zaria, killing over a thousand people, and continues to hold Sheikh Zakzaky in military detention.

The aftermath of the nuclear agreement has been a great disappointment to those who strive for peace and international cooperation. The United States has not responded to Iran’s appeasement by relaxing its attacks, but rather by escalating them. US leaders saw the negotiations not as an opportunity for a new beginning, but as a sign of weakness. The nuclear deal has pushed US leaders into a kind of feeding frenzy. Like a shark smelling blood, they now intensify their hostility, seeking to sink their teeth into a peaceful, oil-rich country that dares assert economic and political independence.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

While two district attorneys are turned away in response to racist police killings

Recent electoral data indicates that the number of African American voters going to the polls in the Democratic primaries and caucuses has taken a precipitous decline since 2008 when Barack Obama was elected.

Despite the much championed reliance on the African American electorate by the Clinton campaign, this trend of declining participation could prove to be an ominous sign for the Democrats in the upcoming general elections in November.

The number of African-Americans who voted in the March 15 primaries declined drastically by an estimated 40 percent in Ohio, 38 percent in Florida and 34 percent in North Carolina compared with the turnout in the 2008 Democratic primary when Obama was on the ballot. (New York Post, March 17)

The super PAC called Black Votes Matter founded by Charlie King has warned that even though primary turnouts are normally less than general elections, the Democratic Party must not assume that it will be able to mobilize the necessary electoral support to ensure a Clinton victory in November if she is able to maintain her lead in delegates.

“It will be very hard for the Hillary campaign alone to have a message that excites Reagan Democrats and the 4 million new Black Barack Obama voters to come out and vote. That is why Donald Trump poses a real challenge,” King said. “And if that is not corrected, a number of states like Ohio, Florida and Virginia can turn to Republican-leaning states . . . Trump could become president.”

King, who is based in New York and has served as a Democratic Party strategist, told the New York Times that “No one has captured the real dilemma in the 2016 election. It’s not a question of whether Hillary Clinton would get 90 percent of the black vote. The question is: 90 percent of what?” (New York Times, March 3)

Results from the 2012 presidential elections indicate that the African American voters contributed significantly to the Obama campaign winning slim margins of victory over Republican candidate Mitt Romney in Florida (50-49 percent), Ohio (50-48), Virginia (51-48) and Pennsylvania (52-47). Higher turnouts among African Americans are presumed to have made the difference in North Carolina where a Democratic nominee won the state for the first time in decades.

The New York Times noted that “Even Mrs. Clinton’s strong victory in South Carolina, which was celebrated for her dominance among African-American voters, obscured a decline in Black turnout of about 40 percent.” (March 3)

Nonetheless, supporters of Clinton suggests that the prospects of a Trump victory, if he is nominated by the Republican Party at their upcoming Cleveland convention, will inspire traditional Democratic constituencies to show up in great numbers in November. A fundraiser for the Clinton campaign Robert Zimmerman said “There will be a spiritual fervor for Democrats to come out and vote.” (New York Post, March 17)

Larger Votes for Sanders Among African Americans

At the same time greater numbers of African Americans and other oppressed groups are voting for Sanders illustrating the lack of enthusiasm for the Clinton campaign.

This was reflected in the exit poll results for Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, where African American support for Sanders rivaled that in Michigan.  Hillary Clinton continued to win the majority of African American votes. Nonetheless, Sanders increased his percentage of African American votes in these states compared to his performance in the South.

Exit polls say Sanders was not able to exceed 20 percent of the Black voter share in southern states which made up the old Confederacy.  Nevertheless, exit poll data shows he won 28 percent of the African American vote in Michigan and Ohio, 29 percent in Illinois, and 32 percent in Missouri. (ajc.com, March 17)

In Michigan where Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders staged an upset against Hillary Clinton, voter turnout exceeded expectations.  Some 2.5 million cast ballots which was the largest level of participation since 1972 when George Wallace won the Democratic primary over the issue of cross-district busing.

However, more Republicans turned out than Democrats.  A total of 1,322,742 voters participated in the Republican primary, giving Donald Trump a victory, while 1,193,169 voted in the Democratic primary. (mlive.com, March 9)

Lower Turnout of Democratic Voters in General

This level of participation is reflected throughout the entire Democratic electoral base where the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the favorite candidate among the party hierarchy and its backers on Wall Street.

According to the New York Times, “In Nevada, exit polls suggested that Hispanic voters — who have helped push the once deeply Republican state toward Democrats in national elections — voted in significantly lower numbers than in 2008. In Iowa, where Mrs. Clinton barely won after a hotly fought battle with Sanders, exit polls suggested that turnout for voters under the age of 30 dropped by roughly 40 percent from 2008.” (March 3)

The closeness of the primary results in Illinois, Clinton’s home state, and neighboring Missouri, portends much for the potential outcome of the general elections as it relates to the degree of political interests in supporting Clinton. Although the Democratic Party leaders and elected officials speak with confidence leading toward the convention in Philadelphia during late July, there are still 31 more primaries and caucuses between March 22 and June 14.

Despite the suggestions that Clinton is well on her way to clinching the nomination, she only leads Sanders by 317 delegates, (1,147 to Sanders’ 830). Illustrating the undemocratic character of the selection process for nominees, there are 712 super delegates who have already pledged their allegiance to Clinton giving her the advantage. These super delegates can ostensibly switch sides to Sanders if he is able to overcome Clinton in the upcoming elections.

If Trump is selected as the nominee for the Republicans and the Democratic electoral base is not mobilized in support of the potential candidacy of Clinton, the probability for an extreme right-wing presidency exists.

Both Clinton and Trump represent ruling class interests from Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Either way the nationally oppressed and working people in general will be faced with the necessity of building an independent political movement to challenge and defeat the inevitable programs of economic austerity, state repression and imperialist militarism.

Overall there is a greater turnout in the primaries and caucuses among Republicans, largely due to the Trump campaign, than what exists among the Democratic electorate. The San Diego Union Tribune noted in a March 14 article, including graphs of electoral participation in various states, that “Republican voters have been turning out in record numbers in the primary contests held so far. Democrats on the other hand are showing up in lower numbers than they did in 2008, the last open election.”

African American Voters Defeat District Attorneys in Chicago and Cleveland

Another notable occurrence in the recent primary elections in Ohio and Illinois was the voting out of office of two county prosecutors in Chicago (Cook) and Cleveland (Cuyahoga). These electoral victories stemmed from two high-profile police killings of Laquan McDonald in Chicago and Tamir Rice in Cleveland during 2014.

In Chicago, Anita Alvarez was the target of mass demonstrations when it was revealed that police had attempted to cover up the killing of MacDonald, who was shot 16 times after walking away from the cops in Chicago. Rice, a 12-year-old African American youth, was shot down while playing with a toy gun in a public park in Cleveland.

There has been an indictment of one of the Chicago police officers involved in McDonald’s killing. However, no one has been held accountable in the shooting death of Tamir Rice.

Alvarez lost to Kim Foxx, a former assistant state’s attorney, and incumbent Tim McGinty lost to challenger Michael O’Malley, a former Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutor.

State-owned industrial firms targeted in latest round of economic warfare

Earlier this month the United States administration of President Barack Obama utilizing the Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the extension of sanctions encompassing two fertilizer firms based in Zimbabwe which are owned by the Industrial Development Corporation (IDCZ), a government controlled entity.

Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace, 2013 campaign

The Office of Foreign Assets Control included Chemplex Holdings and Zimbabwe Fertilizer Company on its sanctions list. IDCZ owns 100 percent shareholding in Chemplex and 50 percent in the Zimbabwe Fertilizer Company. IDCZ also controls 15 percent of shares in Sable Chemicals, Zimbabwe’s only ammonium nitrate company.

Derick Sibanda, the spokesperson for IDCZ, said these actions by the Obama administration were “deliberately aimed at paralyzing” the agricultural sector of the economy and to frustrate the implementation of Zim-Asset, the Southern African state’s economic development program.

“Well, the two companies have been to some extent affected by virtue of being owned by IDC but the latest development will worsen the situation,” said Sibanda.”The two companies are critical in achieving targets set under the Food and Nutrition cluster.” (allafrica.com, March 10)

The targeting of these two firms was encompassed within the broader sanctions having been in effect since 2003. These sanctions against Zimbabwe were in direct response to the land reform program of 2000 which seized control of 50 percent of commercial farms owned by the descendants of British white settlers who colonized the country during the late 19^th century.

Successive U.S. administrations have never been in full support of Zimbabwean independence even during the height of the national liberation struggle during the 1960s and 1970s. In the aftermath of independence in 1980, Washington sought to limit the degree of sovereignty and economic freedom enjoyed by the people of this agricultural and mineral rich country.

Although Zimbabwe has held numerous internationally-monitored elections since 2000, both the previous government of President George W. Bush and the current Obama administration have continued the sanctions. The Zimbabwe government led by the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) attributes the bulk of its economic problems to the continuation of these punitive economic measures.

Obama issued a statement on March 6 saying in part that

“The threat constituted by the actions and policies of certain members of the Government of Zimbabwe and other persons to undermine Zimbabwe’s democratic processes or institutions, contributing to the deliberate breakdown in the rule of law, to politically motivated violence and intimidation, and to political and economic instability in the southern African region, has not been resolved.”

This same statement goes on claiming

“These actions and policies continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States. For these reasons, I have determined that it is necessary to continue this national emergency and to maintain in force the sanctions to respond to this threat.”

There were no specific documented threats to the U.S. by Zimbabwe included in Obama’s declaration. The country maintains diplomatic relations with Washington where both states have ambassadors deployed in their respective capitals.

Food Shortages Worsen While Sanctions Are Expanded

These actions are taking place amid a mounting food deficit stemming from existing sanctions and aggravated by El Nino in Southern Africa which impacts climate and water availability in the throughout the region.

The number of people in need of food assistance has grown to four million according to reports published in the state-owned Herald newspaper. Minister of Public Service, Labor and Social Welfare, Prisca Mupfumira, noted on March 14 that the government had enough grain stocks to cover the shortages and was speeding up the process to import grain to ensure no one goes without food.

Minister Mupfumira stressed that the government was prepared to meet the needs of the people saying “We have mobilized the resources, and it is all systems out to ensure grain is moved from areas with surplus maize to those that have a deficit.” (Herald, March 15)

She went on to emphasize that “We are now looking forward to the importation programs to increase the flows, but the situation is under control. In terms of transportation, the District Development Fund has adopted a ‘hit and run’ concept that operates with a fleet of 10 trucks that move from province to province distributing maize from the Grain Marketing Board depots to the vulnerable.”

President Robert Mugabe in a speech delivered at a rally held in Bindura on March 18 said that despite reports of political sectarianism in the distribution of much-need food, there would be no discrimination based upon party affiliations. He sought to ensure the people of the area that the government was committed to bringing enough food to meet the burgeoning need.

“Whether we find ourselves in the party or any association, we are all the same, bound together as one family of Zimbabweans.” He added: “As food is being distributed, it is being distributed to people as a whole to save them. We might differ on policies but when we talk of food, all of us should be served. It does not matter which church or party one belongs to.” (Herald, March 19)

Barclays to Leave Zimbabwe

The sanctions not only target potential imports and exports but other institutions which assist the IDCZ. Barclay’s Bank plc was fined $2.5 million by the Department of Treasury for ostensibly violating the sanctions against IDCZ.

On March 5, the Zimbabwe affiliate of Barclays announced that it was closing its operations inside the country. This could potentially have an even more devastating impact on the country’s ability to attract foreign direct investment.

Even though the U.S. has expanded sanctions against Zimbabwe, the European Union (EU) has purportedly lifted most of its bans on conducting trade with the country. However, with Washington seeking to cripple the ZANU-PF government through blocking financial transactions as well, these measures will make it impossible for the resumption of normal relations with other states which do not have the same policy as the Obama administration.

Barclays plc controls 68 percent of shares in Barclays Zimbabwe. The financial institution said it could not continue to combine Barclays Bank Zimbabwe with Barclays Africa Group Limited since the firm “is no longer a good fit with Barclays’ core strategy”. (The Standard, March 6)

In addition the bank said it would reduce its 62.3 percent interest in Barclays Africa Group Limited as well during the course of the next two to three years. This would allow the firm to deconsolidate “from a legal and regulatory perspective.” (Standard)

There is much speculation that the withdrawal of such a multi-national financial institution like Barclays from the African continent is indicative of an exodus of capital in the region.

