Global Research

The Government of Honduras is intent on framing the only witness to the murder of Berta Cáceres as the one guilty of the crime, writes Beverly Bell. Gustavo Castro Soto, an eco-defender from Mexico, is now in effective detention in his country’s embassy in Tegucigalpa in fear of his life, having himself been injured in the attack and seen the real assassin. The US Government must break its resounding silence.

The sole eyewitness to Honduran social movement leader Berta Cáceres’ assassination on March 3, 2016 has gone from being wounded victim to, effectively, political prisoner.

Now Gustavo Castro Soto may also be framed as the murderer of his long-time friend.

Both the Mexican Ambassador, Dolores Jiménez, and Castro himself are worried that he will be charged by the government for the killing, they told the National Commission of Human Rights of Honduras on March 16.

A writer and organizer for environmental and economic justice, Castro has been forbidden by local authorities from leaving the country to return to his native Mexico until April 6, at least.  Since being released from several days in Honduran government custody, he has been forced to take refuge in the Mexican Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

The protection of the Mexican Embassy “does not mean that my life is no longer in danger”, Castro wrote to some friends and colleagues on March 4. As long as he is on Honduran soil, he remains in peril. Ambassador Jiménez called the risk he is running “an objective fact.”

Castro – who is able to identify Cáceres’ killer – is an impediment to the plan that the Honduran government is clearly advancing, which is to pin the murder on members of the group which Cáceres founded and ran, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations (COPINH). It could help the strategy of the fraudulently elected regime to dispense with Castro by charging and arresting him.

The government may also charge COPINH members with the killing of their leader, in the hopes of eliminating them from the body politic. Authorities tried to incriminate three of them just after the murder.

• Prominent COPINH organizer Aureliano Molina was imprisoned for two days on suspicion of a ‘crime of passion’ though he was two hours away from La Esperanza on the night of March 3.
• Two other COPINH leaders, Tomas Gómez and Sotero Echeverria, were interrogated for days, during which time the government denied their request for accompaniment by their lawyers. On March 15, Echeverria was threatened with arrest.

The real assassins

Cáceres was a tireless organizer for accountable government, participatory democracy, indigenous peoples and their territories, human rights, and women’s and LGBTQ rights.  For many years, she was subject to threats, attempted violent attacks, legal prosecution for being a “continual danger to the nation”, and other persecution.

Just during the three-month period prior to Cáceres’ murder, human rights accompanierstracked eleven threats and attempted assaults by national and local government officials, police, soldiers, employees of the Agua Zarca dam project which Cáceres and others were fighting, and unidentified men.

In addition to that litany within 10 days before Cáceres’ death, Agua Zarca released two incendiary public email announcements. Their message lines read “THE VIOLENT ACTS”and “FALSEHOODS OF BERTA CACERES  – COPINH”.

Those who have witnessed the price Cáceres has paid for her decades of advocacy have no doubt who is culpable in her murder. Her four grown children and mother stated publicly on March 5,

We hold the company DESA responsible for the persecution, the criminalization, the stigma, and the constant death threats made against her and our people of COPINH. We also hold the financial and international entities that support the project such as, the Dutch development bank FMO, Finn Fund, BCIE, Ficohsa, and the committed companies CASTOR, and business group ATALA, responsible for her death.

We hold the Honduran State responsible for having largely impeded the protection of our Bertha and for having favored her persecution, criminalization and assassination by having opted for protecting the company’s interests above the decisions and mandates of the community …

The ones responsible for her assassination are the business groups in collaboration with the national government, the municipal government and the repressive institutions of the State, who are behind the extractive project that is developing in the region. The funders of these extractive death projects are also responsible for the death of our Bertha and of countless people who struggle against the exploitation of our territories.

Castro’s ordeal

Many elements of the government’s so-called collection of evidence from Castro have been irregular at best, and illegal at worst.

Beyond being inconvenient for knowing too much, the eyewitness falls into the repressive government’s category of public enemy. Like Cáceres, Castro has been a vocal opponent of dam construction on indigenous rivers, as well as of the broad powers given transnational corporations and the local elite to plunder democracy and the riches of nature.

Castro is coordinator of the group Otros Mundos / Friends of the Earth Mexico. He has cofounded, and sits on the governing body of, many anti-mining and anti-damming networks, as well as the US-based organization Other Worlds. In his interrogation, the public prosecutor has asked  Castro about his environmental organizing and history of activism.

Following the killing in Cáceres’ home in the town of La Esperanza, Castro was detained for days in the local public prosecutor’s office for interrogation. On March 5, having been told the questioning was complete, he was transported by the Mexican ambassador and consul to the airport in Tegucigalpa so that he could return to his homeland.

As he approached the migration checkpoint, Castro was set upon by multiple Honduran police, who attempted to grab him. The Mexican ambassador stopped them.

The government has since forbidden Castro from leaving Honduras for 30 days, or until April 6. When Castro appealed the order, the judge in the case ruled against it, even while admitting that there is no legal provision for a 30-day restraint for witnesses or victims.

The judge also suspended the license of Castro’s lawyer, Ivania Galeano, for 15 days. The stated reason was that Galeano had requested a copy of Castro’s file which, according to Honduran law, was her right.

Even in the Mexican Embassy, almost three weeks after the killing, Castro continues to be interrogated by the Honduran prosecutor.

Hearing no protest from the US, Honduran Government ramps up repression

The US State Department put out a brief, generic statement of condolence the day after Cáceres was assassinated. At the same time, according to email communications, the State Department confirmed that it is cooperating with the Honduran government in the investigation, with various US agencies actively participating in it.

The Obama Administration has failed to raise questions about the Honduran government’s role in the murder, given its persistent, well-documented targeting of Cáceres over the years, and its transparent attempts at a cover-up by fingering Cáceres’ close colleagues. US military assistance to the Honduran government continues to flow.

On March 17, 62 US Congressional representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, calling for an independent investigation of the assassination and urging the Secretary to immediately stop US security funding pending a review. Rep. Hank Johnson, co-sponsor of the letter along with Rep. Keith Ellison, said,

It’s time for our government to leverage security assistance and multilateral loans so as to put real and lasting pressure on the Honduran government to protect its activists and pursue those responsible for these hideous crimes.

Meanwhile, the silence from the administration has given the Honduran government a green light for repression.

That repression was aggressively launched on March 15. On that single day, Honduran soldiers and police coordinated assaults against ten activists from four geographic regions and three separate organizations.

• Nelson García, a COPINH leader, was assassinated during a violent government eviction of the community of Rio Chiquito.
• As stated above, police threatened Sotero Echeverria, member of the COPINH coordinating committee, with arrest.
• In the capitol, three hit men shot and wounded Christian Mauricio Alegría, who works with the global peasant movement La Via Campesina. His uncle, Rafael Alegría, is a deputy in the national parliament from the opposition Libre Party, and is former secretary general of La Via Campesina.
• José Flores, head of the United Movement of the Peasants of the Aguan (MUCA), was temporarily arrested along with family members in the town of Tocoa.

The message was clear to all. No matter where one is or with whom one works, activists are not safe in Honduras.

From the Mexican Embassy on 15th March, Castro sent out a note of condolence and support to the Honduran people. He closed the missive this way: “Soon there will be justice.”

Take action here to call for safety for Gustavo Castro and members of COPINH, as well as for a fair, internationally led investigation into Berta Cáceres’ killing.

Beverly Bell is founder of Other Worlds and more than a dozen international organizations and networks, Beverly is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Beverly has worked for more than three decades as an organizer, advocate, and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the US. Her focus areas are just economies; democratic participation; and rights for women, indigenous peoples, and other excluded peoples.

It’s real simple. Create a threat, predicate expanding autocracy at home and endless wars of hegemony abroad upon confronting that threat, and all the while intentionally perpetuate fear, hysteria, hatred, and division to keep that threat relevant in the hearts and minds of as many people as possible.

Described above is an elementary tactic used by special interests throughout human history, and today’s special interests being no exception. Today, the contrived threat of choice is “terrorism.” It is a well-documented fact that organizations like Al Qaeda and the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), are creations and geopolitical tools of the United States, its European allies, and its Middle Eastern subordinates, including Turkey and the Persian Gulf states.

The means of keeping this contrived threat fresh in the minds of the public is Islamophobia – the scapegoating of some 1.6 billion Muslims around the world for the deeds of US-Saudi indoctrinated, armed, funded, and backed extremists.

Image: Groups like the UK EDL, PEGIDA, and others are created and run directly by special interests – ironically the same special interests organizing, funding, and directing the very extremists Islamophobes are scapegoating all of Islam for. Many EDL/PEGIDA members are concurrently violent football hooligans and/or Neo-Nazis, thus, a lack of informed discernment should be no surprise.

The role the United States and Saudi Arabia played in the inception of Al Qaeda during the 1980’s to wage proxy war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is documented history. What is less widely known, is the role these same two nations played in the creation of ISIS -which admittedly branched off from Al Qaeda.

However, America’s own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) admitted in a leaked 2012 memo that indeed, just as Al Qaeda was created to wage proxy war in Afghanistan, a “Salafist” (Islamic) “principality” (State) was intentionally created in eastern Syria to wage proxy war against Damascus.

The leaked 2012 report (.pdf) stated explicitly that:

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.

It is clear then, that if the US and its allies are behind ISIS, then attacks attributed to ISIS are either directly or indirectly related to US foreign policy. It is very clear that ISIS serves Western objectives in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) by waging war against precisely those governments the US itself has slated for “regime change.” ISIS also serves as a convenient pretext for direct military intervention abroad when possible.

What may be less clear to some, is what the US and its allies have to gain when ISIS launches attacks in France, Belgium, and other targets across both East and West.

However, it is indeed clear – clear that they serve to bolster the contrived threat of “global terrorism” and both the growing autocracy at home and expanding wars abroad,

Islamophobia Industry Run by Familiar Faces 

Wouldn’t it be curious if those most vocal in promoting fear, hysteria, hatred, and division against Muslims to perpetuate the contrived threat of “global terrorism” represented the same special interests both involved directly in arming, funding, training, and exploiting the violence of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, as well as the same special interests profiting the most from the perpetual “War on Terror?”

It would be curious – and it also happens to be the verified truth.

A growing ecosystem of Islamophobia networks is centered around a cadre of Neo-Conservatives who led the United States into the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as advocated for wars against Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and many more in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania.

One of the highest level former US government representatives publicly involved, John Bolton, was a vocal advocate for global war including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Iran, and  has for years served as the gravitational center of at least America’s Islamophobia subsidiary. Around him orbits media personality, racist, bigot Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, and Project for a New American Century (PNAC) signatory, Daniel Pipes.

Image: Not only is America’s Islamophobia subsidiary linked directly to US government representatives directly involved in both the arming, funding, and exploitation of terrorist groups and the various wars fought upon the pretext of “fighting terrorism,” but this subsidiary interlocks with those across Europe including the UK’s “English Defense League” and PEGIDA. The special interests characters like Bolton, pictured posing with Geller top, right, represent, have made literally trillions off of the wars predicated on the fear, hatred, and hysteria perpetuated by Islamophobia.

Further in the peripheries, are faux-alternative media cognitive infiltrators like WorldNetDaily run by Joseph Farah, a card-carrying member of the Neo-Conservative war lobby and an associate with many advocates who have played a direct role in the subversion and destruction of Syria. Farah himself is Syrian-Lebanese, and involved heavily in organizations created by the US aimed at the overthrow and reordering of the Levant.

WND, Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, and many others who lead the American Islamophobia subsidiary, in tandem with their European counterparts, have invested years in fanning the flames of misunderstanding, hatred, fear, and hysteria among Western populations. They do this to both divert from the fact that the very interests they represent are the source of global terrorism carried out by Al Qaeda and ISIS – creations not of Islam, but of US foreign policy, and to create sufficient rhetorical justification for continued American intervention overseas across MENA and beyond.

The West has scarcely managed to justify its many and still multiplying wars abroad, and global consensus regarding America’s role in the creation and perpetuation of Al Qaeda and ISIS is reaching critical mass. It is not difficult to see that without the significant Islamophobia being spread through at least segments of the world’s population, just how much more tenuous US foreign policy would be.

Those in the Alternative Media Selling Out 

It has been a stated matter of US policy, best articulated in former-US Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein’s “Conspiracy Theories” paper, to infiltrate and redirect the alternative media, who even years ago, had already begun to significantly undermine US spheres of influence within global information space.

Called “cognitive infiltration,” the idea was to infiltrate the alternative media with messages not directly contradicting the truth, but contradicting it enough to slowly bring readers, viewers, and listeners back into government controlled narratives. That is precisely what WND and those that have since found themselves in close cooperation with them and paid lobbyists like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer have done.

Co-opted alternative media organizations that had for years warned the public of the dangers of false flag terrorism, US government involvement behind both Al Qaeda and more recently ISIS, and who had warned of Western attempts to scapegoat religions, races, and political systems to divide and control people, are now directly complicit in doing all of the above.

Now, throngs of weaker-minded readers who had drifted toward alternative media, have been successfully brought back through the vector of Islamophobia – employing many of the most elementary ploys used throughout the history of propaganda to manipulate and control public perception. With establishment media platforms and alleged alternative media personalities peddling precisely the same narrative so closely, these supposed alternative media platforms no longer are “alternative.”

What is left is for genuine alternative media to recognize this split and continue focusing on telling the truth overall – and in particular – the interests and agendas being served by the Islamophobia industry. Co-opted alternative media organizations that had for years warned the public of the dangers of false flag terrorism, US government involvement behind both Al Qaeda and more recently ISIS, and who had warned of Western attempts to scapegoat religions, races, and political systems to divide and control people, are now directly complicit in doing all of the above.

Image: It is a hard sell for US policymakers to justify the price in public treasure and blood paid to maintain global hegemony like that depicted on the map above. It would be infinitely harder without the contrived threat of “terrorism,” and to ensure the longevity of the “terror” narrative, much has been invested in the Islamophobia industry.

The goal should not be to fall into perpetual infighting with these co-opted individuals and organizations. The goal should be to treat these sell-outs precisely as the rest of the corporate-controlled media is treated – a voice to be exposed by simply documenting and reporting the truth.

Lying about Groups of People to Start Wars = Oldest Trick in the Book: Why are Some Still Falling for It? 

While in hindsight, considering the lies that have been told to sell wars to the Western people, and the documented wealth, power, and influence these wars have brought special interests at the cost of the rest of humanity, it should seem obvious to people that those peddling Islamophobia have vested monetary and political interests in doing so, and that the truth certainly lies well beyond their simplistic generalizations, slurs, and vitriol.

But because indulging  in racism and bigotry is a path of lesser resistance than informed inquiry, research, and self-guided learning, the establishment has found a means of diminishing the impact of alternative media. It will be up to genuine alternative media to find a way of restoring and even expanding upon its previous impact.

Lying about groups of people to justify perpetual war profiteering is one of the oldest tricks in the book. If the alternative media is unable to confront and confound such elementary tricks, something is systemically weak within the alternative media itself. If the alternative media is content with reporting whatever will bring in readers and revenue, they are no longer the alternative media – they are bad copies of establishment propagandists. If the alternative media is serious about the truth and a future for themselves, their friends, family, and communities, this Islamophobia – and all ploys like it – must be confronted and crushed alongside all the other lies told by special interests.