Neighboring South Africa is undergoing an economic downturn where the value of the national currency and the flight of private investment have been occurring over the last several months.

Economist Reginald Shoko said of the present situation that “Investors have a tendency to follow trends. European investors in particular, prefer working with these international banks when they come to Africa and in this case, Barclays’ exit could jeopardize this. Therefore, Africa as a continent and Zimbabwe as a nation will suffer in terms of FDI.”

Another economist John Robertson said that Barclays Bank Zimbabwe was a separate subsidiary and it was likely that its local banking business would continue, unimpeded by the withdrawal of the parent firm.

“In years to come, when the country recovers, Barclays overseas might consider its investment options and might put more capital into the local bank, but as this current withdrawal affects the whole of Africa, Zimbabwe’s case for support will have to be a very good one,” Robertson said.

Barclays has conducted business in Zimbabwe since 1912, making it the second oldest bank in the country after another British bank Standard Chartered.

Bernie Sanders’ political corpse in the presidential race is still warm, but some of his prominent liberal supporters already are urging us to flee to Hillary Clinton. Sanders, who knows the game is up, will soon become the Democrats’ pied piper. He will seek to entice his supporters into the Democratic Party rattrap. He has decried the disruption of Trump rallies—denigrating the only power we have left—saying “people should not disrupt anybody’s meetings.” His “political revolution,” like his promise of a movement, is a cynical form of advertising. Sanders will, like the Barack Obama of 2008, end as an impediment to the mass movements he claims to represent. And mass movements in our system of “inverted totalitarianism” are our final and only hope.

I understand the fear over Donald Trump. I too want to crush the growing fascist sentiments rising up from the rot and decay of American society. But voting for Clinton and supporting the Democratic Party will not halt our descent into despotism. It will only accelerate it. Trump is not creating phenomena. He is responding to them. It is up to us to halt the array of forces, including the Trump campaign, that are preparing a species of American fascism and orchestrating a global ecocide. The only way we have left to vote is with our feet.

When fundamental rights are abolished by the state, as novelist and activist Arundhati Roy has pointed out, “they are almost always won back only through revolution.” And it is not as if we have much time left. Josh Fox, in his brutally honest film about the looming effects of climate change, “How to Let Go of the World (and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change),” notes that we have to cut 80 percent of all carbon emissions by 2020 if we are to have any hope of saving the Greenland ice sheet. The Paris climate talks were a step backward. The loss of the polar ice will flood coastal cities around the globe. It will trigger a global ecological catastrophe. It will displace hundreds of millions of people. It will bring, if not revolution, violence, anarchy, chaos, suffering and death that will rival the black plague. And our elites intend to do nothing to stop it. That fact alone should send us into the streets.

The Democrats, and in particular Hillary and Bill Clinton, are responsible as much as anyone on the right for our being sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. They told the same lies as the right-wingers. They fed the same hate. They too orchestrated the corporate coup. The Clintons removed from the Democratic Party platform the progressive stances championed byJesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. They spoke early in their careers in the coded racism of “law and order.” They transformed the Democratic Party into the old Republican Party. They unleashed the predators of Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry. They stripped us of our civil liberties, championed endless war and empowered the arms industry and agencies such as Homeland Security to suck the marrow out of the federal budget. The Clintons and the Democratic Party filled the prisons and destroyed welfare. And under President Obama it has gotten worse. Obama authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens. He signed into law legislation that permits the military to act as a domestic police force and detain U.S. citizens indefinitely without due process. He and the Democratic Party establishment are attempting to ram new trade agreements down our throats.

It pays to betray the citizenry. The Clintons have made more than $153 million for paid speeches alone since 2001. The Democratic Party is awash in corporate cash. And the Obamas will soon, like the Clintons, be multimillionaires.

The two parties colluded to turn American politics into anti-politics. The culture wars replaced political debate. The Democrats co-opted the liberal elites and unions. The Republican Party embraced the lunatics of the Christian right, nativists and opponents of abortion rights. The Republicans and the Democrats looked at their supporters as useful idiots. It worked for a while. Then the manipulated and the abandoned sent the elites back to their gated estates. Voters flocked to Trump hate rallies and fueled Sanders’ political insurgency.

It was a bankrupt liberal establishment that made possible the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia in the 20th century. The great intellectuals, writers, philosophers and artists—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Hannah Arendt—who fought against emergent fascism and communism warned about a failed liberalism. They understood that stories of rage were, first of all, stories of despair. Liberalism, by constantly betraying its stated values, neutered and discredited itself as a political force. Its self-destruction left the working poor bereft of their only means of halting their abject exploitation and abuse. Incremental and piecemeal reform became impossible. When the underclasses turned against the liberal establishment they rejected not only its representatives but also the values liberals claimed to represent. And they searched for a leader who promised new glory, moral renewal and vengeance.

In his book “The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,” Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany and later a scholar of fascism, examined the roots of fascist ideology. He singled out as fundamental to the rise of fascism the collapse of liberalism as a political force and a government crippled by infighting and paralysis. He wrote of the nascent German fascists:

They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism [laissez-faire capitalism], materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.

Who wants to support liberals when, year after year, they demonstrate that they stand for nothing? Who can trust liberals when they routinely sell out because they are afraid? (You cannot truly claim you oppose the apartheid state of Israel, endless war, mass incarceration, the ravaging of the environment or wholesale state surveillance and then go vote for Clinton.) How can you build a movement to blunt the legitimate rage of the underclasses if you are not willing to defend their most basic rights?

There are mechanisms to wrest back our democracy. Voting in presidential elections is not one of them. Shutting down Trump rallies, as took place in Chicago, and blocking fracking sites are examples of the only form of direct democracy left. We must begin to mobilize around mass actions. We must, in large and small ways, disrupt the system.

Street demonstrations to denounce the party conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia would expose the political theater. Unfortunately, the state, whose fear of protests is pathological, will impose de facto martial law in the host cities during the conventions, as it has in the past. It will flood the streets with militarized police, set up mazes of barricades and deploy the usual array of militarized hardware—including drones and helicopters—and crowd control technology. The state has, I suspect, already infiltrated and is monitoring any group it believes might attempt to protest. Authorities will work to make it impossible for any demonstrator to get within blocks of the convention halls. Sustained, mass civil disobedience—if not in Cleveland and Philadelphia then in other parts of the country—that can impede the machinery of corporate power is our only hope.

There were once radicals in America, people who held fast to moral imperatives. They fought for the oppressed because it was right, not because it was easy or practical. They were willing to accept the state persecution that comes with open defiance. They had the courage of their convictions. They were not afraid. It is only by reclaiming this radicalism that the left can regain its credibility and effect change. It was the radical left that amid the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s ensured we had the New Deal rather than American fascism, which many U.S. industrialists openly championed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt told his fellow oligarchs that it was either the New Deal or a revolution. Better to lose some of your wealth, he warned them, rather than all of it.

We need to once again make the power elites afraid.

Ask yourself, what would Ida B. Wells, Mother Jones, Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Emma Goldman or “Big Bill” Haywood do? What would Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker or Fred Hampton do?

“They were madmen [and madwomen],” Pierre-Auguste Renoir said of the radicals who rose up and led the Paris Commune, “but they had in them that little flame which never dies.”

These radicals understood that plutocrats and the armed goons who kept them in power had to be fought. There was not enough money, power or fear to get them to surrender their integrity. And because they did not waver, indeed were willing to suffer persecution and in some cases death to speak truth and demand justice, they inspired those around them to resist. Present-day protesters in the United States, such as those in Chicago after the police murder of Laquan McDonald and those who were targets of arrest or violence at or near two Trump rallies in Arizona, grasp this fundamental truth about power. These men and women did not wait for police permits to march or protest. They defied the law. Some of them went to jail. We will embrace this inspiration and courage, handed down by earlier generations of radicals, or we will stumble like sleepwalkers toward catastrophe.

Islam challenges the two major premises of Western imperial world domination: “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” (Mayer Rothschild) “War is the continuation of policy by other means.” (Carl von Clausewitz). These geopolitical “laws” underlie modern capitalism that Islam rejects. Both theses cited in Eric Walberg’s previous book “Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games”. The challenge of these hypotheses by Islamic resistance movements and states like Iran to imperialism in the 21st century is exemplified in the author’s newest book “Islamic Resistance to Imperialism”.

Therein, the author combines his geopolitical knowledge with his deep understanding of Islam. Showing a great apprehension of the Muslim Brotherhood, it must have been a bitter medicine for him to swallow when Egypt’s new military dictator crushed the Muslim Brotherhood that was in thrall with Turkey, Qatar, and the US. The Saudis backing of Egypt’s Abdel el-Sisi had a lot to do with his dirty work for Western imperialism. The failure of secular resistance to imperialism must be confronted, and the more resilient Islamic movements understood by the public, writes Walberg.

Eric Walberg, who is a Canadian journalist, belongs to the very few who still have the guts to look behind the facade of state organized propaganda. His journalistic and political experience and his Muslim faith render him immune to the swansongs of flatteries and vanity fairs that most journalists can’t resist.

In his book on geopolitical strategy, the author focuses on the Middle East and the global ramifications of the multiple state destruction resulting from Western aggression. Walberg addresses the following questions:

What is left of the historic Middle East upheavals of 1979 (Afghanistan, Iran) and 2011 (the Arab Spring)? How does 9/11 fit into the equation of Islamic resistance? Is al-Qaeda’s long-term project still on track? What are the chances that ISIS can prevail in Iraq and Syria? Are they and like-minded jihadists dupes of imperialism or legitimate resistance movements?

Part I, comprised of four chapters, addresses the colonial legacy, the meaning of jihad, and the parallel movements among Sunni and Shia to confront imperialism.

Part II considers the main figures among the “neo-Wahhabi” movement: Azzam, Bin Laden, and Zawahiri. The author questions the justification of indiscriminate violence as well as its legacy. He then turns to the movements that attempt to re-establish the Caliphate, the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring, and the experience of key Muslim-majority countries in the past two decades (Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Iran).

He then sums up the state of the ummah in the 21st century and prospects for future Islamic resistance to imperialism.

According to Walberg, in 1979, the Iranian revolution challenged the very foundations of the Western imperialist system. Although Ayatollah Khomeini proposed non-violence like Gandhi did, he was dismissed as a “terrorist” because Islam poses a “real threat to empire and its claims of superiority to non-western cultures”. Khomeini understood very well what imperialism and Zionism stood for. Both denied God’s authority, writes Walberg. To glorify Khomeini as a “Muslim” Gandhi may be one thing, but one should not forget that under his rule thousands of Iranian communists were murdered.

The Saudis felt increasingly challenged by the Iranian revolution in its leadership role within the ummah. They instigated not only a proxy war in Syria to overthrow Iran’s protégé Bashar al-Assad, who belongs to the Alevi sect, an offshoot of Shiism, but also got into partnership with the Zionist regime in Jerusalem. Consequently, Walberg writes;”The need for unity of the ummah, for Sunni-Shia convergence, in confronting imperialism and providing an alternative approach to the violent al-Qaeda-types has never been clearer. Iran’s Islamic revolution remains as the bellwether, even though attempts to emulate it have not yet succeeded. The only Islamist successes in achieving such a convergence recently have been Hizbullah and Hamas, where Sunni-Shia differences have been minimized.”

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah stresses that the current turmoil in the Middle East region is a political, not sectarian conflict, saying that both, Sunnis and Shias, have a common enemy such as Daesh (ISIS). Saudi Arabia disagrees because it sees the Iranians as enemies.

Although, Olivier Roy, a French professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy,  dismisses the Iranian revolution as “the last of the leftist, Third Worldist and anti-imperialist revolutions, carried out under an Islamic cloak”, the author thinks otherwise: “there is life in the Iranian revolution yet, as its unwavering defiance of empire shows, and its ability to adjust its path through debate and an electoral system”. Comparing Iran to Saudi Arabia, he considers the latter as light-years behind the political achievements of the former.  Walberg also rejects the imperialist invention of the so-called “Judeo-Christian heritage “. In fact, the Iranian political system is highly complex and guided by spiritual means that Westerners do not or do not want to acknowledge. Alastair Crooke arrived to a similar conclusion in his excellent book “Resistance. The Essence of the Islamist Revolution”.