Long live the European court, the most humane court in the world! 

That is why seven times as many Croat and more than ten times as many (Kosovar) Albanian war crimes suspects, in percentage terms relative to Serbs, were acquitted by the Hague Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, with Radovan Karadzic being just its latest victim. (Source via this recent infographic from Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda).

No matter that well before Srebrenica you had Sisak, where 595 Serb civilians of which 120 were women were disappeared by Croatian paramilitaries in 1991-1992. Everyone has heard of Srebrenica; almost nobody has heard heard of Sisak. The largest ethnic cleansing action of the entire war occurred in the wake of Operation Storm, when 200,000 Serbs were removed from the territories of Serbian Krajina to create the homogenous Croatia we have today. Croatia’s wartime leader Tudjman died peacefully and was buried with full honors and with no protests from the West.

It’s hard to think of an ethnic group, barring the Jews and possibly the Armenians, that has had a more traumatic 20th century. 25% of Serbians died in World War I. Another 25% died again in WW2 at the hands of the Nazis’ rabid hounds, the Ustaše. They were then incorporated into a federal state headed by an ethnic Croat whose internal divisions stranded many Serbs outside of Serbia’s borders. When in the wake of Yugoslavia’s collapse those stranded Serbs took up arms to defend themselves against revived nationalisms in Croatia and Bosnia – and ultimately, in their own country, against the metastasized Molenbeek that was Kosovo – they were steadily pushed back to their bombed out heartlands, unable to mount a sustained resistance against the Clinton clique’s sponsorship of the Croats and the Kosovars, cowardly betrayals from the Yeltsin regime in Russia, and the vaccilating Milosevic himself, always seeking to make deals with the “Western partners” (he only wised up to the fact that you can never trust the West by the time he was on the dock).

To round it all off, it was Serbia that had to send all its wartime leaders and generals off to the absolutely fair and impartial judgments of the Hague Tribunal – so fair and impartial that three times as many Serbs received prison sentences than all the other combatant parties combined – to be sacrificed on the altar of promised Euro-Atlantic integration.

A promise that now rings as almost completely hollow, the only result since then being the accession of Croatia to the EU, while Serbia has continued falling apart with the loss of Montenegro. And as of today, it is increasingly clear that the only additional peoples the EU is interested in integrating – or trying to, anyway – are young male Muslim refugees.

But not all hope is yet lost.

Perhaps Karadzic will eventually be seen not as the last knight of a dying order, but as one of the first heralds of a new dawn. It was NATO’s attack on Serbia more than anything else that lifted Russia from its blind-drunk 1990s pro-Western stupor, and it has become more and more active at countering further Western designs on its territories – in Crimea and Novorossiya, and in the sovereign state of Syria. The pushback against the globalist cabal will continue and this time Serbia will no longer be alone should it rejoin the struggle.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Karadzic, despite his advanced age, will live long enough to see the wrongs done unto his people this past century avenged and to set foot one last time on a liberated Serbia.

Families threaten to pull children from Jaffa’s first mixed Arab-Jewish school, accusing Tel Aviv officials of breaking promises

It is a rare scene: in a classroom on the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv, young Israeli children – Jewish and Palestinian – play and study together, casually chatting and joking in a mix of

It is a rare scene: in a classroom on the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv, young Israeli children – Jewish and Palestinian – play and study together, casually chatting and joking in a mix of Hebrew and Arabic.

The opening of the first bilingual classrooms in Israel’s largest city was celebrated with great excitement by parents and teachers last September. It broke with a decades-old model of strict segregation between the country’s Jewish and Palestinian pupils.

Israel includes a large and often-overlooked minority of 1.7 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population.

Only months into the educational experiment, however, the mood has soured. Hundreds of parents staged a protest in central Tel Aviv this month, chanting “All children are equal” and “We demand bilingual education.”

They accuse the municipality and education ministry – both of which officially support the project – of betraying the ideals of bilingualism, and have threatened to pull their children out of the school.

“We held a vote and 80 percent of parents agreed that they would not let their children continue at the school if things stay as they are,” Assaf Ronel, a spokesman for the parents, told Middle East Eye.

We have demanded that the municipality commit to our vision in writing, and provide a proper space for a Palestinian identity in the school.

Fierce backlash

Shuli Dichter, director of Hand in Hand, an organisation that promotes bilingual education in Israel, calls the 170 families taking part in its Jaffa project “pioneers”.

Hand in Hand operates four bilingual schools across Israel and two kindergartens. Jaffa’s primary school classes are the most recent addition.

The idea of children from different cultural backgrounds learning together and speaking each other’s language may seem uncontroversial. But it has prompted a fierce backlash from right-wing Jewish groups in Israel.

In late 2014 Hand in Hand’s flagship school in Jerusalem was torched by activists from Lehava, an organisation that opposes integration between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Graffiti daubed on the walls read “Death to the Arabs” and “There can be no coexistence with cancer”.

Three of the group’s members were jailed last year. In January Israel’s high court increased the sentences of two brothers involved in the arson attack.

Although Lehava is a fringe group, it draws on ideas that have found favour with much larger numbers of Israeli Jews, especially over the past 15 years as the country has lurched to the right.

A survey by the Pew polling organisation this month found that half of Israeli Jews wanted Arabs expelled from the state, and 79 percent believed Jews should have more rights than their Palestinian compatriots.

In the current climate, Dichter told MEE, Jaffa’s Jewish and Palestinian parents were a “revolutionary group, determined to break down the walls between them”.

“The families want to build a shared community around these schools based on the principle of equality,” he said. “That goes against official policy. It can be viewed as deeply subversive.”

Drop in the ocean

According to Hand in Hand, interest among parents has rocketed following the arson attack in Jerusalem, with the publicity alerting many parents to the existence of bilingual education for the first time.

“In many areas, we have 20 children for every available place, and demand is growing especially fast among Jewish parents,” Dichter said. “It is only a shortage of financial resources that prevents us from opening more schools.”

The numbers participating so far, however, are a drop in the ocean: 1,350 children are currently in bilingual education, out of a total Israeli school population of some 1.5 million children.

The Jaffa parents argue that their coastal city of 50,000 residents, which is incorporated into the Tel Aviv municipal area, is the natural location for a bilingual school.

A third of Jaffa’s residents are Palestinian, reflecting the fact that, before Israel’s creation in 1948, it was Palestine’s commercial centre.

Although Israelis mostly live in separate communities, based on their ethnicity, Jaffa is one of half a dozen urban areas where Jewish and Palestinian citizens live close to each other.

Pressure for change

The story of bilingual education began in Jaffa three years ago when the municipality agreed, under mounting pressure from dozens of local parents, to allow Hand in Hand to take over a disused kindergarten.

It was such a success that the parents demanded the city allow their children to continue on into elementary school, said Mohammed Marzouk, who coordinates between the parents and the municipality on behalf of Hand in Hand.

But rather than provide them with a new school, Tel Aviv officials agreed only to incorporate the children into a failing Jewish school, one that was due to close because of falling enrolment.

The situation was far from ideal, Marzouk told MEE, but the parents were persuaded that the school would gradually become bilingual as the children in the project rose up through the grades.

“Bilingual schools have a different DNA,” said Marzouk. “And it’s very difficult to achieve that when the existing culture is entirely Jewish.”

It was vital, he said, that books were in both Arabic and Hebrew, that signs around the school were in the two languages, and that the holidays of the three religions represented in class – Jewish, Muslim and Christian – were respected and celebrated by all children.

Ronel said of the municipality’s position: “We received many promises, but in practice most of them were not kept.”

Row over holidays

Within days of the bilingual first-grade classes opening last year, parents hit a crisis when school administrators refused to let the children take off the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha.

When the parents rebelled and kept their children home, the management “flipped out”, said Ronel. “Now the trust has gone and we are demanding that they make commitments in writing that things will be different.”

Marzouk said the biggest challenge to founding bilingual schools was “breaking the resistance of officials. Without pressure from the parents, it won’t happen.”

A spokeswoman for the Tel Aviv municipality said this was the first year the two bilingual classes had operated. Municipal and education ministry officials, she added, would be “at hand to assist and solve problems that might come up during the year”.

Solution to conflict

Advocates for bilingual education argue that it is the key to reversing increasing social polarisation in Israel and ending a seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Earlier this month, a few hundred metres from Jaffa’s bilingual school, a Palestinian from the West Bank went on a stabbing spree that killed an American tourist and wounded nearly a dozen Israelis.

Ronel, an Israeli Jewish journalist, said he had long been pessimistic about the region’s future and had contemplated leaving Israel with his family, taking advantage of his wife’s German passport. But that changed once his daughter, Ruth, began at the bilingual kindergarten.

“I have become evangelical about it,” he said. “I see how her knowledge of Palestinian identity and the Arabic language has made her own identity much stronger.”

He said knowing the other side was essential to strengthening Israelis’ sense of security and reducing their fears. “This is the model for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict too. I am sure this is what a solution will look like.”

Marzouk agreed. “When the conflict isn’t being solved on the macro-level, people start to look for solutions on the micro-level.”

According to Dichter, bilingual schools are proving particularly popular in Israel’s mixed cities. Next year Hand in Hand will open the first bilingual elementary school in Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, following the success of a bilingual kindergarten there.

A new generation of widely travelled parents are demanding an educational model based on equal citizenship, he said. “They have experienced social diversity outside Israel, they have seen colourful, inclusive societies, and they want to live that way themselves.”

Deeper segregation

However, the movement for change is not all in one direction, even in Jaffa.

Far-right Jewish religious groups, ideologically close to the settlers, have set up seminaries and exclusive housing areas in Jaffa and other mixed cities. “They are going the other way: they want even deeper segregation,” said Dichter.

Hassan Agbaria, principal of the only bilingual school in a Palestinian community in Israel, located in the northern town of Kafr Karia, said there were problems in more rural areas too.

This month the gated Jewish community of Katzir, close to his school, refused to allow Hand in Hand organisers in for a parents’ registration meeting, accusing the group of “political activity”.

“It is a big psychological hurdle for some of them,” he told MEE. “Some think you must be crazy to send your young children into an Arab community every day.”

Another of Hand in Hand’s rural schools – in the gated Jewish community of Ashbal in the Galilee – has seen enrolment from Jewish parents fall sharply in recent years.

Dichter admitted: “The challenge is to attract these families out from behind their gates, and it can only be done by offering them an excellent education programme.”

Marzouk said it had also proven difficult to take the bilingual model beyond elementary level. So far, only the Jerusalem school, founded in 1998, offers a secondary education.

Many Jewish parents, he noted, were concerned about how, in the context of bilingual education, their children would cope with the preparation for compulsory military service when they finish high school.

And given the dominant climate of opinion in both Jewish and Palestinian society, opposition to teenagers dating across the ethnic divide could not be ignored.

“These obstacles aren’t insurmountable but they are major challenges,” said Marzouk. “As we get more experienced, we are finding better ways to deal with these complexities.”

Instilling fear in the minds of the public has been a powerful tool of social control since the dawn of human civilization. Today, it is clear that the Western elite are using fear and terror as a means of ushering in totalitarian control. The mainstream media has been force-feeding the Western public a steady diet of war, fear and terror since the neocons “new Pearl Harbor event” in 2001.

After the latest terror attack in Belgium, the media is playing its usual role of amplifying the incident beyond any rational comprehension. The majority of the public are caught up in the vortex of emotive propaganda and sensationalist rhetoric. Images of terror; horror; fear; and panic dominate the news landscape. The main message is that you should be afraid.

The only solution to latest crisis (in the eyes of the elite) is for even greater spying powers and totalitarian control. Hillary Clinton, the political prostitute par excellence, called for more surveillance and an expansion of the police state in response to the attacks in Belgium. Both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump support a further erosion of civil liberties and have called for increasing surveillance of Muslims (Trump even advocated torturing terror suspects).

Yet not one political figure has called for prosecuting CIA and other US officials for war crimes, after years of the West openly funding and arming terrorists in Syria. Accountability is what is needed, not authoritarianism.

Every terror attack produces the same response by the elite: more surveillance, more state power, more war, more barbarism and more control. It’s frankly boring. You know what the puppets are going to say prior to them opening their mouths. It was the same response after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, when David Cameron was pushing for greater surveillance powers in the UK and leading the charge for an insane ban on all encryption.

We know that NSA spying has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, and everything to do with controlling the domestic population. In the words of the high-level NSA whistleblower, William Binney:

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”

We know that Western intelligence agencies and their regional allies were instrumental in supporting the rise of ISIS (and other terror groups), by funding and arming these factions in a failed attempt to topple al-Assad. In the words of the former US military intelligence chief, Michael T. Flynn, the Obama administration took the “willful decision” to support the rise of these radical forces.

The criminal Western elite have no intention of winning the ‘war on terror,’ as the ‘war on terror’ was always designed to be perennial. The elite create the terror groups because without the faux ‘war on terror,’ the surveillance state loses the entire pretext on which it was built.

For any totalitarian elite, it is essential that “a state of war should exist,” as Orwell wrote in 1984:

It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist… The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable situation of survival (2008 edition: p.200 & p.201).

As the elite create a perpetual state of war, chaos, fear and terror, the people of the West increasingly allow more power to be concentrated in the hands of the ‘superclass.’ If the Western public continues to be duped into believing that this phony ‘war on terror’ is real, the elite will use this as a pretext to completely destroy civil liberties and any semblance of freedom in the West.

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

CHRIS HEDGES: We’re going to be discussing a great Ponzi scheme that not only defines not only the U.S. but the global economy, how we got there and where we’re going. And with me to discuss this issue is the economist Michael Hudson, author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy. A professor of economics who worked for many years on Wall Street, where you don’t succeed if you don’t grasp Marx’s dictum that capitalism is about exploitation. And he is also, I should mention, the godson of Leon Trotsky.

I want to open this discussion by reading a passage from your book, which I admire very much, which I think gets to the core of what you discuss. You write,

Adam Smith long ago remarked that profits often are highest in nations going fastest to ruin. There are many ways to create economic suicide on a national level. The major way through history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to reach a point where it cannot be paid by a large swathe of the economy. This is the point where austerity is imposed and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent. Today is not the first time this has occurred in history. But it is the first time that running into debt has occurred deliberately.” Applauded. “As if most debtors can get rich by borrowing, not reduced to a condition of debt peonage.

So let’s start with the classical economists, who certainly understood this. They were reacting of course to feudalism. And what happened to the study of economics so that it became gamed by ideologues?

HUDSON: The essence of classical economics was to reform industrial capitalism, to streamline it, and to free the European economies from the legacy of feudalism. The legacy of feudalism was landlords extracting land-rent, and living as a class that took income without producing anything. Also, banks that were not funding industry. The leading industrialists from James Watt, with his steam engine, to the railroads …

HEDGES: From your book you make the point that banks almost never funded industry.

HUDSON: That’s the point: They never have. By the time you got to Marx later in the 19th century, you had a discussion, largely in Germany, over how to make banks do something they did not do under feudalism. Right now we’re having the economic surplus beingdrained not by the landlords but also by banks and bondholders.