The Western strategy of manipulating Islam to promote imperial ends is more than two centuries old. The Islamic revolution in Iran, inspired by opposition towards the existing neocolonial regime, was carried out in the name of Islam and had also echoes in the Sunni world. That same year, it prompted Saudi rebels to occupy the Kaaba in a desperate attempt to spark the revolution, it inspired Syrian Islamists to rise against Hafez al-Assad in 1980, and may have led future al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri to conspire in the assassination of  Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. But these uprisings were crushed, and the Sunni world remained mired in its neocolonial purgatory, defeated by empire’s machinations and falling prey to Saudi instigations against Shia anti-imperialists, writes the author.

The author has still some doubts whether 9/11 was a false flag operation. He admits, nevertheless, that “9/11 also provided a convenient casus belli for the empire, blackening Islam in the eyes of the world – the most obvious reason for the imperialists to perpetrate such a false flag operation if they are indeed responsible. Whoever is responsible, 9/11 did, nonetheless, instill in Muslims a burning and urgent purpose: to affirm their religion and to let the world know what Islam and jihad really stand for – which has nothing to do with blowing up innocent people.”

“There is sharp criticism in the 9/11 Commission Report of the Pentagon, CIA, FBI and Federal Aviation Administration for blatant lying and obstruction, though it seems that this concentrated more on covering up their incompetence, their refusal to share vital information, and the fact that their agents among the conspirators were really double agents.” This report doesn’t just cover up the alleged “incompetence” but rather the active involvement of the Bush/Cheney administration. It’s well known that the report is riddled with contradictions, flaws, and outright lies and does not even mention the demolition of WTC No 7 that its value is equal to zero.

Although leftist secularists dismiss Islam, partly because of its social conservatism, they should, at least acknowledge that their secular discourse doesn’t inspire the masses anymore and has run its course. Even Christians and Jews who recognize that their faiths have been compromised in the age of imperialism are inspired by the believers of Islam, writes Walberg. The author argues that the West finally sees reason: “Even the imperialists are beginning to recognize that Islamists must be given a chance to rule if only in order to sap the following of the violent alternative.” At least for Palestine, this statement doesn’t hold true. After the election victory of Hamas in 2006 the US and its client states fell into line with Israel’s rhetoric that labeled Hamas a “terrorist organization”.

Whether “post-materialism” which rose in the 1970s in the West represents a new morality against consumerism that can fall into line with the “essence of Islam” remains to be seen. It seems as if Islam has the potential as the last movement of resistance against Western imperialism.

Did You Know That the US Once Planned to Attack Itself — and Blame Castro?

Introduction by Russ Baker:

As we watch President Obama being warmly welcomed in Cuba, we think back to the secret, shameful things done in the past by the US to undermine Castro, not counting the various assassination attempts. This report lays bare one of the more hair-raising schemes.

On March 13, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed to President John F. Kennedy that the United States attack itself — and blame Cuba. This is what is known as a “false flag” event.

This proposal came at the request of the CIA’s Edward Lansdale who was in charge of the anti-Castro project.

Kennedy dismissed it as lunacy, certain to lead to war. This set him on a fatal collision course with the most powerful people in the country.

This little-known proposal, code-named Operation Northwoods, is highly relevant today. It provides a crucial backdrop to the murderous mindset of those whom Castro — and Kennedy — had angered.  Moreover, we would be foolish to assume that  the basic nature of institutions has changed. The temptation to engineer so-called false flag events may simply be too great to resist.

Was Northwoods an anomaly? Certainly not. Creating provocations to justify action — by making it appear you are only reacting — has long been a ploy of many governments, over time and throughout the world.

The United States has hardly been immune to the temptation to shape events, opinion, and historical trajectories: An explosion on the US battleship, The Maine, in Havana Harbor, may have been designed to build public support for the American takeover of Cuba; the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an attack blamed on the North Vietnamese to justify widening the Vietnam Conflict; Operation Gladio, in which terrorist attacks in  Europe in the 1970s were blamed on leftists but engineered by right-wing networks supported by American intelligence. And WhoWhatWhy has covered the recent use of falsified atrocities to justify the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi and the strategic grab of that valuable North African real estate.

So it is no surprise that many Americans do not trust their government when it assures them it was caught completely unawares by the 9/11 attacks. Because past is prologue, we would do well to learn the particulars of Northwoods.

Peter Dale Scott — professor of English at Berkeley, former Canadian diplomat, poet, author of several critically acclaimed books on the pivotal events of America’s recent past — has unusual insight into such events. Here is a short excerpt from his book, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Chapter 9: “ 9/11 and the American Tradition of Engineered Deep Events.”):

Operation Northwoods: Planning Provocations and Deceptions against Cuba

by Peter Dale Scott

We know that the Pentagon was capable of planning atrocities as pretexts for war from the series of documents known collectively as Project Northwoods.

Edward Lansdale Photo credit: US Air Force / Wikimedia

Northwoods was a JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] response to a request from Edward Lansdale, who in 1962 was chief of operations for the anti-Castro Cuba Project, also known as Operation Mongoose.

Lansdale had asked “for brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.” (1) The JCS document, signed by JCS Chief Lyman Lemnitzer, obliged with a list of false-flag possibilities such as the following:

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement, also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

This was only one of nine paragraphs in an annex proposing a menu of (in its words) possible “provocation” and “deception” against Cuba.

[Ed: To read about more of these proposed engineered events, please go here.]

Operation Northwoods Memorandum
Photo credit: Department of Defense / Wikimedia

That Lemnitzer would forward such a provocative document is not surprising. Only a few months earlier, in July 1961, he had joined CIA Director Allen Dulles in supporting a plan for a nuclear surprise attack on the Soviet Union “in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.”(2)

Air Force General Leon Johnson later told the National Security Council that the JCS estimated a preemptive strike would result in “at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR.”(3)

One year later, in May 1963, another JCS document continued to write of “engineering a provocation as a pretext for invasion” and argued that “the engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible and could be accomplished with the resources available.”(4)

This document was prepared by J-5, the JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy, “in response to a request [of March 25, 1963] from the Chairman of the JCS to provide comment and recommendation concerning the requirements for and desirability of fomenting a revolt in Cuba, giving consideration to the advantage of engineering an incident as an alternate cause for invasion.”(5) This chairman was Kennedy’s choice to succeed Lemnitzer, Maxwell Taylor.

(Taylor is generally remembered as the advocate of a flexible response rather than “massive retaliation” to deal with international crises. But he is also the general who, from as early as 1961, was meeting with other hawks “to get Kennedy to… use military force in both Laos and South Vietnam.”(6) Significantly, Taylor as JCS Chairman in 1963 was simultaneously promoting J-5 plans for escalated attacks, or 34A Operations, against North Vietnam.)

All this Cuban planning was in support of JCS OPLANS 312 (Air Attack in Cuba) and 316 (Invasion of Cuba). These were not theoretical exercises but actively developed operational plans that the JCS were only too eager to execute.(7)

(It is not generally realized that the blockade of Cuba, now enforced for almost a half century, began as the first step in planning for OPLAN 316.) (8)

In support of these plans, J-5 served as a workshop for manufacturing pretexts, or what we may call deep deception events. As James G. Hershberg wrote in 1990,

A review of Pentagon planning makes it clear that for a small circle of high civilian and military officials, the idea  that the United States might deliberately provoke events in Cuba that could serve as a pretext for U.S. intervention represented a possible course of action, frequently invoked, rather than an unthinkable libel that had emerged from the paranoid fantasies of Havana and Moscow.(9)

At least one of the false-flag deceptions envisioned in the Northwoods document — “Cuban’ shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach” of another country — may have been implemented.

Venezuela announced in November 1963 that it had discovered on a Venezuelan beach a cache of Cuban arms, consisting of rifles, machine guns, and ammunition.

This was shortly after John F. Kennedy had asked CIA Director John McCone for evidence of Castro’s intervention in Venezuela “that could be presented in a Public forum, such as the OAS [Organization of American States].”   [Especially after the agreement with Khrushchev not to invade Cuba, Kennedy was obsessed with stopping a wider spread of Castroism in Latin America. His request for evidence, however, should not be interpreted as an invitation to manufacture it.] 

CIA officers brought one of the cached rifles to the Kennedys, and Richard Helms reports that the president responded, “Great work.”(10)  [Ed: To learn more about this episode, please go here.]

References

1. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, March 13, 1962 (Northwoods Document), 1, NARA # 202-10002-10404, 128, reproduced in Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2004), 595.

2.  Notes on National Security Meeting, July 20, 1961, in James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell, “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?” American Prospect, Fall 1994, 88; cf. James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 235.

3.  Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 239–40.

4.  Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, NARA #202 -10002-10018, 21, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=167&relPageId=21.

5.  Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 4.

6.  Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 265, cf. 148.

7.  g., Memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Kennedy, November 16, 1962, JCSM-910-62, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/msc_cuba186.asp: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff are glad to report that our Armed Forces are in an optimum posture to execute CINCLANT OPLANS 312-62 (Air Attack in Cuba) (1) and 316-62 (Invasion of Cuba). (2) We are not only ready to take any action you may order in Cuba, we are also in an excellent condition world-wide to counter any Soviet military response to such action.”

8.  Telegram from the Headquarters of the Commander in Chief, Atlantic, to the Headquarters of the Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet, September 21, 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States , 1961–1963 [hereinafter FRUS], vol. 10, 1082–83.

9.  Hershberg, “Before ‘The Missiles of October,’” 242.

10.  Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 107.

An ugly feature of life in modern Washington is that anyone who dares criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians can expect to be subjected to nasty accusations of “anti-Semitism” and other attacks that are meant to make the target politically untouchable.

For example, The New York Times published a full-page ad on Saturday paid for by a pro-Zionist group called The World Values Network featuring a grainy graphic of Sidney Blumenthal and his son Max Blumenthal along with a demand that “Hillary Clinton must disavow her anti-Israel advisors.”

The text accuses Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton’s longtime personal friend and adviser, of sending the Secretary of State emails in which “he was obsessed with painting the Jewish state in the most unflattering light.”

The ad cites Blumenthal writing on March 20, 2010, that “The policy of the present Israeli government is endangering the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Blumenthal is also attacked for noting Israeli “settlers’ theft of water from Palestinian towns” and, according to the ad, sending Clinton an article “claiming Israel was pursuing goals contrary to U.S. interests, while ‘starting a rebellion’ against the United States.”

Image: A graphic from The World Values Network’s attack on Sidney and Max Blumenthal.

Though such comments might seem like no-brainers to anyone who has followed Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and how that behavior has inspired Islamic extremism, The World Values Network views the comments as evidence of anti-Semitism.

The ad then denounces Blumenthal’s son, Max, saying “Even more shocking still were Sid Blumenthal’s attempts to feed Hillary Clinton toxic analysis from his son Max, a self-declared ‘anti-Zionist’ and fanatical Israel-hater. This rotten apple did not fall far from the tree.”

The World Values Network is headed by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who likes to go by the nickname “America’s Rabbi.” The group is one of many that has sought to scar any political figure who won’t toe the line of Israel’s right-wing government as it rejects any reasonable peace agreement with the Palestinians and periodically “mows the grass” by launching bloody attacks on Gaza and the West Bank.

Typically, the way this Zionist political strategy works is to demonize individuals, like Blumenthal or his son, and then demand that an ally must disassociate from them or face political reprisals. The approach is a form of McCarthyism. In this case, The World Values Network makes clear what Clinton must do if she wishes to receive Jewish support in her presidential campaign. She must publicly renounce the Blumenthals.

The ad says: “Hillary Clinton is running for President. She’s asking friends of Israel to count on her support of the always-vulnerable Jewish State. If she won’t disassociate herself from her discredited advisor Sid Blumenthal and his rabid, Israel-hating son Max, how can we?”

Pressuring Branson

In a similar attack, the same group has sought to drive a wedge between businessman Richard Branson and both former President Jimmy Carter and South African Bishop Desmond Tutu for their offense of criticizing Israel’s abuse of Palestinians.

“But a little known and unfortunate fact about Branson is his strange, anti-Israel opinions and activities that are beneath a man known for having a good and kind heart,” The World Values Network states at its Web site.