Adam Smith was very much against colonialism because that lead to wars, and wars led to public debt. He said the solution to prevent this financial class of bondholders burdening the economy by imposing more and more taxes on consumer goods every time they went to war was to finance wars on a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of borrowing, you’d tax the people. Then, he thought, if everybody felt the burden of war in the form of paying taxes, they’d be against it. Well, it took all of the 19th century to fight for democracy and to extend the vote so that instead of landlords controlling Parliament and its law-making and tax system through the House of Lords, you’d extend the vote to labor, to women and everybody. The theory was that society as a whole would vote in its self-interest. It would vote for the 99 Percent, not for the One Percent.

By the time Marx wrote in the 1870s, he could see what was happening in Germany. German banks were trying to make money in conjunction with the government, by lending to heavy industry, largely to the military-industrial complex.

HEDGES: This was Bismarck’s kind of social – I don’t know what we’d call it. It was a form of capitalist socialism…

HUDSON: They called it State Capitalism. There was a long discussion by Engels, saying, wait a minute. We’re for Socialism. State Capitalism isn’t what we mean by socialism. There are two kinds of state-oriented–.

HEDGES: I’m going to interject that there was a kind of brilliance behind Bismarck’s policy because he created state pensions, he provided health benefits, and he directed banking toward industry, toward the industrialization of Germany which, as you point out, was very different in Britain and the United States.

HUDSON: German banking was so successful that by the time World War I broke out, there were discussions in English economic journals worrying that Germany and the Axis powers were going to win because their banks were more suited to fund industry. Without industry you can’t have really a military. But British banks only lent for foreign trade and for speculation. Their stock market was a hit-and-run operation. They wanted quick in-and-out profits, while German banks didn’t insist that their clients pay as much in dividends. German banks owned stocks as well as bonds, and there was much more of a mutual partnership.

That’s what most of the 19^th century imagined was going to happen – that the world was on the way to socializing banking. And toward moving capitalism beyond the feudal level, getting rid of the landlord class, getting rid of the rent, getting rid of interest. It was going to be labor and capital, profits and wages, with profits being reinvested in more capital. You’d have an expansion of technology. By the early twentieth century most futurists imagined that we’d be living in a leisure economy by now.

HEDGES: Including Karl Marx.

HUDSON: That’s right. A ten-hour workweek. To Marx, socialism was to be an outgrowth of the reformed state of capitalism, as seemed likely at the time – if labor organized in its self-interest.

HEDGES: Isn’t what happened in large part because of the defeat of Germany in World War I? But also, because we took the understanding of economists like Adam Smith and maybe Keynes. I don’t know who you would blame for this, whether Ricardo or others, but we created a fictitious economic theory to praise a rentier or rent-derived, interest-derived capitalism that countered productive forces within the economy. Perhaps you can address that.

HUDSON: Here’s what happened. Marx traumatized classical economics by taking the concepts of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and others, and pushing them to their logical conclusion. Progressive capitalist advocates – Ricardian socialists such as John Stuart Mill – wanted to tax away the land or nationalize it. Marx wanted governments to take over heavy industry and build infrastructure to provide low-cost and ultimately free basic services. This was traumatizing the landlord class and the One Percent. And they fought back. They wanted to make everything part of “the market,” which functioned on credit supplied by them and paid rent to them.

None of the classical economists imagined how the feudal interests – these great vested interests that had all the land and money – actually would fight back and succeed. They thought that the future was going to belong to capital and labor. But by the late 19^th century, certainly in America, people like John Bates Clark came out with a completely different theory, rejecting the classical economics of Adam Smith, the Physiocrats and John Stuart Mill.

HEDGES: Physiocrats are, you’ve tried to explain, the enlightened French economists.

HUDSON: The common denominator among all these classical economists was the distinction between earned income and unearned income. Unearned income was rent and interest. Earned incomes were wages and profits. But John Bates Clark came and said that there’s no such thing as unearned income. He said that the landlord actually earns his rent by taking the effort to provide a house and land to renters, while banks provide credit to earn their interest. Every kind of income is thus “earned,” and everybody earns their income. So everybody who accumulates wealth, by definition, according to his formulas, get rich by adding to what is now called Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

HEDGES: One of the points you make in Killing the Host which I liked was that in almost all cases, those who had the capacity to make money parasitically off interest and rent had either – if you go back to the origins – looted and seized the land by force, or inherited it.

HUDSON: That’s correct. In other words, their income is unearned. The result of this anti-classical revolution you had just before World War I was that today, almost all the economic growth in the last decade has gone to the One Percent. It’s gone to Wall Street, to real estate …

HEDGES: But you blame this on what you call Junk Economics.

HUDSON: Junk Economics is the anti-classical reaction.

HEDGES: Explain a little bit how, in essence, it’s a fictitious form of measuring the economy.

HUDSON: Well, some time ago I went to a bank, a block away from here – a Chase Manhattan bank – and I took out money from the teller. As I turned around and took a few steps, there were two pickpockets. One pushed me over and the other grabbed the money and ran out. The guard stood there and saw it. So I asked for the money back. I said, look, I was robbed in your bank, right inside. And they said, “Well, we don’t arm our guards because if they shot someone, the thief could sue us and we don’t want that.” They gave me an equivalent amount of money back.

Well, imagine if you count all this crime, all the money that’s taken, as an addition to GDP. Because now the crook has provided the service of not stabbing me. Or suppose somebody’s held up at an ATM machine and the robber says, “Your money or your life.” You say, “Okay, here’s my money.” The crook has given you the choice of your life. In a way that’s how the Gross National Product accounts are put up. It’s not so different from how Wall Street extracts money from the economy. Then also you have landlords extracting …

HEDGES: Let’s go back. They’re extracting money from the economy by debt peonage. By raising …

HUDSON: By not playing a productive role, basically.

HEDGES: Right. So it’s credit card interest, mortgage interest, car loans, student loans. That’s how they make their funds.

HUDSON: That’s right. Money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit, in order to get money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks. At New York University here, for instance, they have Citibank. I think Citibank people were on the board of directors at NYU. You get the students, when they come here, to start at the local bank. And once you are in a bank and have monthly funds taken out of your account for electric utilities, or whatever, it’s very cumbersome to change.

So basically you have what the classical economists called the rentierclass. The class that lives on economic rents. Landlords, monopolists charging more, and the banks. If you have a pharmaceutical company that raises the price of a drug from $12 a shot to $200 all of a sudden, their profits go up. Their increased price for the drug is counted in the national income accounts as if the economy is producing more. So all this presumed economic growth that has all been taken by the One Percent in the last ten years, and people say the economy is growing. But the economy isn’t growing …

HEDGES: Because it’s not reinvested.

HUDSON: That’s right. It’s not production, it’s not consumption. The wealth of the One Percent is obtained essentially by lending money to the 99 Percent and then charging interest on it, and recycling this interest at an exponentially growing rate.

HEDGES: And why is it important, as I think you point out in your book, that economic theory counts this rentier income as productive income? Explain why that’s important.

HUDSON: If you’re a rentier, you want to say that you earned your income by …

HEDGES: We’re talking about Goldman Sachs, by the way.

HUDSON: Yes, Goldman Sachs. The head of Goldman Sachs came out and said that Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive in the world. That’s why they’re paid what they are. The concept of productivity in America is income divided by labor. So if you’re Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary and bonuses, you’re considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that’s enormously productive. So we’re talking in a tautology. We’re talking with circular reasoning here.

So the issue is whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and predatory pharmaceutical firms, actually add “product” or whether they’re just exploiting other people. That’s why I used the word parasitism in my book’s title. People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more complicated. The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn’t realize the parasite’s there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host’s brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected.

That’s basically what Wall Street has done. It depicts itself as part of the economy. Not as a wrapping around it, not as external to it, but actually the part that’s helping the body grow, and that actually is responsible for most of the growth. But in fact it’s the parasite that is taking over the growth.

The result is an inversion of classical economics. It turns Adam Smith upside down. It says what the classical economists said was unproductive – parasitism – actually is the real economy. And that the parasites are labor and industry that get in the way of what the parasite wants – which is to reproduce itself, not help the host, that is, labor and capital.

HEDGES: And then the classical economists like Adam Smith were quite clear that unless that rentier income, you know, the money made by things like hedge funds, was heavily taxed and put back into the economy, the economy would ultimately go into a kind of tailspin. And I think the example of that, which you point out in your book, is what’s happened in terms of large corporations with stock dividends and buybacks. And maybe you can explain that.

HUDSON: There’s an idea in superficial textbooks and the public media that if companies make a large profit, they make it by being productive. And with …

HEDGES: Which is still in textbooks, isn’t it?

HUDSON: Yes. And also that if a stock price goes up, you’re just capitalizing the profits – and the stock price reflects the productive role of the company. But that’s not what’s been happening in the last ten years. Just in the last two years, 92 percent of corporate profits in America have been spent either on buying back their own stock, or paid out as dividends to raise the price of the stock.

HEDGES: Explain why they do this.

HUDSON: About 15 years ago at Harvard, Professor Jensen said that the way to ensure that corporations are run most efficiently is to make the managers increase the price of the stock. So if you give the managers stock options, and you pay them not according to how much they’re producing or making the company bigger, or expanding production, but the price of the stock, then you’ll have the corporation run efficiently, financial style.

So the corporate managers find there are two ways that they can increase the price of the stock. The first thing is to cut back long-term investment, and use the money instead to buy back their own stock. But when you buy your own stock, that means you’re not putting the money into capital formation. You’re not building new factories. You’re not hiring more labor. You can actually increase the stock price by firing labor.

HEDGES: That strategy only works temporarily.

HUDSON: Temporarily. By using the income from past investments just to buy back stock, fire the labor force if you can, and work it more intensively. Pay it out as dividends. That basically is the corporate raider’s model. You use the money to pay off the junk bond holders at high interest. And of course, this gets the company in trouble after a while, because there is no new investment.

So markets shrink. You then go to the labor unions and say, gee, this company’s near bankruptcy, and we don’t want to have to fire you. The way that you can keep your job is if we downgrade your pensions. Instead of giving you what we promised, the defined benefit pension, we’ll turn it into a defined contribution plan. You know what you pay every month, but you don’t know what’s going to come out. Or, you wipe out the pension fund, push it on to the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, and use the money that you were going to pay for pensions to pay stock dividends. By then the whole economy is turning down. It’s hollowed out. It shrinks and collapses. But by that time the managers will have left the company. They will have taken their bonuses and salaries and run.

HEDGES: I want to read this quote from your book, written by David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and have you comment on it.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute rather than to generate wealth and income. [By] ‘accumulation by dispossession’ I mean … the commodification and privatization of land, and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of various forms of property rights (common collective state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights; suppression of rights to the commons; … colonial, neocolonial, and the imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); … and usury, the national debt and, most devastating at all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. … To this list of mechanisms, we may now add a raft of techniques such as the extraction of rents from patents, and intellectual property rights (such as the diminution or erasure of various forms of common property rights, such as state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education, health care) one through a generation or more of class struggle. The proposal to privatize all state pension rights, pioneered in Chile under the dictatorship is, for example, one of the cherished objectives of the Republicans in the US.

This explains the denouement. The final end result you speak about in your book is, in essence, allowing what you call the rentier or the speculative class to cannibalize the entire society until it collapses.

HUDSON: A property right is not a factor of production. Look at what happened in Chicago, the city where I grew up. Chicago didn’t want to raise taxes on real estate, especially on its expensive commercial real estate. So its budget ran a deficit. They needed money to pay the bondholders, so they sold off the parking rights to have meters – you know, along the curbs. The result is that they sold to Goldman Sachs 75 years of the right to put up parking meters. So now the cost of living and doing business in Chicago is raised by having to pay the parking meters. If Chicago is going to have a parade and block off traffic, it has to pay Goldman Sachs what the firm would have made if the streets wouldn’t have been closed off for a parade. All of a sudden it’s much more expensive to live in Chicago because of this.

But this added expense of having to pay parking rights to Goldman Sachs – to pay out interest to its bondholders – is counted as an increase in GDP, because you’ve created more product simply by charging more. If you sell off a road, a government or local road, and you put up a toll booth and make it into a toll road, all of a sudden GDP goes up.

If you go to war abroad, and you spend more money on the military-industrial complex, all this is counted as increased production. None of this is really part of the production system of the capital and labor building more factories and producing more things that people need to live and do business. All of this is overhead. But there’s no distinction between wealth and overhead.

Failing to draw that distinction means that the host doesn’t realize that there is a parasite there. The host economy, the industrial economy, doesn’t realize what the industrialists realized in the 19^thcentury: If you want to be an efficient economy and be low-priced and under-sell competitors, you have to cut your prices by having the public sector provide roads freely. Medical care freely. Education freely.

If you charge for all of these, you get to the point that the U.S. economy is in today. What if American factory workers were to get allof their consumer goods for nothing. All their food, transportation, clothing, furniture, everything for nothing. They still couldn’t compete with Asians or other producers, because they have to pay up to 43% of their income for rent or mortgage interest, 10% or more of their income for student loans, credit card debt. 15% of their paycheck is automatic withholding to pay Social Security, to cut taxes on the rich or to pay for medical care.

So Americans built into the economy all this overhead. There’s no distinction between growth and overhead. It’s all made America so high-priced that we’re priced out of the market, regardless of what trade policy we have.

HEDGES: We should add that under this predatory form of economics, you game the system. So you privatize pension funds, you force them into the stock market, an overinflated stock market. But because of the way companies go public, it’s the hedge fund managers who profit. And it’s those citizens whose retirement savings are tied to the stock market who lose. Maybe we can just conclude by talking about how the system is fixed, not only in terms of burdening the citizen with debt peonage, but by forcing them into the market to fleece them again.

HUDSON: Well, we talk about an innovation economy as if that makes money. Suppose you have an innovation and a company goes public. They go to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street investment banks to underwrite the stock to issue it at $40 a share. What’s considered a successful float is when, immediately, Goldman and the others will go to their insiders and tell them to buy this stock and make a quick killing. A “successful” flotation doubles the price in one day, so that at the end of the day the stock’s selling for $80.

HEDGES: They have the option to buy it before anyone else, knowing that by the end of the day it’ll be inflated, and then they sell it off.

HUDSON: That’s exactly right.

HEDGES: So the pension funds come in and buy it at an inflated price, and then it goes back down.

HUDSON: It may go back down, or it may be that the company just was shortchanged from the very beginning. The important thing is that the Wall Street underwriting firm, and the speculators it rounds up, get more in a single day than all the years it took to put the company together. The company gets $40. And the banks and their crony speculators also get $40.

So basically you have the financial sector ending up with much more of the gains. The name of the game if you’re on Wall Street isn’t profits. It’s capital gains. And that’s something that wasn’t even part of classical economics. They didn’t anticipate that the price of assets would go up for any other reason than earning more money and capitalizing on income. But what you have had in the last 50 years – really since World War II – has been asset-price inflation. Most middle-class families have gotten the wealth that they’ve got since 1945 not really by saving what they’ve earned by working, but by the price of their house going up. They’ve benefited by the price of the house. And they think that that’s made them rich and the whole economy rich.

The reason the price of housing has gone up is that a house is worth whatever a bank is going to lend against it. If banks made easier and easier credit, lower down payments, then you’re going to have a financial bubble. And now, you have real estate having gone up as high as it can. I don’t think it can take more than 43% of somebody’s income to buy it. But now, imagine if you’re joining the labor force. You’re not going to be able to buy a house at today’s prices, putting down a little bit of your money, and then somehow end up getting rich just on the house investment. All of this money you pay the bank is now going to be subtracted from the amount of money that you have available to spend on goods and services.

So we’ve turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out. Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can’t get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end the creditors always win. That’s why every society since Sumer and Babylonia have had to either cancel the debts, or you come to a society like Rome that didn’t cancel the debts, and then you have a dark age. Everything collapses.

Michael Hudson’s new book, Killing the Host is published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet. He can be reached via his website, [email protected]. Chris Hedges’s latest book is Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, illustrated by Joe Sacco.

One of our group was walking her dog on the beach on Monday morning. It was 21 March, one day after the agreement between the EU and Turkey had come into force. From now on arriving refugees faced the prospect of being returned to Turkey.

From the beach she saw a packed refugee boat making slowly and with difficulty for the shore. Soon after, one of the German police rescue boats turned up and slowly approached the refugee boat. As it got closer the refugees became more and more agitated, some were standing and a few went over the side into the sea. They were shouting that they would not get on the patrol boat and that they were not going back to Turkey. Then a man stood up holding a child and a fuel can and began to throw the contents over himself and the people around him. Then with a cigarette lighter in his hand shouted that if the rescue boat came any nearer he would use the lighter. The German boat backed off with the crew trying to re-assure the refugees that they were there to help them and not to return them to Turkey. Then the patrol boat lowered a very small inflatable with 2 policemen and they slowly approached the refugee boat and eventually passed a rope. With this the inflatable towed the refugees to the shore. There were 52 Syrian refugees in the boat of whom about a third were young children.

The German policemen from the dinghy were distressed when they landed and one of them just lay on the beach, crying, saying over and over again, that this wasn’t what he was trained to do; he was here to save lives, not to be seen as a threat and danger to the refugees. Some of the refugees saw this and went over to comfort and thank him. It was a very moving scene.

There was no evidence that the contents thrown from the can was petrol. There was no danger that the refugees would have been incinerated but at the time this was not known.

It is distressing to think that episodes like this, with deadly consequences for the refugees are more likely now with the EU/Turkey pact. We know from arriving refugees that the Turkish police and army are now regularly harassing and attacking refugees waiting to cross over and that even when on the sea the chance of push back by the Turkish coastguards is greater than ever before. All this is being sanctioned by the pact and indeed Turkey is under pressure to slow down and even stop the refugee traffic to the Greek frontier islands.

Of course refugees are going to resist. Making it to Samos has always been expensive, difficult and dangerous for refugees. It has now become more so. But it is the almost unfathomable desperation which fuels many in their determination to get to Greece. If you make it, you are not going to give up the ‘prize’ easily. Who knows what forms their resistance will take in the future but what happened on Monday gives some indication of where their desperation might lead.

The extent to which the pact has any chance of being implemented is going to fall on the shoulders of a range of state and possibly, NGO agencies and their workers. The NGOs have played a major role in sustaining and helping refugees over the past 6 months on Samos. It is not clear if this will continue not the least because the EU seems prepared for the NGOs to withdraw if they do not accept the new policies. The pact marks a clear punitive shift to the arriving refugees. This is more than evident in the locking of the Samos camp on Monday 21st March. The gates are now locked closed. The refugees are incarcerated. Mamoud, who features in ‘Reasons for Leaving’ phoned Tuesday morning from the camp. He and all the Pakistani refugees are now locked in. They are being told nothing but they know they are being seen as a special group. The lack of information is ‘killing us’ he said. ‘It is the worse thing’.They fear being returned to Turkey. They feel powerless. They are depressed. They are frustrated and they feel utterly isolated from any support.

Closed camps and desperate refugees is an explosive mixture. We are fearful for the refugees in Samos camp. It has never been a safe place but it is now being made more dangerous each day the lock-down continues. And be sure the attacks in Brussels and Paris (although not Ankara and Istanbul) are going to harden the punitive resolve of the authorities towards the refugees.”There is an urgent need to strengthen the external borders of the European Union,” Mr Valls [French prime minister] told French radio, adding that heightened vigilance was required to stop people crossing into Europe with false passports, as the group known as Islamic State has “stolen a large number of passports in Syria” (March 23,BBC News).

There are many consequences of incarceration – all bad – and one wonders for how much longer a rescue boat crew can tell newly arriving refugees that they are there to help and not to hurt them. Saving them from the sea and then taking them to the hell of a closed camp and processing for deportation challenges any sense of the meaning of helpful. And when it comes to the NGOs working on Samos, such as Medecin sans Frontieres (MSF) and Save the Children, these dilemmas are magnified given that they often have clear principles which forbid them from co-operating or assisting with the mandatory incarceration of refugees. But if they withdraw, what then for the refugees?

These are the first days of the pact. Most of the resources and personnel needed to implement the pact are not on the island yet. At this moment, we expect business as usual by which we mean confusion, chaos and constant shifts in practice. The NGOs are unhappy but they have not yet had time to work out a response. The same applies to all the activist and voluntary groups who face the challenge of how to help the refugees without colluding with incarceration and deportations. And also fundamentally how to help the refugees when the gates to the camp are locked.

But the locking of the camp sends out a clear signal.

With the March 24 ICTY decision condemning Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for war crimes, exactly 17 years after NATO began its bombing spree on Serbia,  international criminal justice revealed itself once again as an instrument of US and NATO foreign policy.

[They chose that the 24th of March to render judgment regarding Karadzic iquite deliberately with a view to erasing the history of NATO crimes.]

If any doubts persist, it is worth remembering how the Former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, David Scheffer, perceived that tribunal. Writing about it in his memoirs, Scheffer wrote unabashedly:

the tribunal was an important judicial tool, and I had enough support from President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defence William Cohen, and other top officials in Washington to wield it like a battering ram in the execution of US and NATO policy. (All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2012, p. 321. Our emphasis)

Justice Belied, The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice provides essential background to understand how the whole international criminal law movement, of which the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia is a part, has in fact undermined international criminal law.

The late Michael Mandel did groundbreaking work on the question, particularly with his 2004 book, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes against Humanity. David Jacobs knew him well. Following is an excerpt from David Jacobs’s important contribution to Justice Belied, entitled “How the International Criminal LawMovement Undermined International Law— Michael Mandel’s Groundbreaking Analyses.” Read that article and more in Justice Belied, The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice, edited by Sébastien Chartrand and  John Philpot.

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click to order book directly from Baraka books

“How the International Criminal Law Movement Undermined International Law— Michael Mandel’s Groundbreaking Analyses.”

by David Jacobs, (Excerpt)

(…) As Michael put it, it is “the quite massive and unspeakable criminality of the world’s richest countries and particularly that of the United States of America.”[3]

The only rational assumptions are that international criminal law will be firmly subordinated to power, that impunity will be a perk of economic and military hegemony, and that the usual suspects will continue to be rounded up while America gets away with murder.[4]

Michael Mandel

Michael surgically eviscerated the foundational pretensions of the international criminal law movement in works such as his 2004 publication, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage And Crimes Against Humanity. Michael’s view was that the old, anti-war order of international law, which recognised the sovereign equality of nations and anathematised unilateral aggressive war, had to be overthrown to legitimise the “new world order” crystallising after the end of the Cold War. The new order was characterised by the desire of the United States to violently and unilaterally impose “regime change” on governments it held in contempt. This new order needed legal sanction, and the international criminal law movement obliged by fatally undermining the old order governed by the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.

Michael’s argument, made with unassailable logic, is that given the context of NATO’s illegal attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (the “flagship”[5] post-Nuremberg tribunal first promoted by the movement), in turning a blind eye to the illegality of the attack, had no option but to become implicated in “the overthrow of international law and the UN Charter’s fundamental principles.”[6] Thus the ICTY (and by extension the International Criminal Court and the ad hoc tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) had to fashion a “substitute legality”[7] in the form of the current face of international criminal law promoted by the international criminal law movement.

Michael’s starting points include the Charter of the United Nations: the “fundamental document of the old world order,” [8] the “world’s constitution,”[9]and the Nuremberg Principles.[10] The central tenets of the UN Charter are:

[T]he equality of states and the prohibition of the use of force in international relations. Violence is only permissible when authorized by the Security Council… The only permissible unilateral use of military force is the strictly limited right of self-defence, temporarily available until the Security Council can deal with the situation.[11]

The Preamble to the UN Charter expressly sets out as its goal “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles sets out that crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are punishable as crimes under international law. Principle IV defines crimes against peace, in part, as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.” In a statement often cited by Michael in his writings and speeches, the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal famously declared:

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.[12]

Michael pointed out that collateral to the establishment of the various new international criminal tribunals to try war crimes and crimes against humanity was the 1999 war over Kosovo “fought under the legally preposterous claim of unilateral ‘humanitarian intervention,’” and the “mortal blow” to the UN Charter of the 2001 war against Afghanistan, “under the equally preposterous claim of self-defence.”[13]

It is in the furnace of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia that the ICTY and the “substitute legality,” which the international criminal law movement is enamoured of, were forged. Under the “old world order,” the forcible violation of national sovereignty was a violation of the “sound and precious anti-war principles of the”[14] UN Charter and the supreme international crime. While NATO spokespersons tried to justify the attack on the pretext of “humanitarian intervention” (now renamed with the more soothing soubriquet, “responsibility to protect”[15]) such pretext was itself an admission of criminality:

‘Humanitarian intervention’ by military force finds no place in the Charter of the United Nations, because for the generation who wrote the Charter the ‘scourge’ was war betweenstates, the violation of national sovereignty that was Nuremberg’s ‘supreme crime’… The notion of a ‘humanitarian war’ would have rang in the ears of the drafters of the UN Charter as nothing short of Hitlerian, because it was precisely the justification used by Hitler himself for the invasion of Poland six years earlier.

Michael showed beyond doubt that the NATO attack was a violation of the UN Charter and a crime against peace—a crime punishable under international law. It was a war of aggression, a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, not least in breach of the UN Charter and the NATO Treaty. The latter Treaty including the Preamble and Articles 1 and 7 thereto attests to the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council and the subordination of NATO to the UN Charter. As he explained:

Neither Security Council authorization nor self-defence was even claimed by NATO as justification for the use of force… The preamble of the NATO Treaty (1949) states that the signers of this document are attesting to their commitment to the premises of the United Nations Charter as well as their resolve to live amicably with all human beings.[16]

(…) To purchase Justice Belied, click here.

Notes

[3] Speakers’ notes, Michael Mandel, unpublished, 2001.

[4] Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, supra, fn. 1, p. 233.

[5] Michael Mandel, “The Legal Institutions of the New World Order: ‘Might Makes Right’ and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” in Gordana Yovanovich, ed., The New World Order: Corporate Agenda and Parallel Reality, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montréal, 2003, p. 72.

[6] Ibid. pp. 113-114.

[7] Ibid., p113-114.

[8] Ibid., p. 72.

[9] Michael Mandel, R2P & ICC v. UNC: The Responsibility to Protect and the International

Criminal Court versus the Charter of the United Nations in Costituzione Economia Globalizzazione, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2013, p. 1379.

[10] Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal. Adopted by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, 1950.

[11] Michael Mandel, “The Legal Institutions of the New World Order,” supra, fn. 6.

[12] Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, supra, fn. 1, p. 6.

[13] Michael Mandel, “The Legal Institutions of the New World Order,” supra, fn. 6.

[14] Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, supra, fn. 1, p. 113.

[15] See Michael Mandel, R2P & ICC v. UNC: The Responsibility to Protect and the International Criminal Court versus the Charter of the United Nations, pp. 1379-1391.

[16] Michael Mandel, “The Legal Institutions of the New World Order,” supra, fn. 6, p. 75.

Almost one year has passed since Operation Decisive Storm was launched. The appalling level of human suffering, combined with a mounting sense of hopelessness, is exacerbating internal divisions and sectarian animosity. Status quo is clearly not sustainable. The resilience of people in Yemen has been stretched beyond human limits. ~ Ms Kate Gilmore, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights

On the 26th March 2015, one year ago today, the Saudi led coalition launched its ‘Operation Decisive Storm’ against the Yemeni people.  One year on, the intensity of the attacks has not subsided and the wholesale slaughter of civilians and deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure continues unabated. Aided and abetted primarily by the US and the UK, the Saudi regime is destroying Yemen’s cultural heritage, bombing masjids, schools, hospitals, market places, wedding parties, fishing boats, telecommunication centres, electrical power plants, factories, agricultural lands and livestock.

The Saudi regime is doing everything in its power to ensure the Yemeni people have no means of  survival or sustenance under a crippling blockade that has been in place since the inception of the war of aggression against Yemen.  A blockade that is “lamented, decried and condemned” by an international community that hides behind familiar rhetoric while ensuring the flow of arms continues unhindered into Saudi weapons depots.

US Cluster Munitions 

US supplied Cluster Munitions CBU-105 used in Saudi air-strikes in Yemen

Use of Cluster Munitions has been recorded 56 times in Yemen by various on-the-ground sources.  Cluster Munitions supplied, primarily,  by the US.  The US is a non signatory of the Cluster Munitions Convention that bans their use, stockpiling and transfer. However the US’ own export regulations state unequivocally that the munitions must meet a less than one percent failure rate [unexploded ordnance] and must not be used against civilian targets.

Both regulations are being flouted by the Saudi-led coalition who are liberally bombing civilian areas, and leaving behind, a greater than 1% trail of deadly unexploded bomblets, that can sever limbs and tear flesh into shreds when detonated in the hands or under the feet of curious children. These bomblets are recognised as presenting an even greater threat than land-mines for decades after a conflict ends.

Cluster munitions themselves are a hideous invention.  According to US Defence Department contracts, Saudi Arabia purchased 1,300 CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Cluster Munitions from Textron Defence Systems, shipment to be completed by December 2015. According to HRW reports, the UAE had previously received an unknown number of CBU-105 from Textron in June 2010.

The Sensor Fuzed Weapon is a marvel of military technology, says its maker, Textron Defense Systems. An advanced “cluster bomb,” it is designed to spray 40 individual projectiles of molten copper, destroying enemy tanks across a 30-acre swath of battlefield.

Imagine the devastation when these munitions are used in densely populated civilian areas, the effects of this rain of molten metal and shrapnel on the human body, projectiles intended to pierce armour plating will decimate and mutilate human beings over a massive area.

The areas worst hit in Yemen are the Ansarullah strongholds of Saada and Hajjah in the north of the country, signalling intent by the Saudi-led coalition to wipe out all opposition to their corrupt and oppressive neocolonialism in Yemen.

Dr R S Karim of Mona Relief, a Yemen grass roots NGO, told me:

Saada is completely finished, they have bombed it into oblivion.  The suffering there is indescribable, the worst we have seen in the whole of Yemen.  Access for humanitarian aid is impossible, we are told if we cross the red line we are dead

Brigadier General Ahmed Asiri of the Saudi Coalition has declared all of Saada a military target thus violating all international laws that dictate civilian targets must be differentiated from military ones.