“In 2007, Branson founded an organization called ‘The Elders’ which was made up of a council of twelve elder statesmen who would serve as ‘independent global leaders working together for peace and human rights.’ …

“Unfortunately among the elders that Branson selected for his new group are a Who’s who of some of the most tenacious, anti-Israel public figures in the world today. The Elders’ anti-Israel statements and press releases condemning the Jewish state are a sad testament to this fact.

“Topping the Elders’ list is former President Jimmy Carter, a man dedicated to the disgustingly fraudulent and anti-Semitic proposition that Israel is an apartheid State. Carter’s defamatory fabrications about the Jewish State include the lie not only that Israel is like apartheid South Africa but that ‘voices from Jerusalem dominate our media.’ Last year he claimed [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu wasn’t interested in making peace…

“Other ‘elders’ in Branson’s organization include the notoriously anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Bishop Desmond Tutu, … Tutu is a supporter of the BDS movement, calling for an economic and cultural boycott of Israel. His bigoted views have surfaced with statements such as, ‘The Jewish lobby is powerful — very powerful,’ while accusing Jews of ‘an arrogance — the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.’

“Tutu has stated that Zionism has ‘very many parallels with racism,’ and has accused the Jewish state of subjecting the Palestinians to ‘Israeli Apartheid.’”

Again, you might say that little of what Carter and Tutu have said is controversial — at least in the sense of what is empirically true. After all, Netanyahu himself vowed during his last campaign that he would not reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians and there is no doubt that the Israelis treat the Palestinians as inferior beings who are sharply restricted in where they can and cannot go.

But the goal of attacks like the ones from The World Values Network is to use “guilt by association” to marginalize anyone who criticizes Israel by trying to scare a Clinton or a Branson into renouncing the Blumenthals or Carter or Tutu. If that wedge can be driven, then the repudiation itself can be waved about as an example of what happens to some public figure who dares fault the Israeli government.

As the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee holds its annual convention in Washington – and U.S. political leaders from all political persuasions troop across the stage to express their devotion and dedication to Israel – The New York Times ad is a reminder of what’s in store for anyone who deviates.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

U.S. Campaign 2016: Searching for Democracy in a Broken System

They Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the National Defense Forces (NDF) are continuing operations in the province of Latakia. On Mar.20, the Syrian forces repelled al-Nusra attempts to capture the village of al-Soucha. Since the partly departure of Russian forces from Syria, al Nusra militants have been attempting to restore their control on Jabal al-Qal’ah. However, all their attempts have failed. Meanwhile, Syrian troops took control of the Points 287, 397 and 409 in the province’s northern part and killed militants infiltrated al-Sawda village.

The SAA units repelled ISIS attacks on the villages of Kafr Saghir and Babins in Northern Aleppo. According to reports, some 50 militants were killed. Separately, the Syrian Air Force targeted ISIS’ positions in Deir Hafir and Maskana in the eastern part of Aleppo.

In Palmyra, the Syrian forces supported by Russian warplanes and helicopters took control of two hills overlooking the Ithriya-Palmyra road and set a fire control on it. The Ithriya-Palmyra road had been the ISIS main supply route between Eastern Hama and Palmyra. The road had been also used by ISIS for transporting oil from the town of Al-Sukhanah to the province of Al-Raqqa.

Despite the partial withdrawal of Russian air grouping from Syria, Russians are continuing to develop infrastructure and facilities at their air base and naval base in Latakia. These developments clearly demonstrate Moscow’s intention to maintain a military presence there. Thus, as SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence forecasted on October 1, the Russian military operation in Syria has set the ground for establishing a permanent Russian air and naval bases in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The US military said in a statement on March. 20 that the soldiers from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) will be deployed in support of the CJTF-OIR campaign against ISIS. We remember, the US has already deployed a large number of ground troops at a military base near Makhmur.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces seized a bridge in the city of al-Baghdadi, located northwest of Hit along the Euphrates. Iraqi forces are conducting an offensive to retake the city of Hit and the town of Kubaysah from ISIS.

The bold initiative by the Russian government to withdraw some of its forces from Syria is a lesson in the use of limited military means to achieve limited political ends. With the finesse of a skilled surgeon, the Russian intervention saved the Syrian government from being overwhelmed by the NATO proxies attacking it, inflicted a fatal blow to the American attempt to achieve hegemony in the Middle East, enhanced Russian prestige in the world, and demonstrated that the economic warfare being waged against Russia by the USA, EU and Canada, has had no effect on either Russian determination to choose an independent foreign policy or the military means to put it into effect.

The confusion and consternation in the NATO block as they realise that, once again, they have been outwitted, is dramatic. Once again the western intelligence services have proved to be asleep at the wheel, and their government leadership mired in fantasies of their own creation. The embarrassed silence from Washington, which for months has been claiming that Russia was going to be bogged down and chewed up by the Syrian war, reflects the incompetence of its political leadership, from President Obama to the contenders for the Presidency in the current American elections. None of them know what to do, except react in frustration, a reaction that does not exactly lead to rational policies.

The achievement of the limited ceasefire a few weeks ago, forced on the Americans by the reality on the battlefield, set up the logic of this partial withdrawal. The withdrawal underscores the Russian and Syrian policy of achieving a satisfactory political settlement of the war, forces the western powers to support that policy, or be declared opponents of peace, yet, at the same time, gives Russia and Syria the flexibility to respond to any attempts to escalate the violence from whatever direction they may come.

The Russian defence ministry has stated that the remaining Russian air group will continue to provide air support to the Syrian forces and will continue to hit the groups that refuse to abide by the ceasefire or those determined to be “terrorist” groups, in fact the bulk of the forces attacking the Syrian people. Further the S400 air defence systems are to remain in place to cover the Russian forces remaining and to deter aggression from Turkey, Saudi Arabia or American forces. Yet, the withdrawal signals a clear de-escalation of the war and can be taken as an announcement that the enemy has been dealt a fatal blow.

This initiative was taken at the same time that Russia protested any further NATO military actions against Libya unless they had Security Council approval and at the same time that it joined China in calling for the Americans to reduce the pressure on North Korea and commit to a final and peaceful resolution of the conflict on the Korean peninsular. Unfortunately, both Russia and China have joined the United States in condemning North Korea’s attempts to defend itself with nuclear weapons against the threat of nuclear war coming from the United States.

This condemnation seems to be in reaction to the fear that North Korea’s defence doctrine will provoke the USA into launching a war that will affect all Asia or, at the least, give the Americans an excuse to put new anti-ballistic missile systems into south Korea which will threaten the security of not only North Korea but also China and Russia. Perhaps they have a valid point and perhaps there are other reasons unknown to us that prompted them to join in the virtual blockade of North Korea, but the injustice is blatant. All three nuclear powers are enhancing and building their own nuclear weapon systems; Saudi Arabia is making noises that it has nuclear weapons, along with Israel, without any reaction from the big three; and the government of North Korea is being threatened with continuing military exercises that threaten a immediate decapitation strike of its government and nuclear annihilation.

The current exercises being carried out in Korea are the largest ever conducted, involving over 300,000 soldiers, US aircraft carrier battle groups, nuclear submarines, B-2 bombers, Australian naval ships and, to add insult to injury, Japanese forces that attacked and occupied Korea in the Second World War and that helped the Americans to attack the north in 1950. The stated objective of the exercises is to practice Operation Plan 5015, the action plan to kill the Korean leadership, destroy its bases and invade and occupy the country. A first strike using nuclear weapons is a part of that plan.

No one denies that North Korea has reason to feel backed into a corner and no one denies that they have the right to defend themselves as Russia and China are doing against the same enemy. Logic and fairness dictate that imposing an economic blockade on North Korea is tantamount to war and that this can only have the effect of making North Korea even more desperate and determined to react. This reaction to the situation in Korea is in stark contrast to the reasoned approach Russia, with Chinese support, has taken in Syria or Russia’s handling of the on-going crisis in Ukraine.

It would seem obvious that the best way to reduce tension in Korea is to support North Korea in the same way that Syria has been supported, with some guarantee of its security and a diplomatic initiative to force the Americans to back down and come to terms with the government and people of the country. North Korea has stated time and again that all it wants is to be left alone and to have a peace treaty with the United States and a guarantee that it will not be attacked. Then it is prepared to consider eliminating its nuclear weapons systems.

The world breathes a sigh of relief that a peaceful resolution of the war in Syria has shifted from a dream to a distinct possibility but now we face the risk of world war in Asia. North Korea is Asia’s eastern flank. If it is destroyed and its territory occupied by the United States and Japan and other allies, can China and Russia have any doubt what will happen next? It would seem that North Korea is a natural ally of both, but evidently not.

Meanwhile, the world watches the American elections and what it sees is a Fellini film in which the most grotesque of humanity vie for power over the military forces now threatening the world. President Obama, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, is the same man who ordered the military operations in Korea. This is about as peaceful a leader as we can hope for in that militaristic nation. What comes next will be even worse. Surely, there must be an attempt to bring peace to Korea as in Syria. But for that to take place, the pressure on North Korea must be reduced, and its government treated with respect and dignity. The doors to dialogue must be opened, instead of slammed shut, so reason and goodwill can prevail over the fear and malevolence that now guide the actions of the big powers. In Syria, war turns toward peace but, in Korea, peace is threatened by war. Both have their logic; the logic of peace and war, but the world is weary of the logic of war.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, he is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and he is known for a number of high-profile cases involving human rights and war crimes, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

El pasado 17 de marzo del 2016, la Corte Internacional de Justicia (CIJ) se ha declarado competente para examinar dos nuevas demandas planteadas por Nicaragua en el año 2013 contra Colombia con relación al Mar Caribe.

Un breve recuento

Como se recordará el 19 de noviembre del 2012, la CIJ dictaminó su fallo en respuesta a una demanda inicial de Nicaragua registrada en el año 2001 en La Haya. Ante objeciones preliminares presentadas por Colombia cuestionando su competencia, la CIJ procedió a examinar si era o no competente, en un fallo del 2007 (ver  texto ) en el que se inclinó por decidir que sí lo era.  En el 2010, Costa Rica (en febrero) y Honduras (en junio) presentaron ambos (de manera un tanto tardía) solicitudes de intervención, las cuales fueron rechazadas por la CIJ en dos fallos dictaminados en mayo del 2011. Leído el fallo definitivo dado a conocer el 19 de noviembre del 2012 entre Nicaragua y Colombia,  Colombia optó, diez días después, por denunciar un emblemático tratado suscrito en el hemisferio en 1948, como el Pacto que lleva el nombre de su capital (convirtiéndose en el único Estado en hacerlo); a menos de un año de dictaminada la sentencia de la CIJ, el Presidente de Colombia, entre otras inéditas manifestaciones, declaró “no aplicable” dicha decisión, llevando a Nicaragua a reaccionar nuevamente mediante el recurso al juez internacional, y ello con la presentación de dos demandas distintas. Se trata de:

– Una primera demanda, presentada en setiembre del 2013, pocos días después de la declaración presidencial oída en Colombia sobre el supuesto carácter “no aplicable” de la decisión del 2012 de la CIJ, titulada oficialmente por la misma CIJ “Question of the delimitation of the continental shelf between Nicaragua and Colombia beyond 200 nautical miles from the Nicaraguayan coast  / Question de la délimitation du plateau continental entre le Nicaragua et la Colombie au-delà de 200 milles marins de la côte nicaraguayenne“.

– Una segunda, planteada ante la CIJ por Nicaragua al finalizar el mes de noviembre del año 2013, a pocos días de surtir plenos efectos la denuncia del pacto de Bogotá (un año), titulada oficialmente por parte de la CIJ “Alleged violations of sovereign rights and maritime spaces in the Caribbean Sea  /  Violations alléguées de droits souverains et d´espaces maritimes dans la Mer des Caraïbes“.

Figura de las zonas otorgadas a Nicaragua y a Colombia en el Mar Caribe por parte de la CIJ en el fallo del 2012. Extraída de artículo de prensa de Poder.cr

La decisión del 17 de marzo del 2016 de la CIJ

Como era previsible (Nota 1) la estrategia colombiana consistiendo en poner en duda la competencia de la CIJ no surtió mayor efecto, y sus pretensiones fueron rechazadas por los jueces de La Haya. En el caso de la primera demanda, Colombia presentó cinco excepciones preliminares. En el caso de la segunda demanda, mantuvo también cinco excepciones preliminares para intentar evitar un examen en cuanto al fondo. 

De manera que un lector poco familiarizado con estos documentos pueda acceder al texto oficial en inglés y en francés de la decisión de este 17 de marzo del 2016,  estos se encuentran desde ya disponibles:

– en este  enlace  para la versión en  francés (y en este  otro  en inglés), en lo que atañe a la primera demanda presentada por Nicaragua el 16 de setiembre del 2013. Este fallo de la CIJ parece haber sido objeto de un intenso debate colegial en el seno de la CIJ, ya que viene acompañado de una opinión disidente común suscrita por siete jueces, de dos opiniones individuales, de una opinión disidente y de cuatro declaraciones (ver  listado oficial  con acceso a estos ocho documentos elaborados por los jueces de la CIJ). Notemos que la tercera excepción preliminar presentada por Colombia dio lugar en este caso a un inusitado voto de ocho contra ocho en el seno de la CIJ, inclinando la balanza el voto preponderante de su Presidente;

– en francés  aquí  y en inglés  aquí , la decisión concerniente a la segunda demanda de Nicaragua presentada formalmente el 26 de noviembre del 2013. Este fallo viene acompañado de una opinión individual, de una declaración y de una opinión disidente (ver  listado  con acceso a cada una de ellos). En el texto de este fallo de la CIJ, leemos, entre otros aspectos procesales, que Chile y Panamá solicitaron acceder a la totalidad de los documentos escritos presentados por ambas partes, con una suerte diversa, debido a la actitud de Colombia (Nota 2).

La lectura hecha por la CIJ a través del voto de sus jueces

Ambos fallos leídos en La Haya el pasado 17 de marzo son textos muy similares en cuanto a su redacción, en la medida en que Colombia utilizó y repitió varios de los argumentos en ambos intentos para esquivar la competencia de la CIJ. En la parte final de ambas decisiones, se encuentra el resultado de la votación en el que aparece y reaparece con cierta regularidad un voto de quince contra uno, el único voto que se desmarcó siendo el del juez ad hoc designado por Colombia. Ello evidencia el poco eco a las posiciones de Colombia en el seno mismo de los integrantes de la CIJ, con unas muy pocas excepciones. Si analizamos uno a uno el rechazo a estas diversas excepciones, se notará que fueron descartadas en su mayoría de forma casi unánime por parte de los integrantes titulares de la CIJ. Ello podría augurarle tiempos difíciles a Colombia de cara al procedimiento ulterior sobre el fondo. Nuevamente remitimos al hecho que el recurso a la figura de las excepciones preliminares debiera ser siempre cuidadosamente sopesado, al colocar en una situación delicada al Estado si la CIJ se declara competente.

La reacción iracunda de Colombia

Ante la contundencia del rechazo a sus pretensiones, a las pocas horas de leídas las dos sentencias, el Presidente Santos consideró útil y oportuno calificar de “injuriosa” la decisión de la CIJ (ver  nota  de prensa).  Adicionalmente, anunció que Colombia no comparecerá más ante la CIJ (ver  nota  de prensa).

Sobre el uso de semejante adjetivo por parte de un Jefe de Estado, no se tiene (salvo error de nuestra parte) precedente alguno registrado en los archivos de la justicia internacional.  Podemos adelantarnos simplemente a pensar que los servicios de la CIJ que monitorean constantemente las manifestaciones de los Estados con relación a sus decisiones habrán tomado nota de ello.

La no comparecencia ante la CIJ

En cambio, la no comparecencia es una figura que está expresamente prevista en el texto del  Estatuto  de la CIJ (ver artículo 53). La práctica de la no comparecencia cuenta con algunos precedentes, que, estamos seguros de ello,  los asesores legales de Colombia conocen muy bien en cuanto a sus efectos (y que sería recomendable que comunicaran discretamente a la Presidencia de Colombia).

En líneas generales, la no comparecencia no produce mayor efecto, ni afecta el procedimiento ante la CIJ sobre el fondo: bien lo saben, por ejemplo, los asesores legales de Estados Unidos, quiénes optaron por esta misma actitud en 1984 cuando la CIJ se declaró competente para conocer de una demanda interpuesta por Nicaragua. Es de precisar que el fallo de la CIJ sobre el fondo del 26 de junio de 1986 entre Estados Unidos y Nicaragua es considerado en la literatura jurídica especializada como uno de los mejores fallos jamás redactados por parte de los integrantes de la CIJ. Parte de esta característica se puede deber al hecho que los argumentos del demandante (Nicaragua) no encontraron objeción alguna durante el procedimiento sobre el fondo: los jueces de la CIJ optaron, dos años después de declararse competente, por darle a cada uno el alcance requerido desde el punto de vista jurídico. En aquella oportunidad, los jueces no desaprovecharon la ocasión para externar a Estados Unidos, a su manera, su desaprobación, incluyendo una pequeña lección sobre principios muy básicos. Lo hicieron en el fallo de 1986  (ver texto), de la siguiente forma, que nos permitimos reproducir a continuación en ambos idiomas (dado que es probable que la CIJ incluya un párrafo muy similar en su futuro fallo entre Nicaragua y Colombia): “In the present case, the Court regrets even more deeply the decision of the respondent State not to participate in the present phase of the proceedings, because this decision was made after the United States had participated fully in the proceedings on the request for provisional measures, and the proceedings on jurisdiction and admissibility. Having taken part in the proceedings to argue that the Court lacked jurisdiction, the United States thereby acknowledged that the Court had the power to make a finding on its own jurisdiction to rule upon the merits. It is not possible to argue that the Court had jurisdiction only to declare that it lacked jurisdiction. In the normal course of events, for a party to appear before a court entails acceptance of the possibility of the court’s finding against that party ». / « En l’espèce la Cour regrette d’autant plus profondément la décision de l’Etat défendeur de ne pas participer à la présente phase de la procédure qu’une telle décision est intervenue après que les Etats-Unis eurent pleinement participé aux procédures sur les mesures conservatoires et sur la compétence et la recevabilité En effet, en ayant pris part à l’instance pour plaider l’incompétence de la Cour, les Etats-Unis reconnaissaient par là à celle-ci le pouvoir de se prononcer sur sa propre compétence pour statuer au fond. Il n’est pas possible de prétendre que la Cour n’était compétente que pour se déclarer incompétente. La comparution devant une juridiction implique normalement l’acceptation de la possibilité d’être débouté » (párrafo 27 del fallo de 1986).

La situación en la que se ha colocado Colombia vis-à-vis de la CIJ  difiere ligeramente de la situación de Estados Unidos en los años ochenta, ya que su gestual corporal ha dado lugar a manifestaciones mucho más duras contra la CIJ, que Nicaragua posiblemente sepa explotar aún más. Es por ello que advertimos desde ya que, en un futuro fallo, este párrafo 27 de la sentencia de 1986 posiblemente sea ligeramente ampliado a algunos aspectos adicionales ofrecidos por Colombia desde noviembre del 2012.

La CIJ, en su fallo de 1986  (ver texto), también consideró oportuno precisar, con relación a las puebas y los hechos a examinar, que la no comparecencia del Estado demandado le significa una labor adicional, que el juez internacional intenta paliar en la medida de sus posibilidades. Aquí también nos permitimos reproducir en ambos idiomas lo dictaminado por la CIJ: “Nevertheless, the Court cannot by its own enquiries entirely make up for the absence of one of the Parties; that absence, in a case of this kind involving extensive questions of fact, must necessarily limit the extent to which the Court is informed of the facts. It would furthermore be an over-simplification to conclude that the only detrimental consequence of the absence of a party is the lack of opportunity to submit argument and evidence in support of its own case. Proceedings before the Court call for vigilance by all. The absent party also forfeits the opportunity to counter the factual allegations of its opponent » / « Néanmoins la Cour ne saurait totalement pallier, par ses propres recherches, les conséquences de I’absence de I’une des parties qui limite nécessairement l’information de la Cour dans une affaire soulevant comme celle-ci de multiples questions de fait. De plus on simplifierait à l’excès en concluant que le seul inconvénient de l’absence d’une partie est que cette partie se prive ainsi de l’occasion d’apporter des preuves et des arguments à l’appui de sa propre cause. La procédure devant la Cour exige la vigilance de tous. L’absent perd aussi la possibilité de combattre les allégations de fait de son adversaire » (párrafo 30 del fallo de 1986).

Adicionalmente, al no comparecer ante la CIJ, el Estado que opta por esta estrategia pierde, entre estos y otros aspectos antes mencionados, la posibilidad de nombrar a un juez ad hoc (Nota 3).

A modo de conclusión

No queda claro si Colombia tiene claridad sobre la estrategia que ha seguido desde el 2012 ante las pretensiones de Nicaragua. Su aparato estatal está exhibiendo ante los ojos del mundo un espectáculo raramente visto, con un lenguaje corporal inédito en los anales de la justicia internacional (que posiblemente sea explotada por los hábiles asesores de Nicaragua). A ese respecto, merecen ser comparados el listado de asesores internacionales de Nicaragua y de Colombia que tomaron la palabra en las audiencias orales meses antes de leerse los fallos sobre excepciones preliminares en el 2007 y  en el 2016. En el caso del fallo del 2007 (ver listado indicado en el párrafo 10 de su texto ), Colombia y Nicaragua se presentaron a la barra con tres asesores cada uno. En el caso del fallo del 2016, Nicaragua mantuvo a tres asesores, mientras que Colombia optó por cinco para presentar sus alegatos orales (ver párrafo 9 del  fallo del  2016). Por un lado, se desprende constancia y permanencia de un sólido equipo, por el otro, algo distinto que hemos optado por no calificar, de manera a no herir susceptibilidades. Finalmente, hay que saber que la no comparecencia puede también tener efectos muy provechosos. Para las finanzas públicas del Estado demandado, supone un respiro en cuanto al gasto millonario por concepto de honorarios de asesores legales que supone una demanda en La Haya para un Estado (Nota 4), mientras que para el Estado demandante, permite acortar significativamente los plazos (que son de cuatro años mínimo entre el depósito de una demanda y la lectura de un fallo por parte de la CIJ). En el caso de la demanda interpuesta por Estados Unidos contra Irán debido a los atropellos sufridos por su personal diplomático y consular en Teherán, Irán optó por no comparecer ante la CIJ desde un inicio: la demanda fue interpuesta por Estados Unidos el 29 de noviembre de 1979, la sentencia que condena el actuar de las autoridades de Irán fue leída menos de seis meses después, el 23 de mayo de 1980.

Nicolas Boeglin

Nota 1: Sobre la curiosa estrategia de Colombia adoptada después del fallo de la CIJ del 2012 sobre la demanda presentada por Nicaragua en el año 2001, y algunos otros detalles, remitimos al lector a la siguiente  nota  previamente publicada el 9/03/2016, cuya versión más extensa fue editada bajo el siguiente título en diversos sitios: “Próxima decisión de la CIJ sobre las excepciones preliminares presentadas por Colombia ante demandas de Nicaragua“, publicada en el sitio jurídico en Costa Rica  Derechoaldia  , en el sitio jurídico especializado en derecho internacional en Argentina de   DIPublico   así como en el sitio jurídico de la Asociación Colombiana de Derecho Internacional   Debate Global  , entre otros sitios. Agradecemos a los editores de Elpais.cr por hacer aceptado publicar esta misma nota en un formato académico en su  edición del 13/03/2016.

Nota 2: En el párrafo 7 de esta decisión relacionada con la segunda demanda de Nicaragua, se lee textualmente que: “7. Referring to Article 53, paragraph 1, of the Rules of Court, the Government of the Republic of Chile asked to be furnished with copies of the pleadings and documents annexed in the case. Having ascertained the views of the Parties in accordance with that same provision, the President of the Court decided to grant that request. The Registrar duly communicated that decision to the Government of Chile and to the Parties. Pursuant to the same provision of the Rules, the Government of the Republic of Panama also asked to be furnished with copies of the pleadings and documents annexed in the case. This request was communicated to the Parties in order to ascertain their views. By letter dated 22 July 2015, the Agent of Nicaragua stated that his Government had no objection to Panama being furnished with copies of the pleadings and documents annexed in the case. For its part, by letter dated 27 July 2015, the Agent of Colombia indicated that although his Government had no objection to Panama being furnished with copies of the preliminary objections filed by Colombia and Nicaragua’s written statement of its observations and submissions, it did object to the Memorial of Nicaragua being made available to Panama. Taking into account the views of the Parties, the Court decided that copies of the preliminary objections filed by Colombia and Nicaragua’s written statement of its observations and submissions on those objections would be made available to the Government of Panama. The Court, however, decided that it would not be appropriate to furnish Panama with copies of the Memorial of Nicaragua. The Registrar duly communicated that decision to the Government of Panama and to the Parties“.