The US, in supplying these Cluster Munitions is an accessory to war crimes and in violation of all human rights laws and conventions.  The Saudi-led coalition is using them as a weapon of mass murder, a crime being investigated by none other than the Sauds themselves, since theirappointment to chair of a key human rights panel within the UNHRC.  The beneficiaries, as always, are the weapons manufacturers who congratulate themselves on a “clean battlefield operation”.

It really is an extremely sophisticated weapon.  Knowing that we are in no way, shape or form contributing to [civilian suffering] is really a very satisfying place to be ~ Mark D. Rafferty, vice president of business development for Textron Defense Systems 2009.

Perhaps Mr Rafferty and his White House clients would like to visit Yemen and survey the mangled remains of men, women, children and livestock strewn across the “clean battlefield”.  Irrefutable evidence of their cynical involvement in an illegal war of aggression that has been allowed to continue for 365 days, maintained and endorsed by US & UK military industrial complex profiteering.

UK Weapons Supply

Campaign Against Arms Trade

According to a report by Diane Abbott in The Guardian on 25th March 2016, the Committee on Arms Exports Controls met for the first time in two years on Wednesday 23rd March 2016.  This was in response to increasing international condemnation of Britain’s role in the war crimes being committed against the Yemeni people by the Saudi-led coalition.

Their message was clear, unanimous and withering: the UK is breaking its own laws and fuelling a humanitarian catastrophe by selling arms to Saudi Arabia. British law is also clear: it is illegal to sell arms to a state that is at a “clear risk” of committing international humanitarian crimes. But over the past year alone, Britain has sold around £6bn worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, whose campaign in Yemen is targeting civilians – 191 such attacks have collectively been reported by the UN, HRW and Amnesty.

The same report accuses Philip Hammond, UK Foreign Minister, of lying in his statement to the Conservative Middle East Council:

We have been clear with the coalition partners from the outset about the importance of compliance with international humanitarian law and I have said in Parliament, and I will say again here: we have looked at every allegation of breach of international humanitarian law, and we have found no evidence of breach of international humanitarian law, and we urge the coalition to go onto the front foot, to investigate when there are allegations and be open about what they find. Things happen in war, mistakes get made and one should be honest about mistakes when they are made.  ~ Philip Hammond

Diane Abbott points out that David Mepham, UK Director of Human Rights Watch, said he had personally handed Hammond, a comprehensive report complete with GPS co-ordinates, detailing all Saudi air-strikes on Yemeni schools, hospitals and market places.

[The UK Government] has had that evidence for months, and therefore it is extraordinary the line can come back that they do not have the evidence, when that evidence has been shared with them for a considerable period of time. ~ David Mepham

Of course the UK Government is lying.  The UK represents 36% of Saudi Arabia’s overall imports.  Prime Minister, David Cameron has been aggressively pushing for trade deals with the totalitarian regime.  According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, UK arms sales to Saudi totalled £2.95 billion for the first nine months of 2015, and about £7bn since Cameron took office, including a contract for 72 Euro-fighter Typhoon jets.

In January 2016, during Prime Ministers Question Time, Cameron reinforced the double speak:

We have the strictest rules for arms exports of almost any country anywhere in the world. And let me remind him [Jeremy Corbyn] that we are not a member of the Saudi-led coalition, we are not directly involved in the Saudi-led coalition’s operations, British personnel are not involved in carrying out strikes.

However, a report just one week prior to this extraordinary denial from Cameron, stated clearly that British and American officials are present in the Riyadh command and control centre for Saudi air-strikes on Yemen.  Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir, painstakingly clarified that while the US and UK operatives have full access to the Saudi targets, they allegedly have no role in choosing them.

So does this mean that UK & US officials are privy to pending war crimes, not of their choosing, and regardless, stand by while Yemeni civilians are massacred by the weapons they have supplied, not intended for civilian targets? Where does responsibility begin and end?

The UK, further obfuscates its supply of weapons to Saudi Arabia by detailing the majority of items sold as “components“.  Components for military training aircraft, components for combat naval vessels, components for bombs, components for air-to-surface rockets.

Not once, as an example, do they detail the UK Manufactured PGM 500 Hakim Cruise Missiles that were used to obliterate a Yemeni factory near Sanaa, September 23 2015. Remains of the missiles were identified at the site of the blast. One civilian was murdered in this strike and another essential civilian structure destroyed, but the UK steadfastly denies responsibility on all counts of accessory to war crimes.

Arms Embargoes and Economic Sanctions

During the UNHRC, 31st Session, Jan Fermon, Secretary General of IADL [International Association of Democratic Lawyers], made a powerful argument calling for divestment from Saudi Arabia.  He called for economic sanctions and arms embargoes. He condemned the decision to elect Saudi officials to the key panel on Human Rights, stating that this gave them the power to decide Human Rights standards globally, and would enable them to crush human rights activists under the UNHRC umbrella.  He argued that the UNHRC has thus become a weapon in the hands of the Sauds to be turned against the very principles they should be protecting.

He described the despotic Saudi regime as one of the worst human rights violators, consistently violating all rights to peace and development in the region. Their system of “para judicial” killings to silence dissenters rendered them purveyors of terror and was ” one step too far”.  He described initiatives under way in Belgium to facilitate the taking back of control by Muslim communities, infiltrated for years by Saudi Wahhabi agents.

In February 2016, the EU adopted a non-binding resolution calling for an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia over Yemen.

The European Parliament’s call for an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia is unprecedented and reflects growing frustration at the conduct of war in Yemen by the Saudi Air Force. Saudi Arabia is a top arms client of the UK and France, and there is evidence that these weapons have been used in gross violations of international law in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have been killed since the start of the war in March 2015, ~ Alyn Smith, Greens/EFA foreign affairs spokesperson. 

For the US and UK however, it appears that the Military Industrial Complex profits far outweigh the value of human life in Yemen. While the flow of weapons and finance continues to flourish, they will turn a blind eye to the universal humanitarian suffering in Yemen.  The over 8000 lives lost, of which more than 2000 are children, the tens of thousands injured and without proper medical care fade into insignificance when the billion dollar arms deal glistens in front of their eyes.

The largest absolute monarchy in the world, committing heinous acts of terror globally, is given precedence over diplomatic mediation and brokering of a peace deal, a peace deal that was on the verge of being finalised just as this illegal war of aggression was launched against the people of Yemen.

Jamal Bennomar, the former UN peace envoy to Yemen, stated very openly that the warring factions were actually reaching an agreement before the first bomb hit.

When this campaign started, one thing that was significant but went unnoticed is that the Yemenis were close to a deal that would institute power-sharing with all sides, including the Houthis,

As Jan Fermon stated categorically at the UNHRC this month.

“If we fail to take direct action against Saudi Arabia, nothing will change”

“Saudi Arabia is Committing Genocide in Yemen”

Last night in his speech to the nation, Yemen’s Ansarullah movement leader, Sayyed Abdul-Malik-al-Houthi said Saudi Arabia is committing genocide against the Yemeni people as it continues with its deadly aggression against the impoverished nation.

He accused the US & UK of assisting in the destruction of Yemen and the wiping out of an entire generation, including women and children that are deliberately targeted by the Saudi coalition. He implicated the UN, whom he said only draw up charters to serve oppressive and dictatorial regimes and whose silence over human rights abuses in Yemen has contributed to the suffering of the Yemeni people.

In my conversations with Ibrahim al Dalmy, Director of Al Masirah, Yemen TV, he told me

Yemen is wounded, severely wounded, but we will never succumb to the Saudi alliance brutality and oppression.  We will resist, we will heal and we will rebuild without the help of the international community who think they can profit from the devastation they have sanctioned”

This point was reiterated by Diane Abbott in her article:

To fund the reconstruction of the civilian infrastructure in Yemen, largely destroyed by the Saudis with our weapons, the United Nations has asked international donors such as DFID for £1.8bn, which approximates to the profits the UK arms industry has made off Saudi’s intervention in Yemen. We must escape the cycle of selling arms to dubious regimes to sow destruction and then using the taxes on those arms sales to finance an aid budget to clean up the mess. To stop this cycle the government needs to do nothing more than obey the law.

US and UK lawlessness is the root cause of the bloodshed in Yemen.  When national and international laws are blatantly broken by their own arbiters, the world descends into a quagmire of chaos in which only the innocent drown while the criminals benefit. War crimes and grave violations of Humanitarian law go unpunished because their perpetrators are the judge and jury.  The insanity of this dystopian system is felt most keenly by the victims of this brutal abuse whose only weapon is their solidarity and resistance against the powers who would see them eliminated in their quest for economic and geopolitical supremacy.

Yemen is far from perfect but no country in this world is perfect.  We did not wage this war, we did not provoke this war.  For the first 40 days of the Saudi offensive, Yemen did not fire one bullet towards Saudi Arabia.  It is rank hypocrisy from Saudi Arabia to label us the aggressor.  It has always been the opposite. Saudi Arabia has always been sending its filthy elements into my country and attempting to spread its disgusting Wahabi ideology.  Whether Zaydi or Shafi we will never adopt this distorted, twisted, ugly version of Islam.

I would go so far as to state that Yemen has potential to be a model for true democracy in the Middle East.  There are 25 million people who call Yemen home.  We simply ask to be left in Peace. Is that too much to ask? ~ Yemen: A Voice in the Wilderness

***

Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.

Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court marks a continuation and deepening of the lopsided ethno-religious representation in the US judicial system. If Garland is appointed, Jewish justices will comprise 45% of the Court, even though they represent less than 2% of the overall population. Roman Catholics comprise the other 55% of the Court – even though they represent approximately 30% of the population. Protestants (historically the authors and signers of the country’s foundational documents, and the major confessional group) are totally absent from this august body of jurists.

Equally important the increasing power of Jewish justices on the Supreme Court is accelerating: Counting Garland, two of the last three appointments (67%) have been Jews.

In the first half of the 20^th century in the US, progressive Jews and civil libertarians decried what they termed WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) exclusivity, privilege and discrimination, citing their domination of the Supreme Court and their ‘over-representation’ throughout the elite centers of power. Having totally displaced and replaced the dreaded WASPS, there is nary a word from the plethora of civil rights groups and Jewish organizations claiming to be concerned with issues of discrimination and exclusion. Perhaps the marginalized WASP population lacks any qualified jurists among their scores of millions, an ethno-cultural degeneration unique in US history or perhaps the last few WASPs appointed to the Supreme Court turned out to be among the most ardent and independent defenders of citizen rights, to the chagrin of numerous Administrations.

Nevertheless, if a rare individual should dare to raise the issue of nepotism and the exercise of narrow political considerations in the choice of Supreme Court nominees, the factious response is that ‘it’s all about merit’.  Meaning, among the thousands of WASP graduates of the top law schools with academic awards and publications in prestigious journals, no qualified candidate can be found to address this lack of representation.

But scholarship and originality may not be of much merit: A brief perusal of the legal publications of Elena Kagan and   reveals meager, mediocre and pedestrian articles and monographs. In the case of Kagan, her rise to power was facilitated by her relationship with the former (and heartily voted out of office) Harvard President ‘Larry’ Summers, who appointed her Dean of the Law School despite her lack of quality publications. Summers, as Harvard President, led a raucous and bullying campaign against any academic critics Israeli policies during his abruptly abbreviated tenure in office.

Clearly the problem of ethno-religious nepotism is not confined to Jews, it was an abuse practiced by WASP elites and others before them. Nor does such nepotism benefit the average wage and salaried Jews, who have to struggle side-by-side with their Gentile compatriots to make a living and exercise their rights.

However, nepotism or ethno-religious favoritism has become an acute problem now when exclusive control of the Supreme Court compounds the growing problems of abuse in other spheres of the power structure – political, economic and mass communications. This imbalance has profound repercussions on everything from US overseas wars of aggression to the everyday struggle of Americans faced with deepening inequalities and the shredding of the social contract.

Historically, and particularly among progressive and leftist critics, what was referred to as the “Jewish Problem” was a multifaceted issue that revolved around the persecution of resident Jews by anti-Semitic regimes and within Christian majority cultures. Various solutions included the granting of citizenship rights following the French Revolution, socio-cultural assimilation, the development of socialism or separation and re-settlement in Palestine through the Zionist movement. Today the major issue has turned into an ‘American Problem’: how a powerful ethno-religious elite can use its multi-faceted power to secure (and create) strategic positions in the state while excluding contenders, repressing critics and actively promoting policies in the interest of a foreign state, Israel.

Not all Jewish appointees and elected officials explicitly follow the extremist position of the most aggressive Zionist organizations, especially the self-styled ‘Presidents of the Major American (sic) Jewish Organizations’ . . . but… nor do they openly object to Israeli-First activities or try to block them – for fear of ostracism and retribution – with the calumny of ‘self-hating Jew’ unlikely to promote one’s career or social life.

Chosen People: The Myth of Meritocracy and the Practice of Mediocracy

To deal with the rise of Israel-First individuals to positions of power in the US, it is essential to analyze the all-pervasive claims of meritocracy, the argument that their influence is based on their ‘universally acclaimed’ achievements, intelligence and superiority far beyond their elite rivals. The argument of ‘unique merit’ blends smoothly with traditional Talmudic and contemporary Israeli-chauvinist belief that Jews are ‘the Chosen People of God’, destined to prevail over the inferior ‘others’.

The meritocratic argument is partly based on circular arguments contending that the disproportionate number of Jewish billionaires means they are more brilliant in business; that pro-Israel dominance within the US corporate mass media proves that Jewish media moguls are smarter and Israel is a righteous state . . . and the rise of Israel-Firsters in government, academia and finance reflects their higher intelligence, greater work ethic and accomplishments.

It is with the latter that we have to deal, because the significance of higher grades, diplomas from prestigious universities and piles of academic awards has to be proven on the ground. It is not simply the achievement of high individual positions and great wealth that matter, but how the policies formulated and practices pursued by these elite individual have affected the lives of 330 million Americans, the nation, its prestige, welfare and moral authority.

If we use these alternative ‘evidence-based’ criteria, we find a huge disparity between high levels of academic achievement and disastrous performance when in public office.

We can cite the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan’s deregulatory policies, which led to the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression and his successor, Benjamin Bernanke, who presided over the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street banks while millions of American’s lost their homes. Both attended elite institutions, both secured numerous prestigious awards . . . and both imposed disastrous policies on the American nation and people – with complete impunity for their monumental mistakes, while American workers continue to suffer.

Treasury Department

Stuart Levey was the first Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence within the US Treasury Department (a position created by AIPAC and tailored specifically for Levey). He graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude and magna cum laude. While Stu Levey was racing around the US and the rest of the world enforcing the economic sanctions against Iran (which he authored in line with Israeli directives), narco-terrorists from Mexico, Central America, Colombia and Peru were freely washing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in US banks.  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabian officials who funded jihadi terrorists were never prosecuted or sanctioned – even after attacks within the US.

Levey’s successor, David Cohen (who else!) followed the same policy. Multi-national banks and corporations, which had corrupted officials, swindled investors, evaded taxes and laundered illicit funds were never investigated, let alone charged. Cohen devoted his time and effort, at Israel’s behest, enforcing sanctions against Iran and endeavoring to sabotage any US-Iran nuclear negotiations.