Nota 3: En el caso Nicaragua vs. Estados Unidos de 1986, el juez norteamericano Schwebel (juez titular de la CIJ) se sintió obligado a elaborar y a adjuntar una larga opinión disidente, que incluye muchos de los argumentos que Estados Unidos hubiera podido desarrollar de haber participado en el procedimiento sobre el fondo (ver  texto ).  En 1985 se editó en Cambridge una obra sobre la no comparecencia: véase THIRLWAY H.W.A., Non-appearance before the International Court of Justice, Cambridge, 1985. En 1991, el Institut de Droit International, una entidad privada que reúne a los más connotados especialistas del derecho internacional, aprobó una breve resolución sobre el tema de la no comparecencia ante al CIJ (véase  texto ).  Más antiguo, pero no por ello de menor actualidad, en particular la conclusión a la que llega el autor sobre el carácter “vano” de la no comparecencia (p. 375), véase también EISEMANN P.M., “Les effets de la non-comparution devant la Cour internationale de Justice”, Vol. 19 AFDI (Annuaire Français de Droit International), 1973 pp. 351-375. Artículo disponible  aquí .

Nota 4: Al iniciar el año 2013, la prensa colombiana tuvo acceso a un informe de sus autoridades sobre los montos devengados en honorarios de asesores internacionales contratados, sumando 4,7 millones de US$ en 11 años de procedimientos en La Haya que concluyeron en el 2012 (ver  nota  de prensa). Para el 2014, se estimaba que Colombia había gastado más de un millón de US$ para enfrentar las dos nuevas demandas de Nicaragua (ver  nota  de Semana).

Nicolas Boeglin: Profesor de Derecho Internacional Público, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR).

Australia’s political establishment, the media and the police are maintaining their efforts to whip up a racist fear campaign, in particular against African youth, following exaggerated claims that youth “ran amok” in Melbourne’s Federation Square on March 13.

The media and police continue to insist, without presenting any concrete evidence, that those involved were members of the Apex gang, a group supposedly established by South Sudanese youth from the south-eastern Melbourne suburb of Dandenong.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported last week, a group of African youth clashed with police after being attacked by officers using pepper spray during the annual Moomba festival. Scores of youth ran from the scene in attempt to escape the police. While four people were arrested that night, no one has yet been charged over the so-called rioting.

Late last week Australia’s Immigration Minister Peter Dutton issued a statement in response to media calls for the deportation of immigrant youth found guilty of police charges and threats by Victorian Labor premier Daniel Andrews that his government would “smash” youth gangs. Dutton said that the Australian Border Force would work with Victoria Police to “cancel the visas of non-citizens involved in violent criminal activity such as that seen in Melbourne.”

On Thursday, Victoria Police launched Operation Concord, a five-day operation in central Melbourne involving hundreds of uniformed and plain-clothed officers, in response to the previous weekend’s riots. The Herald-Sun, which headlined its report “Police on high alert for Apex thugs,” claimed the operation was to ensure that gang members did not “terrorise Melbourne city streets.”

The centre of the “gang” activity is said to be Dandenong, a working-class suburb 35 kilometres from the centre of Melbourne. Once a thriving manufacturing hub, it is now the scene of closed factories, high youth unemployment and overcrowded public schools. Youth disengagement (young people neither in paid employment nor enrolled in education) is endemic in Dandenong. In 2011, youth disengagement was over 15 percent, the second worst in Melbourne.

The ongoing government and media hysteria has prompted a reaction in working-class areas in Melbourne. WSWS reporters spoke with South Sudanese youth and workers in Dandenong and Footscray last week.

Peter, a science student from Victoria University, has lived in Australia for 10 years.

“When there is a small incident involving the South Sudanese, it’s always blown up in the media and exaggerated. Whenever we gather together, which is a Sudanese tradition, the police always say it’s ‘gang activity.’

“What do they expect when there are no jobs, or young people aren’t at school? Are youth supposed to just hang around in the suburbs? This applies to all young people without jobs, not just the South Sudanese, but they always focus on us.

“When you live somewhere new you always want to fit in with the people you’re living with but we’re made to feel we don’t belong here. Everything in the media is ‘It’s the Sudanese people’s fault.’ When you’re at the [railway] station, the PSOs [Protective Services Officers] specifically come up to us because we’re Sudanese.”

James, a meat worker, commented on Labor Premier Andrews’ statement that he was not interested in the social difficulties facing immigrant youth. “How can you ignore where people have come from. When people come from a war zone or are refugees and you don’t help them, what do you expect,” he said.

Image: James

“If the police come up to you, even if you’ve not done anything wrong, you will to try to get away because you don’t want to get harassed or chased. Then the police go public saying ‘it was the South Sudanese, they were being disruptive, or drinking or fighting…

“I get stopped all the time by the police. They ask, ‘what’s your name, what are you doing here and did you have anything to drink today.’ They do it, even if you’re carrying your workbag and coming from the factory. If you’re asked that all the time, it’s going to start making you feel upset or angry.”

James said that he had been victimised by police while simply sitting on a bench drinking a soft drink. The police accused him of drinking alcohol and threatened to arrest him.

“We want to be able to walk together and gather in our community. We want support from our community, especially if we can’t get work or need someone to talk to… There’s nowhere in this world now that’s quiet and calm, almost everywhere it is war and refugees. We thought we came here for peace, but it’s starting to look like we can’t get that here either.”

Abel, another Victoria University student, said:

“The media is not telling the truth. You have to look at the problems first. The government has a hand in these things. Child protection officers are taking some of these young people from their families and then they have no direction. When they cause problems, they bring them back to the African community and then blame the community.

“Some youth have lost their parents, been traumatised by war, they’ve been brought up without a dad… Sending them back to Africa is not a solution. They need more help and it shouldn’t be bad help like the child protection agencies.

“Our leaders have also failed to take the right direction. Instead of calling for punishment, they should demand the government help these young people. Some of our African community leaders are making accommodating conclusions.”

Michael, a young worker, was near Federation Square at the time of the so-called riot. “I don’t know exactly what happened but I saw police blocking the road, stopping the cars on the road. People were running around,” he said.

“I looked everywhere and I couldn’t tell who was doing what. There were a lot of youth from all sorts of backgrounds. I didn’t see people doing hand-to-hand fighting but I saw people running away from the police. The media said it was ‘gangs’ but only mentioned African youth. These were just kids wanting to have fun in the city.”

The main problem confronting youth was unemployment, Michael said. “We’re waiting for jobs all the time but there are none. I’ve been working in construction but have been waiting round for work for the last two months. It was a struggle back home and it is a struggle here.”

Emmanuel, a Latrobe University law student, denounced the sensationalised media coverage:

“It has been a biased rant against the Sudanese, blaming them for this and every other thing. At the end of the day, the media is just picking on a minority. As soon as something happens, they try to immediately say, it was the Sudanese and people start to believe it…

“I was there [in central Melbourne] at the Moomba festival and I nearly got pepper sprayed. I was looking for my cousin and went up to a group of youth from my community. All of a sudden a police van pulled up and the youth started running. A police officer came up to me with the pepper spray but must have realised I wasn’t part of the group and so he ran past me to chase after the other youth. If I’d started to run, they would have come after me and pepper sprayed me as well. The police were just looking for certain people—the South Sudanese—and were basically racially profiling.

“I’ve been stopped countless times not only by the police but by the PSOs at the train stations for no reason. The PSOs harassed me and my cousins once for about ten minutes. They were being very abusive, using abusive language, but I wasn’t going to retaliate because they had a hidden agenda. They were looking for any reason to get me and would have said, ‘He harassed a police officer, so we had to arrest him.’”

“[Labor premier] Andrews’ statement—‘We don’t want any “poor me” stories’—is a bit outrageous. The government doesn’t look at where these youth have come from or the struggles they have been through. If you come from a war-torn country it’s obviously going to be much more difficult to adapt and it’s very difficult to come from an English as a second-language background. If the government deports people for one offense it’s outrageous.”

A new study by a University of California-Berkeley economist says that at current sluggish levels of job growth, entire regions of the United States, which were hit hardest by the Great Recession will not return to “normal” employment levels until the 2020s. This amounts, to “more than a ‘lost decade’ of depressed employment” for “half of the country,” wrote economist Danny Yagan.

The new study is one of many showing that the fall of the official unemployment rate, touted by the Obama administration and the news media as proof of a robust economic recovery, if not a return to “full employment,” is largely based on the fact that millions of workers fell out of the labor force in the years preceding and following the 2008 financial crash.

The labor-force participation rate fell to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent last fall, and only climbed up to 62.9 percent in February. According to the Economic Policy Institute, February’s official jobless rate of 4.9 percent—the lowest since the pre-recession level of 4.7 percent in November 2007—would really be 6.3 percent if the country’s “missing workers” were included. These include 2.4 million workers who have given up actively looking for work.

Image: Millions of workers have abandoned hope of finding a job.

Yagan based his findings on a detailed study of some 2 million, similarly paid workers in the retail industry in order to calculate employment patterns across different local areas and to account for occupations that might have been particularly hard hit in one region.

He found that the areas hardest hit by the recession, which began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009, continued to have high levels of joblessness in 2014. His map of these distressed areas includes all of Florida and parts of Arizona, Nevada, California, Colorado, New Mexico, the Dakotas, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, Connecticut, New Hampshire and other states.

While different areas of the country are often hit differently by an economic downturn, an article in the Wall Street Journal on Yagan’s study noted, these economically distressed areas generally return to normal levels of employment chiefly because workers move to find work in areas with a higher demand for labor. In the case of the “Great Recession,” however, the mass layoffs resulted in “muted migration,” according to other studies cited by theJournal, and workers simply fell out of the labor market.

“Unlike the aftermath of the 1980s and 1990s recessions,” Yagan wrote, “employment in hard-hit areas remains very depressed relative to the rest of the country.” Living in areas like Phoenix, Arizona, or Las Vegas, Nevada means confronting “enduring joblessness and exacerbated inequality,” Yagan wrote. “If the latest convergence speed continues, employment differences across the United States are estimated to return to normal in the 2020s—more than a decade after the Great Recession.”

The lack of decent job opportunities in large swathes of the country has created a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers who are competing for a shrinking number of jobs in areas that are more or less permanently distressed. Last month’s Labor Department employment report noted that the average annual unemployment rate in 36 states, plus Washington, D.C. was higher in 2015 than the average unemployment rate for those states in 2007.

Image: DANNY YAGAN, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

The majority of unemployed people in the US do not receive unemployment insurance benefits, according to the National Employment Law Project, with just over one in four jobless workers (27 percent), a record low, receiving such benefits in 2015.

The details of these studies will come as no surprise for tens of millions of workers across the United States who face unprecedented levels of economic insecurity, ongoing mass layoffs, and more than a decade of stagnating or falling real wages. This has fueled the growth of enormous discontent and the initial stirrings of class struggle by American workers, which the trade unions and both big business parties have sought to channel in the direction of economic nationalism and hostility to workers in China, Mexico and other countries.

In fact, US workers are being subjected to the same attacks as workers around the world. The reports on the employment situation in the US coincide with a continual massacre of jobs in the world’s steel, oil and mining industries, with 1.2 million steel and coal mining jobs targeted for destruction in China alone.

Continual layoffs in the US have been driven by the plunging price of steel, petroleum, coal and other commodities, which has been generated in large measure by the fall in demand from China and other so-called emerging economies. Last week, St. Louis, Missouri-based Peabody Energy, the largest coal mining company in the world, announced it could soon file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, after its share values fell 46 percent over the last six months.

Peabody has already cut 20 percent of its global workforce since 2012, while spinning off large sections of its operations in order to cheat retirees out of their pensions. The company’s announcement follows bankruptcy filings by both Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources and a similar threat from coal mining giant Foresight Energy. In its press release, Peabody pointed to the collapse in the coal market, where the price per ton has fallen to $40 from $200 in 2008.

The steel industry continues to wipe out jobs, with 12,000 steelworkers already laid off or facing imminent job cuts. The largest US steelmaker, US Steel, has slashed thousands of jobs in Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. The aluminum giant Alcoa is just weeks away from closing its smelter in Warrick County, Indiana, wiping out another 600 jobs. Meanwhile, the United Steelworkers (USW) union is pushing for protectionist measures against China, Brazil, Russia and other countries, even as it pushes through concession-laden contracts at US Steel, Allegheny Technologies and now ArcelorMittal.

Early last year, the USW betrayed the strike by thousands of oil refinery workers, blocking any struggle against the brutal restructuring of the industry that is now underway. The plunging of oil prices triggered more than 258,000 layoffs in the global energy industry in 2015—with the number of active oil and gas rigs in the US falling 61 percent. Analysts anticipate a new round of job cuts and bankruptcies in early 2016.

Texas has lost 60,000 energy-related jobs alone, or one-fifth of the workforce in that sector in the state, with North Dakota and Pennsylvania also being hard hit. The current US unemployment rate for the oil, gas and mining sector is 8.5 percent, but could top 10 percent by February, double the national jobless rate.

Last month, the air conditioner maker Carrier announced it was eliminating 1,400 jobs at its Indianapolis plant and a nearby facility, and shipping production to Monterrey, Mexico where wages are approximately $6 an hour. A video shot by a worker, capturing the explosive anger at a meeting of plant workers when a manager makes the announcement, has been viewed millions of times.

Far from organizing any resistance to the closure of the factory and destruction of jobs, however, the USW is collaborating with United Technologies Carrier management to carry out an orderly shutdown and the retraining of displaced workers for lower-paying jobs.

The USW is hostile to any fight to unite American workers with their brothers and sisters in Mexico, who have been engaging in growing resistance to the exploitation by the transnational corporations. USW officials are telling workers to rely on the Democratic Party to implement protectionist trade measures to “save jobs” and “take our country back.” Local and regional union officials have had nothing but kind words about Donald Trump’s efforts to swindle workers with economic nationalist appeals.

The unions have long used economic nationalism to undermine the class-consciousness of workers and to promote the corporatist outlook of “labor-management partnership.” In the name of making the corporations “competitive,” the USW and other unions have suppressed every struggle against plant closings, job cuts and the destruction of wages and benefits.

This has coincided with the political subordination of workers to the Democratic Party, which under the Obama administration has spearheaded the attack on workers’ jobs and wages and the historic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

USW Local 1999, which claims to represent Carrier workers, is urging them to support Democrat John Gregg for Indiana governor. A former land agent for Peabody Coal and lobbyist for Amax Coal Company, Gregg served as the honorary chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign in Indiana, and was a proponent of austerity and corporate tax cuts while Speaker of the state Legislature.

Despite the shortcomings of the candidates for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations, I see some hope in the strong support that voters are showing for the two non-establishment candidates.  Consider Bernie Sanders’ inroads on the corrupt Clintons’ control of the Democratic Party. Look at how easily Donald Trump defeated the Republican establishment’s candidates.

Some Americans are catching on, shedding their unawareness. I am not confident that Sanders or Trump could bring change. In The Deep State (2016), Mike Lofgren concludes that powerful private interest groups, such as the military/security complex and the financial sector, have hijacked democracy. Still, voters’ interest in Sanders and Trump, despite the beating they receive in the media, is a positive sign. I have the impression that voters are supporting them not so much for their positions on issues as for the fact that neither are part of the Washington establishment. Many voters now understand that the political establishment represents the One Percent, not them.

There are hopeful developments in foreign affairs also. A New Russia has appeared on the scene and demonstrated to the entire world its power to checkmate the hegemonic ambition of the crazed neoconservatives, who have controlled the US government since Bill Clinton. The world now understands that the leadership for peace comes from Russia not from warmonger Washington.

Washington’s vassals in Europe are in disarray, with the Northern European EU members plundering the Southern EU members, and with all of Europe overrun with refugees fleeing Washington’s hoax “war against terrorism.” Europeans are beginning to realize that the establishment political parties that they have blindly supported since World War 2 are nothing but agents of Washington, who serve Washington and not Europeans. Merkel, Cameron, and Hollande are puppets of Washington, not leaders of the German, British, and French people.

The Chinese government is finally beginning to realize that the neoliberal American economic policies that it has so slavishly been copying have led it into economic difficulties. Perhaps China will now cease to follow America into oblivion.

The Russians have learned that being part of the Western system subjects them to economic sanctions and makes it easy for Washington to interfere in Russian internal affairs. The Russians are beginning to show that their desire for their independence is greater than their desire to be accepted by a corrupt, immoral, decadent, and failing West.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders speak to Americans’ loss of economic opportunity and financial independence. Today the 99 Percent are slaves to their debt burdens and lack of productive employment, while those who deceived them into these burdens and lowly-paid employment in domestic services are reveling in multi-million dollar annual paychecks.

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and financial regulators are corrupted by the private financial interests that control them. The US government serves only the One Percent. Despite this obvious fact, many Democratic Party voters—-traditionally the less well off, union members, and American blacks—-are turning out for Hillary Clinton, a tried and proven representative of the One Percent. The Clintons have been enriched to the amount of $153 million by the ruling One Percent who own the Clintons lock, stock, and barrel. Yet the dispossessed vote for Hillary.

Clearly, many American voters, as Thomas Frank made clear in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, still have no clue as to their own interests and vote to elect their worst enemies.

Many Americans are still trapped in The Matrix and kept there by the propaganda that masquerades in the US as “news.”

Consider the possible implications if Americans were to enable Hillary Clinton to become President. Trump has said that he would work things out with Vladimir Putin, but Hillary has declared the President of Russia to be “the new Hitler.” How can Hillary work anything out with “the new Hitler”? She cannot.

It is a great irony that the American lower class, traditionally served by the Democratic Party, could put in the White House not only a person who only represents the super-rich but also a person who cannot escape confict with Russia, a country with possibly the most capable military force on the planet.

The psychopathic Washington neoconservatives who have controlled US foreign policy since the Clinton regime, misintepret Vladimir Putin’s peaceful diplomacy as a sign of Russian weakness. The neocons say: “See Putin is weak. He is pulling out of Syria.” But what Putin says is different. Putin says: “We have created the conditions for peace in Syria.” If Washington abuses these conditions, “Russia can, in several hours, build up its forces in Syria to a size capable of dealing with an escalating situation and use the entire range of means at its disposal.” Putin adds: “We hope the parties involved would show common sense.”

From a position of strength, Putin has rolled the dice. Is there common sense in the West? I fail to see any. I see arrogance, hubris, idiocy, immorality, inhumanity, complete and total stupidity. These are the characteristics of Western governments. They amount to a deranged criminal enterprise organized against humanity.

In the awards of medals to those Russians who served against ISIS, Putin stated: “Our uncompromising attitude to terrorism remains unchanged.” If we take this statement broadly, it means not merely Muslim jihadists but the terrorism of the West—-the destruction of seven or more countries by the US and its vassals in the 21st century, the long-term sanctions against Iran, Russia, and a number of other countries whose governments do not comply with Washington’s dictates. Putin has told Washington and Washington’s European puppets, Cameron, Merkel, Hollande, that he has had enough of them. They must reform themselves, become honorable governments committed to the welfare of humanity, and abandon self-serving policies of plunder.

Considering the total failure of the United States to subdue after 15 years a few thousand lightly armed Taliban, the American people need to understand that the US military, corrupted by privatizations to enhance former vice president Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton and by over-cost weapons systems that serve the profits of the armaments industries and not the military competence of the fighting force, has lost its edge in weapons superiority. The latest over-cost American fighter jet, for example, according to the Air Force’s own conclusions cannot match the old figher it is intended to replace, whereas the latest Russian fighter is said to have the capability to electronically shut down American control systems, track simultaneously 24 enemy fighters and lock on 10 simultanteously for unavoidable destruction. Members of the US military command have expressed concern over the high quality of Russian weapon systems.

Everyone needs to understand that the establishments of the two American political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are less interested in winning the election than in continuing to control the party. Trump and Sanders are hated by the party establishments, because Trump and Sanders are not members of the establishment. Control over the party by the party establishment is so important that we have many members of the Republican establishment declaring that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, they will vote for the Democrat. This has happened before. It was Republicans who denied the presidency to Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.

The United States is a failing society. Citizens’ hopes are being snuffed out. There are few good jobs or enough jobs of any kind, as the collapse of the labor force participation rate confirms. People are drowning in debts that they have no prospect of ever paying off. Young adults cannot form independent households. The oligarchy that rules and controls the country has committed America to massively expensive wars and privacy invasions for the purpose of establishing a hegemony that enriches elite private interests.

The corupt and unrepentant financial sector, having survived its mortgage-backed security fiasco without prosecution or correction has repeated its previous folly with a new weapon of potential financial mass destrution. Speculators have bought up distressed properties and rented them. The rental streams are bundled into financial instruments, as were the mortgage payments previously, and sold to investors. Is a renter more committed and better able to pay than a person with a mortgage?

Jobs offshoring and financialization have drained the US economy of the ability to grow. The ladders of upward mobility have been dismantled, and the service of debt curtails consumer demand for goods and services. The wage saving from offshoring jobs raises corporate profits and brings executive bonuses and capital gains to the One Percent. Financialization diverts consumer purchasing power into the service of debt. The result is stagnation and decline.

Foreign policy based on threats and coercion means constant conflict. The US has been in constant conflict since the Clinton regime overthrew the government in Serbia. Constant conflict is expensive, and Americans have had these expensive costs imposed on them simultaneously with the costs of jobs offshoring and financialization.

It was 20 months ago that Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was destroyed over Ukraine. Despite the inability of the investigation to come to a conclusion, from the first moment Western propaganda has blamed the loss of 298 lives on Russia. Three days after the airliner’s destruction, US Secretary of State John Kerry set in stone the blame on Russia with his claim that:

“we saw the take-off [of the Buk missile]. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this airplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.”

 If the US has all the evidence, why hasn’t the US government released it? Obviously, there is no such evidence. Why would Washington fail to release evidence that proved Russian responsibility? Kerry’s evidence no more exists than the alleged evidence the US government claims to have from numerous security cameras that a passenger airliner hit the Pentagon on 9/11. If the government had such evidence why has the government refused to release it for almost 15 years? If the government produced this evidence, it would be a death blow to the 9/11 Truth movement. The evidence no more exists than the alleged evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, that Assad used chemical weapons, that Russia invaded Ukraine.

The terms of the last three US presidents have been used to squander trillions of dollars on pointless wars and construction of a domestic police state on the basis of a non-existant “terrorist threat.” This alleged threat has been reinforced with false flag events and a fake history spun from lies repeateded endlessly by government and its presstitutes.

In 1994 Christopher Lasch wrote in The Revolt of the Elites: “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy.” As Lasch said, the greed of the elites for money and power have undermined the constitutional basis of the United States. The elites have used their power to betray democracy. Will the American people succeed in clawing back their democracy?

Recently a Chinese commentator, observing the relationship between the need for a peace treaty to end the Korean War and North Korea’s four nuclear tests wrote:

“North Korea, in a statement after its nuclear test, has made it clear that if it could sign a peace treaty with the United States, and if the United States could stop holding joint military exercises with South Korea, it would not conduct further nuclear tests. This proved that the North Korean nuclear issue is, in essence, an issue between the United States and North Korea….”(1)

The Armistice Agreement that ended the fighting of the Korean War was signed on July 27, 1953. While the Armistice Agreement provided for a cease fire, it did not end the Korean War.

The Armistice Agreement that the US and North Korea signed states that a political agreement is needed by the parties to end the war. A political conference was to be held to set the terms for an agreement among the parties to provide for a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. Such a political conference was to provide the means to “settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question,” etc. ( See Article IV of the Armistice Agreement.)

Though a political conference was eventually held, the parties did not succeed in drafting a treaty to end the war.

It is now more than 60 years later. There still is no political agreement to end the Korean War. Nor is there a political agreement to withdraw foreign troops from the Korean Peninsula. Korea continues to be divided into the Republic of Korea, more commonly known as South Korea, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea.

There are 28,000 US troops permanently stationed in South Korea. US troops take part in exercises along with South Korean troops to simulate war activities against North Korea. In the event of a war, the US and South Korea have agreed that the US will have wartime operational command over the South Korean troops.