Foreign Policy

From the Clinton era through the George W. Bush and Obama regimes, the US engaged in a series of wars against predominantly secular governments in Muslim countries, which had been opposed to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

Key policymakers in the design and execution of US war policy were prominent Jews bristling with diplomas from the most prestigious universities.

These ‘scholars’, the ‘cream’ of US academe, blatantly falsified the pretexts for the US’ disastrous thirteen-year war (and counting) in Iraq, the lost (15-plus year) war in Afghanistan, the invasion and destruction of Libya and Syria. Their brilliant plans have led directly to the rise of ISIS throughout the region and the displacement of tens of millions of civilians in the Middle East, West Asia and North Africa.

Due credit must be given to the midwives of the 21^stCentury wars of foreign conquest and domestic decay: Standing out among the principle architects of these foreign policy disasters is Elliott Abrams, BA and Doctor of Jurisprudence, Harvard University. Abrams had been officially censored for lying directly to the US Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. During that administration, Elliot directed US official support for the dictatorial regimes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras where over 250,000 Central American civilians were massacred. The new millennium wiped clean his tawdry slate of crimes against humanity and he was appointed a leading National Security Advisor under President George W. Bush 2002-2009. In this role, he fabricated ‘evidence’ linking the secular government of Iraq to the fundamentalist Al Qaeda and he served as a transmission belt channeling false Israeli ‘intelligence’ that Iraq possessed banned weapons of mass destruction. No weapons were ever found – a ‘mere detail of history’, according to his partner, Paul Wolfowitz.  These blatant lies pushed to Bush Administration to invade and destroy Iraq.

While Elliot Abrams was strategically placed in the Bush/Cheney White House, his partners in deception, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith controlled Middle East policy at the Pentagon. This dream team of Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith formed the powerful Israel-First Troika responsible for the military policies which systematically destroyed Iraq’s state apparatus, decimating its civil society, fragmenting the country and precipitating gruesome ethno-religious wars and the rise of ISIS. This ‘Troika’ has never been held responsible for the deaths of over one million Iraqis – but credit should be given to the ‘meritorious’.

Dr. Paul Wolfowitz received his BA from Cornell and PhD from the University of Chicago. In the 1980’s, early in his government career he temporarily lost security clearance for having passed confidential documents to Israeli agents. Despite this ‘youthful indiscretion’ (or act of treason), Wolfowitz became Deputy Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush (2001-2005). In this position, he was one of the earliest and most forceful advocates for military interventions against Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Libya. He persuaded the American Congress and the Bush Administration that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would be short and self-financing. He glowingly predicted that the wars would ‘pay for themselves’ in terms of looted natural resources and ‘re-construction’ contracts. In fact, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost tens of thousands of US military casualties, over a trillion dollars in military expenditures and they continue over 13 years (Iraq), and 15 years (Afghanistan) with no end in sight but completely devastated societies spewing millions of refugees and thousands of terrorists.

Equally luminous in academic credentials, the third of the ‘Israel-First Troika’, Douglas Feith received his BA from Harvard (magna cum laude), and JD (magna cum laude). He worked closely with Israeli intelligence officials fabricating out of whole cloth the myth of Saddam’s quest for ‘yellow cake’ uranium to construct Iraqi nuclear weapons of mass destruction pushing the US into war against Iraq.

Feith set up a cozy nest at the Pentagon, the ‘Office of Special Plans’ (OSP), which served as a base of operations for Israeli operatives. One thoroughly disgusted former Pentagon official described the flow of Israeli officials in and out of OSP as resembling ‘a brothel on Saturday night’.

One of Feith’s crowning achievements was the destruction of the Iraqi Baath Party and administrative apparatus, which included the entire police force, the army and public administration, education, and even the huge public health system. Virtually all qualified Iraqi officials were either fired or ‘disappeared’.  The result was the total breakdown of essential services, the pillage of the national and historic patrimony and decimation of civil and secular Iraqi society. Even the most fabulous archeological treasures of Mesopotamia were destroyed or looted for American and European collectors.  Feith’s level of meddling and disastrous policies led the colorful US General Tommy Franks to describe the Harvard ‘JD’ as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet”.

Hovering on the periphery of the ‘Troika’ was the ‘mysterious’, veteran manipulator, Richard Perle. With his BA from the University of Southern California and MA from Princeton (and no military experience), Perle was qualified to push for serial US wars on Israel’s behalf, starting with Iraq and moving on to all other countries which had traditionally supported the rights of the Palestinian people. He was a key member of the US Defense Policy Board under the Bush Administration and the front ideologue for invading Iraq. His second ‘job’ was strategic adviser to Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Benyamin Netanyahu. Perle pushed for US military intervention to effect ‘regime change’ in Syria and Iran as well as Libya.

Beyond the warrior ‘troika’ and shadowy Mr. Perle, there is Dr. Dennis Ross who received his BA and PhD from UCLA and taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Ross and fellow uber-Zionist, Martin Indyk, founded the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) the most influential lobby on Middle East policy and a virtual ‘king-maker’ in Washington. He was President Bill Clinton’s ‘Middle East Coordinator’, ensuring that Israel’s land grabs in the occupied territories were unimpeded, and indeed justified and funded by the US taxpayer. His notoriety in promoting the brutal and illegal confiscation of Palestinian property earned him the title as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ even among his most pro-Israel colleagues.

Ross made sure that Israel would not be bound to the Camp David agreements even as President Clinton claimed the negotiations as his landmark achievement in diplomacy. AIPAC, under Ross and Indyk, lobbied long and hard for the US invasion of Iraq; it backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and justified the expansion of apartheid style ‘Jews only’ colonial settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

During the Obama Presidency, Ross served as Special Adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. In this capacity, he actively opposed diplomatic negotiations with the government of Iran or the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Ross’ partner, Martin Indyk received his PhD from the Australian National University and served as Deputy Research Director and co-founder of AIPAC (1982-85).  This, the most powerful lobby in Washington, serves exclusively as a political fifth column for the Israeli Foreign Office. Indyk was founding Director of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy (WINEP), a barnyard of ideological propagandists for Israel. When President Clinton appointed (the Australian, Israeli, US citizen) ‘Marty’ Indyk as US Ambassador to Israel, serious questions came up about his transfers of confidential documents to Israel. He thus became the first Ambassador stripped of security clearance. Israel Lobby pressures led to reinstated security clearance for Indyk who was subsequently named Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. As a mouthpiece for Israel’s interests, Indyk has pushed to ‘contain’ Iraq (through bombing) and Iran (through economic sanctions).

Throughout his career, Indyk sabotaged peace negotiation between Israel and Palestine and he undermined any early diplomatic resolution of the Iraq-US conflict, which might have prevented the disastrous war. His meddling on Israel’s behalf has cost the US treasury hundreds of billions of dollars in lost trade with Iran. Despite his clear record of ‘service to Israel’ and ‘disservice to the US’, President Obama appointed Indyk as US (sic) Special Envoy for Israel-Palestine Negotiations (2013-2014). In this supposedly ‘diplomatic’ role he failed to protect even one acre of Palestinian farmland among the hundreds seized by Israel for the illegal establishment of many ‘Jews Only’ enclaves the occupied West Bank.

Economic Policy – More Mediocrity, Less Meritocracy

Jack Lew, Secretary of the Treasury (2013-2016) heads an ethno-Chauvinist quintet dictating US foreign and domestic economic policy (with Michael Froman, Chief Trade Negotiator; ‘Penny’ Pritzer, Secretary of Commerce; Lawrence Summers, Director of National Economic Council and Janet Yellen, head of the Federal Reserve Bank). Lew pushed policies favoring the wealthiest 1% along with his co-religionist Michael Froman, while millions of Americans were plunged into poverty and stagnation. Their policies include Free Trade Agreements in Europe, Asia and Latin America which have led to the relocation of US MNC overseas, massive job losses at home, further deepening inequalities and degrading work conditions and wages. Recently, in his stellar public career, Jack Lew was investigated for lying to the US Congress about the national debt, the size and growth of which he deliberately understated. Thanks to his ‘backers’, he was never charged . . . Of course, Lew has his BA from Harvard and JD from Georgetown, which accounts for his success on behalf of the leisure class.

Penny Pritzer, Obama’s Secretary of Commerce (2013-2016) received her BA from Harvard and JD and MBA from Stanford. She is a Chicago billionaire, who served as National Financial Chairperson of for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign, and was National Chair of his 2012 campaign. Pritzer has been major player among prominent Chicago Jews ensuring that ‘their candidate’ Obama ‘got it right’ on US-Israel relations. Despite having been fined $460 million by the US Treasury Department for predatory banking (Pritzker’s, Superior Bank of Chicago had fleeced millions of poor and middle class household mortgage holders and investors of billions of dollars of their assets), a grateful Obama named Penny Pritzker as his Secretary of Commerce. She quickly teamed up with Froman and Lew in promoting the ‘free trade’agreements that have thoroughly undermined US regulations protecting labor and the environment. Billionaire Pritzker and her partners have been fabulously successful in globalizing profits for the elite while ‘socializing’ the cost of corporate flight abroad onto the backs of the US working and middle classes.

Dr. Michael Froman, Obama’s Chief Trade Negotiator, has a BA from Princeton, a JD from Harvard and PhD from Oxford. Prior to heading up Trade, Froman served under ‘Bill’ Clinton in Treasury and was a National Security adviser to President Obama. He actively pushed for the Obama’s program of expansive domestic police state surveillance. He is also the principal author and promoter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes eleven Pacific nations and is designed to marginalize and encircle China . . . This is a ‘trade’ partnership, which may jeopardize the profits of over 500 major US MNC with investments in China and the US multi-hundred-billion-dollar trade relation. Froman is one of the major architects of Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, which has heightened military tensions and threatens the entire West Coast economies heavily dependent on China trade.

Not to be outdone by other luminaries in the ‘economic quintet’, Lawrence Summers had been President at Harvard University until he was booted out by a resounding “no confidence vote” by the faculty – despite the efforts of Zionist academics and trustees who stuck by their ‘golden boy’. Summers, along with co-religionist Alan Greenspan (it has been so hard to find any competent Gentiles to steer the US economy), was one of the prime authors of the deregulatory financial policies leading to the 2008-09 financial-economic crash. This crushing success caused double-digit unemployment, three million household foreclosures and forced a trillion dollar bank bailout down the gagging throats of the US taxpayers.

Summers led the charge on the successful repeal of the New Deal, Glass-Steagall Act, a venerable depression era legislation designed to prevent banks from speculating with their depositors’ savings – which the banks promptly did after the repeal.

As Under-Secretary of Treasury in 1993, Deputy-Secretary in 1995 and Treasury Secretary in 1999, the Harvard and MIT-diploma-laden Summers advised the vodka-soaked ‘experts’ around Boris Yeltsin to ‘privatize the Russian economy’ – resulting in the pillage by gangster-oligarchs of over $500 billion dollars in public properties, banks and natural resources and providing significant profits for a score of Harvard-based ‘advisers’.

As President of Harvard, he attributed the absence of women scholars in science, mathematics and engineering to their lack of ‘high-end’ intellectual capacity (ignoring centuries of ingrained discrimination) and he trivialized the academic work of Afro-American scholar, Cornel West, causing him to leave and join Princeton. His denigration of a major African-American scholar was in line with his views on Africa while at the World Bank where he advocated shipping toxic waste because, ‘I’ve always thought that the under-populated countries in Africa were vastly under-polluted.”

After alienating women and African Americans, Summers spearheaded a vitriolic attack on any and all campus critics of the state of Israel. He targeted student leaders of the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as ‘anti-Semites’ or ‘self-hating Jews’, using the University Presidential bully platform to silence opponents of his pro-Israel politics. Eventually, he was ousted from office by an overwhelming faculty vote ostensibly for his financial ‘conflict of interests’related to his Yeltsin-era dealings with mega-swindler Andrei Shleifer whose shady deals in Russia’s privatization orgy made some Harvard officials very wealthy.

Self-promoted, academic spokesman for the American worker, Robert Reich received his JD at Yale Law School and taught at Harvard. He served as Labor Secretary under Clinton (1993-97). During Reich’s tenure, labor union membership steeply declined, laws prohibiting worker organizing were tightened and the minimum wage became a minimum survival wage. Reich hung on to his Cabinet position even after the North American Free Trade for the Americas (NAFTA} was approved destroying over two million once secure American manufacturing jobs. He hung on as President Clinton carpet bombed the renowned worker self-managed factories of Yugoslavia. He kept his luxurious office in Washington after Clinton bombed Sudan’s principle factory for the production of vaccines and antibiotics leaving million of children and adults without basic vaccines and medicines. Reich kept ‘mum’ even as Haiti was invaded and a harsh neo-liberal anti-worker agenda was imposed to permit the democratically elected President Aristide to return to office.

While domestic inequalities deepened and economic deregulation extended, Reich remained in office. Reich ignored Israeli violence against Palestinian labor unions and workers, backing Clinton’s “carnal relation” with Tel Aviv.

After years of devastation against workers at home and abroad, Reich left Washington for a cushy $243,000-a-year appointment at UC Berkeley where he ‘teaches’ two hours a week assigning his own op-ed columns in the mass media as ‘reading material’. When not engaged in such strenuous scholarship, Reich has managed to churn out books ‘critical of neo-liberalism, inequality and social justice’. ‘Crying all the way to the bank’, this intellectual for the oppressed worker has to manage the $40,000 he is paid for each 45 minute speech on the lecture circuit.  On an hourly basis, Reich earns 6 times more than the average US corporate CEOs he denounces.

Conclusion

From our discussion it is clear that there is a profound disparity between the stellar academic achievements of Israel-First officials in the US government and the disastrous consequences of their public policies in office.

The ethno-chauvinist claim of unique ‘merit’ to explain the overwhelming success of American Jews in public office and in other influential spheres is based on a superficial reputational analysis, bolstered on degrees from prestigious universities. But this reliance on reputation has not held up in terms of performance – the successful resolution of concrete problems and issues. Failures and disasters are not just ‘overlooked’; they are rewarded.

After examining the performance of top officials in foreign policy, we find that their ‘assumptions’ (often blatant manipulations and misrepresentations) about Iraq were completely wrong; their pursuit of war was disastrous and criminal; their ‘occupation blueprint’ led to prolonged conflict and the rise of terrorism; their pretext for war was a fabrication derived from their close ties to Israeli intelligence in opposition to the findings US intelligence.  Their sanctions policy toward Iran has cost the US economy many billions while their pro-Israel policy cost the US Treasury (and taxpayers) over $110 billion over the last 30 years.  Their one-sided ‘Israel-First’ policy has sabotaged any a ‘two-state’ resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and has left millions of Palestinians in abject misery. Meanwhile, the disproportionate number of high officials who have been accused of giving secret US documents to Israel (Wolfowitz, Feith, Indyke and Polland etc.) exposes what really constitutes the badge of “merit” in this critical area of US security policy.