Moreover, there is a formal agreement between the US and South Korea that includes the US commitment to provide nuclear weapon protection for South Korea. This is referred to as a nuclear umbrella.

Recently, China proposed that the UN Security Council find a way to engage North Korea in political negotiations toward a peace regime for the Korean Peninsula. China supported the need for a peace treaty which at long last would end the Korean War. But then the US and South Korea agreed to negotiate for the positioning of the US THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system in South Korea under the command of the US troops stationed there. The THAAD is a system that China explained would represent a stepped up use of foreign military equipment on the peninsula, a process forbidden under the terms of the 1953 Armistice Agreement. (See Article 13A2d)

In response to the proposed deployment of THAAD on the Korean Peninsula, China expressed its opposition to the increased militarization that THAAD would represent to the region. Once the US and South Korea added the possibility of their agreement to deploy THAAD in South Korea, the discussion between the US and China appeared to focus on THAAD and China appeared to subordinate its focus on the need for dialogue with North Korea to resolve the conflict situation to its opposition to THAAD.

There is also opposition to the placement of THAAD in South Korea among South Koreans who have offered their critiques of how it will be used. For example, according to a public statement by one South Korean NGO “a multitude of experts” contend it is easy to use THAAD to put “most of Chinese territory under detectable range, regardless of THAAD’s location in South Korea.”(2)

The sanctions in the Security Council resolution drawn up by the US require nations to search any cargo from or to North Korea in their territory. The sanctions include the restriction on the sale by North Korea of its gold, its coal and other minerals. Also the resolution restricts countries from providing fuel for planes to North Korea.

The 1953 Armistice Agreement forbids any naval blockade of Korea. In her comments about the sanctions, the US UN Ambassador bragged that the resolution restricts North Korean cargo “whether by land, sea or air.” Hence, the Security Council resolution replaces what little remains of the 1953 Armistice regime with a previously forbidden form of blockade of North Korea, intensifying the war-provoking situation on the Korean Peninsula.

The Total Destruction of Pyongyang, May 1951

With China agreeing to a minimal reference to negotiations in the Security Council Resolution against North Korea, the US and China bilaterally agreed to a US draft resolution. Then the US brought the resolution to the other members of the Security Council, pressuring them to quickly adopt it.

The UN Charter calls for the UN Security Council to consider issues it deems violations of international peace and security, and to investigate the conflict situation toward finding a peaceful resolution.

Also, Chapter V, Article 32 of the UN Charter mandates that any state which is not a member of the Security Council, “if it is a party to a dispute under consideration by the Security Council, shall be invited to participate, without vote, in the discussion relating to the dispute.”

There is no indication that the Security Council made any effort to invite North Korea to the minimal discussion of the US draft that was held by Security Council members. During the explanations made by member nations after the vote in favor of the resolution, some nations commented about the lack of a proper period of time for the Security Council to consider and discuss the resolution and its implications. The US, by rushing the adoption of the resolution by the Security Council denied not only North Korea, but even the Security Council members themselves, the time needed for responsible discussion about the resolution and whether it could contribute to a peaceful settlement of the conflict.

In their statements after passing by unanimous consent Security Council Resolution S/RES/2270(2016) imposing these new sanctions on North Korea, both Russia and China explained their opposition to the installation of THAAD on the Korean Peninsula. Japan, however, welcomed such an increased militarization.

In a statement after the resolution was approved by the Security Council, the South Korean Ambassador to the UN, directed his comments to North Korea, though it was not at the meeting. He said(3):

“I would like to say a few words in appeal to those who are ruling North Korea. I would say in Korean, ‘please stop it now’. I would ask them: Why do you need these weapons? In South Korea we do not have a nuclear bomb. As we border each other, you do not need an intercontinental missile if you are targeting us. Why do you need these weapons? You say the United States is a threat to you. Why would the United States threaten you? Why would the strongest military Power in the world threaten a small country far across the Pacific? There is no threat. It is a figment of your imagination. If you continue in this way, the only people who will suffer from what you are doing are your own people, and our people as well. So please, wake up, open your eyes, look out at what is happening in the world. Give up the nukes. Join the rest of us in the world and we can live together in safety and peace.”

The problem with such a statement is that the US and South Korea have a formal agreement for the US to protect South Korea under the US nuclear umbrella. It is dishonest to hide that nuclear weapon protection is indeed part of the military assurance provided to South Korea by the US. Similarly, North Korea notes that US troops remain in South Korea and in the case of a war not only will these troops be used, but the US military will exercise operational command over the South Korean military. The US and South Korea and at times other nations join in military maneuvers several times a year that directly threaten the security of North Korea. For example, as of March 7 this year, the US and South Korea are carrying out military maneuvers involving 17,000 US troops and 300,000 South Korean troops. These maneuvers are practicing for a war with North Korea.(4)

The fact that there is no peace treaty after more than 60 years despite the provisions in the Armistice Agreement calling for the political negotiations to officially end the war demonstrates that the Korean War is not over. Similarly, the statement by South Korea that there is no security threat facing North Korea, is but a demonstration of the belittling attitude of the South Korean government toward North Korea.

While in other situations, Russia and China have recognized that North Korea has serious and legitimate security concerns, at this Security Council meeting, neither of them nor any other member of the Security Council objected to the inaccuracy of the South Korean Ambassador’s statement.(5)

That the South Korean Ambassador could make such a statement at a Security Council meeting, with not one Security Council member objecting that it is an inaccurate statement, demonstrates the failure of the UN Security Council to provide a process to understand and resolve a serious and dangerous conflict threatening international peace and security.

Notes

1. Wu Zhenglong, “Create Conditions to Restart North Korean Nuclear Talks” http://m.chinausfocus.com/article/4327.html
2. See for example the PSPD Statement “We Oppose THAAD System Deployment in South Korea-PSPD in English.” PSPD is a South Korean NGO. See: http://www.peoplepower21.org/index.php?mid=English&document_srl=1393339&listStyle=list
3. UN Security Council Meeting, Wednesday, March 2, 2016, S/PV.7638, p.14. http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/PV.7638
4. The US is a party to the conflict that involves North Korea’s claim that it needs nuclear weapons for self defense because the US continues to be at war with North Korea. Yet in the actions of the Security Council on this dispute not only is the US the pen holder drafting the resolution, but it also pressured other members for a quick vote on its proposed resolution. A party to a conflict is permitted to dominate the process by which the Security Council acts on the conflict. Such actions are contrary to the spirit and provisions of the UN Charter.
5. In other circumstances, at least Russia and China have recognized the serious security threat facing North Korea. For example on March 7, 2016, the Russian Foreign Ministry wrote:  “Naturally, as a state, which is directly named as an object of this kind of military activities, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) cannot but feel reasonably concerned for its security. Russia has many times stated its openly negative attitude to such manifestations of military and political pressure on Pyongyang,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. http://tass.ru/en/politics/860974

The path that led the US administration to recognizing the violence perpetrated by the Islamic State on Christians as “genocide”, is “a geopolitical operation” that “exploits the category of genocide for their own interests”. This is how Syrian Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo, at the head of the Syriac Catholic archieparchy in Hassaké-Nisibis, comments to Agenzia Fides the statements made yesterday by US Secretary of State John Kerry in response to the mobilization of groups and acronyms that have long urged US policy leadership to apply the definition of “genocide” to the various forms of brutality and oppression consumed by militants of the Islamic Caliphate on Christians and other minority groups.

“In my judgment”, Kerry said yesterday, supporting the demands posed by a wide network of organizations and groups, “Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yezidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims. Daesh is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology, and by actions – in what it says, what it believes, and what it does”.

According to Archbishop Hindo, who carries out his pastoral work in the most troubled areas of north-eastern Syria:

“the proclamation of genocide is accomplished by pointing the spotlight on Daesh and censoring all the complicity and historical and political processes that led to the creation of the jihadist monster, since the war waged in Afghanistan against the Soviets by supporting armed Islamist groups. One wants to erase all the strange factors that led to the sudden and abnormal emergence of Daesh. While only until recently, there was even Turkish and Saudi pressure – US allied Countries – so that jihadists of al-Nusra Front would take their distance from al Qaida network, in order to be classified and maybe even helped by the West as ‘moderate rebels …’ “

According to the Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Hassaké-Nisibis, the “genocide declaration against Christians” by the US Administration is also an attempt to recover, before the increased Russian prestige among the peoples of the Middle East: “the Russian intervention in Syria”, said the Archbishop “has increased the authority of Moscow in a large sector of the Middle Eastern peoples, not only among Christians. Powerful circles in the US fear that, so now they play the card of protecting Christians. It seems we have gone back to the nineteenth century when the protection of the Christians in the Middle East was also an instrument of geopolitical operations to increase the influence in the region”.

According to the Archbishop, interviewed by Agenzia Fides, it is also misleading to present Christians as exclusive or priority victims of the violence of Daesh: “Those fools” noted Mgr. Hindo:

“…kill Shiites, Alawites and also all the Sunnis who do not submit to them. Christians represent a a minimum portion of the deaths of 200 thousand in the Syrian conflict. And I repeat, in some cases Christians are allowed to flee or to pay the fee of submission, while for non-Christians there is only death”

The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) was found guilty on Friday, March 11, of violating the “spirit and letter” of the state of Washington’s Campaign Finance Disclosure Laws by attempting to shield the identities of the corporations that dumped millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat a GMO food labeling initiative that was gaining steam across the state.

The guilty verdict was handed down by the Washington Superior court. The case was originally filed in October 2013 by the Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson after the AG’s office became aware of the fact that the GMA was hiding the identities of anti-labeling donor corporations.

According to Ferguson, the GMA raised $14 million dollars from its members for the “Defense of Brands” fund far above and above the dues regularly charged to members. Over the course of the anti-labeling campaign the GMA was the largest single-donor to the “No on 522” initiative, spending $22 million dollars to stop labeling.

Initiative 522 would have required the labeling of GMO food, seeds, and seed products across the state if it had passed. After receiving the $14 million dollars in special solicitations from its members, the GMA donated $11 million of that money to the “No on 522” initiative.

However, instead of listing the money as coming from the corporations who donated it, only the GMA was listed. This was done in order to protect the identities of the individual companies from laws requiring proper disclosure and to effectively allow the GMA to act as the spearhead and the scapegoat for a collective corporate assault on food freedom.

According to Fortune Magazine, internal documents, memos and even meeting notes showed that the Defense of Brands fund was indeed designed to conceal the identities of GMA members.

One example is a meeting note which said,

State GMO-related spending will be identified as having come from the GMA, which will provide anonymity and eliminate state filing requirements for contributing members.

Thurston County Superior Court Judge Anne Hirsch stated that,

In enacting the Public Campaign Finance Laws, the people of Washington directed that they be interpreted liberally, to promote transparency and full disclosure to the voters. By its actions creating the [Defense of Brands] account, the GMA violated the spirit and letter of Washington’s Public Campaign Finance Laws.

The court also ruled that a factual dispute remains in regards to whether or not the GMA’s violation of the law was intentional. Therefore, a penalty was not determined and will not be administered until there is a ruling on the intentionality of the GMA’s actions.

In 2013, the top ten contributors to the GMA’s Defense of Brands Account saw Pepsi Co, Nestle USA Inc., and the Coca-Cola company as the top three contributors.

Below are the top 10 contributors to the Defense of Brands fund and the amounts that they contributed in 2013:

1. PepsiCo: $2.696 million
2. Nestle USA, Inc.: $1.751 million
3. The Coca-Cola Company: $1.742 million
4. General Mills: $996,000
5. ConAgra: $949,000
6. Campbell Soup: $441,000
7. The Hershey Company: $413,000
8. J.M. Smucker: $401,000
9. Kellogg: $369,000
10. Land O’Lakes: $332,000

With such massive amounts of money being spent to prevent labeling initiatives like Initiative 522, one might begin to wonder whether or not, at some point, it might become more financially feasible for a number of these companies simply to move toward non-GMO ingredients. In fact, such an idea should be a consolation to pro-labeling activists as well as a guiding concept for their march forward. While Initiative 522 failed, it required millions of dollars in corporate funds to defeat it. Activists must now return to the battle field, not deflated – but invigorated.

Pro-labeling attempts must continue every election cycle. Eventually, either the measure will pass – or corporations will find it cheaper to comply with the activists’ demands. The message should be clear to the corporations: we will have GMO labeling whether you like it or not.

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books. His podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.