The gulf between academic credentials and actual performance extends to economic policy. Neo-liberal policies favoring Wall Street speculators were adopted by such strategic policymakers as Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Lawrence Summers.  Their ‘leadership’ rendered the country vulnerable to the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression with millions of Americans losing employment and homes. Despite their role in creating the conditions for the crisis, their ‘solution’ compounded the disaster by transferring over a trillion dollars from the US Treasury to the investment banks, as a taxpayer-funded bailout of Wall Street. Under their economic leadership, class inequalities have deepened; the financial elite has grown many times richer.  Meanwhile, wars in the Middle East have drained the US Treasury of funds, which should have been used to serve the social needs of Americans and finance an economic recovery program through massive domestic investments and repair of our collapsing infrastructure.

The trade policies under the leadership of this ‘meritocratic’ elite – formerly called the ‘Chosen People’ – have been an unmitigated disaster for the majority of industrial workers, resulting in huge trade deficits and the deskilling of low paid service employment – with profound implications for future generations of American workers. It is no longer a secret that an entire generation of working class Americans has descended into poverty with no prospects of escape – except through narcotics and other degradation. On the ‘flip side’ of the ‘winners and losers’, US finance capital has expanded overseas with acquisition and merger fees enriching the 0.1% and the meritocratic officials happily rotating from their Washington offices to Wall Street and back again.

If economic performance were to be measured in terms of the sustained growth, balanced budgets, reductions in inequalities and the creation of stable, well-paying jobs, the economic elite (despite their self-promoted merits) have been absolute failures.

However, if we adopt the alternative criteria for success, their performance looks pretty impressive: they bailed out their banking colleagues, implemented destructive ‘free’ trade agreements, and opened up overseas investments opportunities with higher rates of profits than might be made from investing in the domestic economy.

If we evaluate foreign policy ‘performance’ in terms of USpolitical, economic and military interests, their policies have been costly in lives, financial losses and military defeats for the nation as a whole. They rate ‘summa cum lousy’.

However if we consider their foreign policies in the alternative terms of Israel’s political, economic and military interests, they regain their ‘summa cum laudes’! They have been well rewarded for their services: The war against Iraq destroyed an opponent of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The systematic destruction of the Iraqi civil society and state has eliminated any possibility of Iraq recovering as a modern secular, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state. Here, Israel made a major advance toward unopposed regional military dominance without losing a soldier or spending a shekel! The Iran sanctions authored and pushed by Levey and Cohen served to undermine another regional foe of Israeli land grabs in the West Bank even if it cost the US hundreds of billions in lost profits, markets and oil investments.

By re-setting the criteria for these officials, it is clear that their true academic ‘merit’ correlates with their success policies on behalf of the state Israel, regardless of how mediocre their performances have been for the United States as a state, nation and people. All this might raise questions about the nature of higher education and how performance is evaluated in terms of the larger spheres of the US economy, state and military.

What we suggest is that degrees from prestigious universities and the highest awards have prepared academic high achievers to serve the elites but not the workers; to empower the financiers but not the producers. These years of training and achievement have certainly not prevented destructive foreign loyalties from undermining the greater society, nor have they taught basic civic virtues and egalitarian values. Prestigious universities recruit and train graduates in the mold of the dominant elites and increasingly narrow ethno-classes. They purge, intimidate and marginalize effective critics of Wall Street and of the State of Israel – the two major success markers that derive from an increasingly insulated ethno-chauvinist power configuration. I would rather question if the disproportionate rise to the top of academia, government and finance hierarchies by pro-Israel Jews has less to do with their effective practical knowledge and democratic values and more to do with their affiliation with the political and economic power that revolves around ‘the1%’ and is played out, first in academia and then in the larger political and economic spheres to the detriment of the vast majority.

Whatever intrinsic intelligence may exist can be blinded and distorted by an irrational doctrine of racial-ethnic superiority: the results have been stupid and destructive policies imposed by self-congratulatory, self-contained collectivities – with absolutely no accountability for their failures.

Epilogue

The prestigious degrees and awards may account for the appointments – but they don’t explain the complete absence of any evaluations, or firings or even punishment for failed policies. There have been no consequences for the authors of broken economies, impoverished workers, prolonged losing wars, lies and fabrications of data leading to war and the passing of confidential state documents. Why have they continued to receive promotions in the face of policy failures? Why the revolving doors of appointments to the World Bank, positions in the ‘best’ universities (to the exclusion of real independent scholars) and the lucrative seats in investment banks after their policies have shredded the domestic economy?

Don’t the deaths and maiming of millions of Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians and, Libyans and the tens of millions of desperate refugees, resulting from their foreign policies, warrant a pause in their continued hold on power and prestige, if not outright condemnation for crimes against humanity?

It is easy to forget, given that the Russian airgroup at Hmeimim was wholly composed of Sukhoi aircraft, including the Su-24, -25, -27, -30, -34, and -35, that the word MiG has been synonymous with “fighter” for most of the post-World War 2, era.

MiG Design Bureau’s dominance started with the famous MiG-15 fighter of the Korean War fame, through MiG-17, -19, and -21 of the Vietnam War, Arab-Israeli Wars, and the India-Pakistan conflicts and ending with the MiG-23 that was the frontline Soviet fighter for most of the 1970s and 1980s and the MiG-25 strategic interceptor.

The dominance of the MiG family was eclipsed and ultimately ended by the sudden emergence of the Sukhoi Design Bureau which spent decades building attack, bomber, and strategic interceptor aircraft such as the Su-15 and whose introduction of the record-breaking Su-27 meant the MiG suddenly became the “junior partner” in the Su-27–MiG-29 combination of fourth generation fighters which entered service in the 1980s.

The end of USSR only tilted the playing field more in favor of the Su-27. It was not efficient to modernize and maintain two fighters with similar characteristics, so the preference was given to the larger, longer-ranged aircraft capable of carrying a greater payload. While MiG-29s experienced almost modernization, the Su-27 family was enlarged by the Su-30SM long-range multi-role interceptor, the Su-34 tactical bomber, and finally the Su-35 Generation 4++ fighter, all of which accepted into active service and ordered in large numbers. Moreover, older Su-27s were modernized to the Su-27SM Generation 4+ level to keep them competitive in the air combat role. And, of course, the T-50 Generation 5 fighter is also a Sukhoi design that will receive its “Su” designation once it is officially accepted into service.

But now the two decades of MiG neglect are coming to an end. Already in the 1990s, a few dozen of MiG-29SMT Generation 4+ fighters entered service. These aircraft had improved avionics, more powerful engine, extra fuel, and a wide armament suite which make it equally capable in the air-to-air and air-to-ground roles. Additional MiG-29SMTs were recently ordered and have begun to enter service, with the first four new aircraft being deployed to the Russian airbase in Armenia to keep watch on the potential Turkish threat. Russian Naval Aviation has ordered sufficient MiG29Ks to equip a carrier-based fighter regiment to supplement the Su-33 regiment that represents the Admiral Kuznetsov’s aerial component.

But the MiG-29 family’s ultimate member will be the MiG-35 fighter which was originally developed for export but which is expected to enter service with the Russian Aerospace Forces in 2017. Like the larger Su-35, the MiG-35 will be a Generation 4++ multi-role fighter equipped with a active phased array radar and a wide range of weapons.

The renewed interest in MiG fighters serves several interests. The Sukhoi aircraft are all large, powerful, long-ranged aircraft, so much so that they are “overkill” in many situations, including close air support and providing battlefield air cover. Their presence would release the Sukhois for longer-ranged missions where their performance is crucial. The MiG-35 is also more than a match for most of the F-16 variants which represent the bulk of NATO’s fighter force and will continue to do so for decades to come, so they provide a useful boost to Russia’s tactical aircraft numbers at lower operating costs than the Sukhois.

The final reason has to do with Russian defense industry policy which seeks to avoid excessive consolidation. The problems associated with the F-22 and the F-35 are a direct consequence of Lockheed-Martin having a de-facto monopoly on fighter design in the United States. The JFX competition which led to the F-35 was a sham for which the Boeing design was not developed to win but rather to hone technologies to be used in Boeing’s own monopoly, namely unmanned combat aerial vehicles. Therefore the USAF now has no choice but to pay however many billions of dollars Lockheed-Martin demands, and accept a substandard product, because it literally has no alternative.

The Russian Aerospace Forces, on the other hand, will have two major design bureaus to choose from in the years to come, as there are already rumors that the MiG-35 will be followed by a lightweight Generation 5 fighter to supplement the heavyweight T-50.

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Though many are still reeling in the wake of the Brussels tragedy – there are key questions surrounding this latest act of terror that should be examined.

Brussels went into full lockdown mode following an apparent double terror attack that occurred at the Brussels airport and Maelbeek metro station earlier this week, not far from the European Union’s headquarters in the downtown city center.

As previously reported here at 21WIRE, the U.S. embassy declared a security emergency following the Brussels terror attacks, instructing all American citizens to “shelter in place,” in what is now said to be an attack carried out by ISIS  – or so we’ve been told…

‘BRUSSELS BOMBERS’ –  Khalid el-Bakraoui and his brother Ibrahim el-Bakraoui (Photo link thedailystar)

Meet the Cast

In early reports, the apparent ISIS-linked bombers, revealed to be brothers, allegedly blew themselves up in a double-suicide bomb attack in Brussels, Belgium’s capital city, at the main airport and a busy metro station downtown.

However, according to Belgian officials the two brothers were originally stated to have been at the airport together but both “were actually at two different locations and that one huge bomb left by a third terrorist failed to detonate at the airport.”

Brussels issued a notice for an individual seen pushing luggage through the airport, along with the two other suspects now said to be dead. All three were allegedly seen on CCTV footage at the airport, in a highly coordinated attack that the terror linked media organization Amaq agency says was an ISIS attack.

The identity of two terror suspects in connection with the Brussels attack were uncovered by DNA records according to Belgium officials, while a third suspect named Najim Laachraoui, (alleged bomb-maker in the Paris attacks last November) was presumed to be on the loose, also died as a result of his part in the airport attack, with authorities describing his relationship with the Paris attackers:

Laachraoui’s DNA was found on a suicide belt at the Bataclan music venue that was targeted by the terrorists along with an explosive device at the Stade du France.

His DNA was also recovered at several safe houses in Belgium used by the cell.

Laachraoui also used the false name Soufiane Kayal and was with suspected Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam in Hungary in Sept. 2015.

This report added confusion to the already winding Brussels narrative, as it was initially reportedLaachraoui was seen fleeing the airport, “One of the other men, seen wearing a hat, and believed to be Najim Laachraoui, was pushing a cart with a 35-pound bomb that failed to go off. He was seen leaving the airport and is being sought.”

Also according to reports this week, the Maelbeek metro station explosion took place near some very important government buildings, including the EU’s main buildings, the European Parliament and the US embassy in Brussels – all of which, make the attack appear even more suspicious in nature, given the amount of security in the area on a daily basis.

We’re told that the attack at Maelbeek metro, was less than two miles away from the US embassy, as both European Commission Headquarters and the Council of the European Union were around a 1,000 feet from the popular exit, Rue de la Loi. Additionally, the European Parliament was just under 2,000 feet from the bombed station.

According to US officials, the Brussel’s attacks displays some of the similar hallmarks reported during the Boston bombing, and London’s 7/7 bombing:

Belgian police were trying to locate a second man seen at the location of the subway bombing. The man was seen buying tickets in the subway with the confirmed suicide bomber, Khalid El Bakraoui, and both men had identical backpacks.

Belgian prosecutors have said at least four people were involved in Tuesday’s attacks on the Brussels airport and a subway train, including El Bakraoui and his brother Ibrahim.

‘PLANTED EXPLOSIVES?’ – Blown-out windows mirror each other after an apparent
suicide-bombing at Brussels airport. (Photo link qz)

According to the Associated Press, hundreds of civilians have been injured at both the Brussel-Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station, along with nearly three dozen killed:

A Belgian security official says the death toll has risen to 34 in attacks on the Brussels airport and a subway station.

The official did not specify how many people were killed and wounded at each site. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because precise numbers were expected to be announced early Wednesday.

Earlier, the government had reported 20 dead at the Maelbeek metro station, in the heart of the European Union’s capital, and 11 dead at the airport, and scores of injured.

According to reports, there was a ‘twin blast’ in Brussels airport and one explosion at the metro station, downgraded to 31 killed in total as of March 24th.

Below we’ll examine the shocking situation in Brussels, its links to other attacks, some of the major questions surrounding this case and lay out some of the existing evidence we know to date…

‘TERROR TV REDUX’ – The alleged Brussels bombers caught on CCTV, shades of London 7/7 (Photo link youtube)

Hebdo, Paris and Brussels

Though the Brussels attack appears somewhat different than the Hebdo shootings and Paris attacks of 2015, there are overlapping narratives to consider that tie all three events together.

Perhaps most notably, we saw a similar radicalized brother theme during and after the Charlie Hebdo magazine shooting from January of 2015, as a jihadist duo allegedly carried out a major shooting attack in downtown Paris, only to be killed later in a six-hour standoff by police some 50 miles away from Paris.

Soon after, it was then discovered that the Paris shooters also had a third accomplice following the heavily dramatized magazine shooting attack/siege. In fact, if you remember, it didn’t take long for investigators and media implicate the ‘Kouachi brothers’ (Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi) as being the two masked individuals seen fleeing the Charlie Hebdo offices, as Said’s identification had been ‘discovered’ laying on the seat of the apparent get-away vehicle, left perfectly intact near the Paris shooting as if by magic.

It was then revealed, coincidentally or not, that there were major terror links discovered following the theatrical Paris shootings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters, as media outlets declared that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had taken responsibility for the attacks  – as well as helped to finance the apparent perpetrators, the Kouachi brothers.

Then by a twist of fate, there was an allegedly ISIS-inspired attack carried out by the Kouachi brothers accomplice Amedy Coulibaly, who had released audio recordings and terror declarations via YouTube, professing his allegiance to ISIS, while he was supposedly working side by side with the Kouachi brothers, who claimed they were “financed by AQAP”, to carry out their part in the attack.

To many analysts, this was an obvious attempt to shore up some of the loose ends within the Paris attack/siege narrative, while also performing the function to set-up Yemen as a central focus for the West’s next destabilization campaign – which is exactly what happened in the US sanctioned/Saudi-led airstrikes a year ago.

If the Hebdo/Paris attacks were to be accepted at face value – it would mark a clear connection between AQAP and ISIS. It was no surprise then that this is exactly the narrative we saw formed over a year ago in Yemen.

Then after all of the high-flying media confusion, we learned that authorities already knew the identities of the Kouachi brothers for at least ten years, as at least one brother was placed on a “no fly list” and both had been under police surveillance since Said Kouachi allegedly trained with AQAP in 2011.

Looking at the clues in Paris, leads directly to Brussels…

Following the first orchestrated Paris attack in January of 2015, Belgium was already in the periphery concerning terror networks, as a weapons supply cache was causally revealed by theWall Street Journal, as well as a dark underground network of apparent militants:

 An official with the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said that a man presented himself to the police in Charleroi, a city in southern Belgium, saying he bought a car from Mr. Coulibaly’s wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, who is now believed to be living in Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria. Ms. Boumeddiene left France for Turkey a few days before the Paris attacks occurred.

The police then searched the man’s home and discovered evidence that he was involved in weapons trafficking, the official said. A judge ordered the arrest of the man, who wasn’t identified. But officials say it is unclear whether Mr. Coulibaly bought any weapons from the man.

Said and Cherif Kouachi named in the Charlie Hebdo attack, purchased AK-47 assault rifles and rocket launchers “for less than €5,000 near Gare du Midi, one of the main Brussels railway stations, located in a gritty area of the city.”

Following the second round of Paris attacks, French authorities launched a massive manhunt for “possible” eighth suspect in the terrorist attacks that killed 129 people and wounded more than 350 others.

‘TERRORIST OR INFORMANT? – Salah Abdeslam, the purported mastermind behind
November’s Paris attacks in 2015.(Photo link twitter)

Paris Mastermind or Petty Drug Dealer?

Belgium authorities had been routinely running anti-terror raids since the Charlie Hebdo attacks and double siege that followed back in January of 2015. In fact, Brussels renewed its raids in the aftermath of the Paris attacks from November of last year, while looking for the “most wanted man” in Europe, Paris attacks suspect, Salah Abdeslam.

The Brussels attacks came just days after investigators apprehended Abdeslam, who had been hiding out inside a suburb very familiar to authorities in Brussels.

According to reports, for over four months, Belgium officials had apparently sought Abdeslam, suspecting he was located in a Brussels suburb not far from where he grew up in Molenbeek, and according to reports, “They rounded up his friends and fellow drug dealers and thieves, and interrogated members of his family.”

In December of 2015, Belgium officials had believed they had pinpointed the area where Abdeslam had been holed up – but due to a law prohibiting nighttime raids (between 9pm – 5am) the so-called Paris attacks ‘mastermind’ alluded apprehension.

This begs the question: How did Abdeslam, become mastermind of the Paris attacks, as his pedigree by all accounts, appears to be one linked to a life of petty thievery and drug deals?

While this kind of story makes for an intriguing Hollywood drama, complete with all the cat and mouse hijinks, it’s more likely that Belgium officials were monitoring Abdeslam’s every move for some time over the last year and had already been seeking to change the security protocols about nighttime raids for sometime.

According to VICE, it turns out police had been monitoring their prime suspect in the Paris attacks, after gathering intel from Abdeslam’s brother Brahim Abdeslam’s funeral, who, we’re told, had also participated in the attacks.

Interestingly, Abdeslam’s brother’s funeral was some five months after the Paris attacks, and that authorities became suspicious of Abdeslam’s apartment as they were already watching it because“a large number of pizzas were delivered there,” according to both VICE and Politico.

Problem, Reaction, Solution, Again…

All across Europe ‘terror’ threat levels have been raised for maximum impact, with fear induced talking points led by US and UK leadership promising to put an end to this latest set of terror attacks coming out of Brussels.

While many political leaders and media operatives continue to bang the drums of security over so-called terror ‘sleeper cells’ hiding in a nation near you – none of them will acknowledge the historical fact that they themselves have also helped to harbor, grow, foment and radicalize individuals through counter-terrorism operations for decades.

Allied nations of course will bring up the fact that Western intelligence regularly uses double agents and informants under the banner of security to obfuscate the true intentions of such programs.

The Media is already preempting the next shockwave of terror, even though every security agency across Europe is on high alert. Take a look at the CBS passage below that sets the stage – they way big media wants you to see it:

While investigators believe the deadly Brussels attacks were accelerated by Friday’s arrest of the chief suspect in November’s Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, U.S. investigators are working under the assumption that it’s possible other similar plots may have been rushed into motion as well, CBS News homeland security correspondent Jeff Pegues reports.

Adding even more confusion in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks, we see another passage from the same CBS report that quotes FBI Director James Comey, stating that the attack images will ‘dissuade’ some individuals from joining ISIS, while explaining that there could be copycatattacks inspired by the events this week:

During a press conference, Lynch and FBI Director James Comey acknowledged a concern that the attacks would inspire copycats, Reid reports. However Comey said he believes the pictures of the carnage may dissuade some people from joining ISIS because the pictures show the group isn’t actually building a caliphate, but instead killing innocent people.

According to officials, the Paris attacks were plotted in Brussels and as Mashable tells us, “In the fall, the neighborhood (Molenbeek) first became the focus of attention after it was revealed that the brothers Salah and Ibrahim Abdeslam, at the center of the Paris attack investigation, lived in the neighborhood. 

Continuing, Mashable presents the backdrop that allegedly allowed terror to thrive in an area known for drugs and arms trafficking, according to Belgium’s Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon:

Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon acknowledged in November that the the illegal economy of guns, drugs and petty crime in the neighborhood had been used to fund extremist activities. Despite plans to “clean up” the neighborhood, radical networks had been allowed to thrive in Molenbeek and elsewhere in the city, he admitted.

This presents the biggest question so far in this article: If we are to accept that authorities were monitoring Molenbeek and Abdeslam at least since the November Paris attacks, how is it that they sat on his arrest for five months, days before the double attack in Brussels knowing the danger that was out there?

Additionally, from the beginning, officials presented that the Brussels attacks were a response to Abdeslam’s arrest, when the timing of the attacks could have also been attributed to a deliberate lapse in security, allowing attackers months of planning, uninterrupted by authorities – even when they had prior knowledge of those allegedly involved.

Then we hit pay dirt…

In an article published at Haaretz entitled, “EXCLUSIVE: Belgian Intelligence Had Precise Warning That Airport Targeted for Bombing,” we see that Belgium authorities did in fact have prior warning of the airport and subway attack:

The Belgian security services, as well as other Western intelligence agencies, had advance and precise intelligence warnings regarding the terrorist attacks in Belgium on Tuesday, Haaretz has learned.

The security services knew, with a high degree of certainty, that attacks were planned in the very near future for the airport and, apparently, for the subway as well.

Despite the advance warning, the intelligence and security preparedness in Brussels, where most of the European Union agencies are located, was limited in its scope and insufficient for the severity and immediacy of the alert.

Aanirfan reports that the police had questioned the Brussels bombers just a week before the airport and subway attack:

“Khalid and Brahim El Bakraoui were again arrested just a few days before the 22 March 2016 attack, according to the Center for Security Policy.“

‘CREATING A SCENE?’ – A fellow passenger at Brussels Airport, causally walks next to a man
in pain on the ground after an explosion. (Photo link to johnsoncitypress)

CCTV Footage Faked, Prior Knowledge and Security Changes

On March 23rd, an article written by Professor Michel Chossudovsky entitled, “Media Manipulation: More Fake Video Reports of the Brussels Terror Attacks,” we see how major media has pushed the Brussels attack narrative at the expense of the public:

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.

Chossudovsky, then explains how the media manipulation didn’t end there:

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.

On one hand, authorities and their media counterparts want you to believe the terror attacks of today are some kind of unforeseen black swan event but the reality is, these incidents prove time and again examples of pre-planning and foreknowledge before an incident occurs.

Today the UK’s Telegraph reports, that the Bakraoui brothers named in the Brussels twin terror attacks, were already known to US officials before the Paris attacks, as both had been placed on a watch list:

Brahim El Bakraoui, one of the Brussels suicide bombers, was on a US counterterrorism watch list before the November attacks in Paris and his brother Khalid was put on the list shortly afterward, sources familiar with the matter said, Reuters writes.

Reuters previously reported that both brothers had been known to U.S. authorities before the March 18 arrest of Salah Abdeslam, a French national who prosecutors say had a key role in the Paris attacks.

Many critics of today’s terror events, often cite the uncanny timing of security measures around the time of these incidents. The Brussels attack, appears to be no different, as the EU has been seeking a controversial ‘passenger name record system’ since at least the Paris attacks. The proposal has been met with much opposition, as some law makers are concerned about public privacy.

Earlier this week according to the EUObserver (hat-tip Ger Anono), “EU interior ministers are expected to hold an emergency meeting in the wake of Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels, as European authorities try – again – to find ways to address the terrorism threat.

With the use of existing databases, ministers will discuss “the launch of a new EU-wide air passenger name record (PNR) system.”

The PNR was something we at 21WIRE  had brought up after the first wave of Paris attacks.

Additionally, in the wake of the attacks in Paris, there were open calls by US and UK leadership to gain access to encrypted data. Both President Obama and PM Cameron have agreed to stage cyber ‘war games’ and establish a joint cyber cell, to repel future hack attacks.

This year, the nature of encryption has reached critical mass, as between the very public court battle with Apple and the FBI – as the security agency is seeking a more direct route into personal devices moving into the future.

Survivors of Multiple Terror Events

Perhaps the most bizarre and extremely questionable story to come out since the Brussels attacks, were the reports of Mason Wells, a Mormon missionary, who allegedly survived three separate terror attacks since 2013 – Boston, Paris and Brussels.

Back in 2013, just after the Boston marathon bombing, the Washington Post ran an article including some interesting statistics about terror directly from the National Counterterrorism Center, which stated that:

In the last five years, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack have been about 1 in 20 million (that’s including both domestic attacks and overseas attacks).

Here’s the Mason Wells story, as reported by ABC news…

.
Just another coincidence? At those odds, it’s a near impossibility, and more likely we are looking at a role player of sorts.

Terror Drills & Operation Gladio

As 21WIRE has noted many time before, we’ve seen evidence of multi-agency drills or security exercises prior to other alleged attacks and shootings – was this the case in Brussels?

In October of 2015, SputnikNews reported massive NATO drills in Belgium and other member countries:

On October 21, the largest NATO military exercises in 13 years moved into an active phase testing threat response. The drills involve over 36,000 troops from 30 NATO and partner countries.

The first phase of the Trident Juncture drills began October 3, running for two weeks in Canada, Norway, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The second part is taking place in southern Europe – Spain, Italy, and Portugal – as well as in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

Similarly, in February, The Daily Mail published an article reporting “Europe’s largest-ever disaster response training exercise”:

Police, firefighters and paramedics will this week work side-by-side with more than 70 partner agencies including local councils, utility companies and specialist search and rescue teams to respond to the disaster during the four-day drill.

Disaster victim identification teams from all UK police regions are also working alongside other forensic specialists in a mortuary on site.

Teams will also be working alongside firefighters from Italy, Hungary and Cyprus who will also be mobilised to the incident on Wednesday.

Although this scenario is not a terrorist attack, we will be practising procedures and systems that are common to any emergency that results in a large number of fatalities and injuries.

‘CRISIS ACTORS’ – Two actors with fake gory wounds seen here laughing in between
playing their part in the exercise. (Photo link livestream)

That’s not all. Back in 2013, “a full-scale emergency drill at Brussels Airport to test and evaluate the preparedness of our airport emergency services in the event of an incident.” 

Here’s a YouTube video depicting the Brussels Airport drill in April of 2013, and then again in April of 2015…

.

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In December of 2015, in a 21WIRE article entitled “GLADIO GOES GLOBAL: Gangs and Counter Gangs in Europe, Northern Ireland, Iraq and now in Syria,” we see a dark alliance of security and terror across Europe:

In addition to the French, Belgium and Italian branches of Operation GLADIO, there is also the rarely mentioned British contingent – GLADIO’s key component, which seems to be international in scope – bringing GLADIO into a global context.

In a 2007 article by Nafeez Ahmed, entitled “The Strategy of Tension,” we discover the existence of many stay-behind operations under the Gladio umbrella:

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists.

To provide a background on the existence of state-sponsored terror using proxy agents, here’s a link to a recent 21WIRE post concerning a BBC documentary entitled “Operation Gladio.”It describes how a secret army operated by the CIA and MI6 via NATO was used to carryout worldwide political objectives through a “strategy of tension.”

What will be next for Brussels and other NATO countries moving ahead?

Every president needs a doctrine.  Now the sensible approach here would be to see the need for a doctrine the way an ardent feminist might see the usefulness of a man.  As Irina Dunn claimed (an aphorism commonly attributed to Gloria Steinem), “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Be that as it may, President Barack Obama’s doctrine has been deemed to be “much less a coherent foreign policy ideology than a basic recognition of the world as it is: the moral dilemmas of American power in a post-Iraq world make anything as simplistic as an ideology at best silly and at worst destructive.”[1]

Obama’s Cuban adventure may not have involved the school boy bravura of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, all patriotic gore dictated upon saddles in a quaint imperial tradition.  But nor was it entirely free from ideology.  There was no getting away from the fact that this play for the cameras as he touched down on Cuban soil was very much in the order of historical show. He was there to enact a ceremony of US power.

On Monday, he exclaimed on Twitter how “Michelle, the girls, and I are here in Havana on our first full day in Cuba.  It’s humbling to be the first US president in nearly 90 years to visit a country and a people just 90 miles from our shores.”

The White House site, however, evinced a more serious approach, one unmistakably tactical in attempting to reform, not so much the Cuban-US relationship, as Cuba itself.  (Ignore the point that Cuba has much to teach the US, notably in terms of social welfare.)  It was clear that Obama was keen to “promote a democratic, prosperous and stable Cuba.”[2]

This has taken various forms, first with the Mary 29, 2015 rescinding by the Secretary of State of Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, followed by the reopening of the US embassy in Havana, reciprocated by Cuba in Washington on July 20, 2015. There have also been joint initiatives combating narcotics, transnational crime and various agreements on marine activity, the environment and the delivery of mail.

These gestures are plugged into the market model of opening up Cuba, an approach that emphasises the strength of the dollar and the profit motive over the starvation approach of the embargo.  This is framed as an effort to help Cuban citizens rather than the hungry ambitions of US business.  “Decades of US isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our objective of empowering Cubans to build an open and democratic country” (White House, Mar 20).[3]

The description of Obama’s Cuba effort in the US has varied between the Miami-lobby’s conventional, visceral rage and the liberal wing that sees American power as a gentleman’s code of conduct in action, to be exercised responsibly to influence history. “Through a series of tiny gestures,” wrote Stephen Marche in Esquire, “Obama achieved what 50 years of American resistance to Cuba was not able to.”  For Marche, Obama was truly a “masterful performer” on “the world stage,” with the “press conference with Raul Castro” being in of itself “a masterpiece”.

The views from the conservative Commentary Magazine, however, emphasise the “ego-fuelled venture to the island prison nation,” with Obama doing his bit to legitimise “the world’s holdout Marxist regimes.”[4]  Noah Rothman, almost charmingly anachronistic, was still attempting to identify the tricks of the trade Havana might deploy against the US government.  (What, asked Rothman, of the mysterious case of a Hellfire missile delivered to Havana from Europe, one duly surrendered to the US ahead of the visit?)

If the outcome of this US-Cuban rapprochement is a pale admission to the limits of US power, then sceptics of the global imperial project will have much to take away from it.  But this concession to reality will eventually see Washington’s business interests reassert themselves in traditional territory, and with traditional mercenary zeal.  Those grateful for Obama’s tactics here see a way of ambushing the communist regime and providing fodder for its overthrow.

Pragmatism, in other words, can be a state’s most poisonous asset, deployed under the guise of realistic worth.  It was for such reasons that, in the words of Mexico’s former secretary of foreign affairs Jorge G. Castañeda, Obama, “perhaps even somewhat cynically – decided to abandon trying to compel Cuba’s leaders to change their political system.”[5]Engagement without revolutionary punch.

The sceptics argue that US investment and spending is not likely to lead to the flowering of a thousand flowers of democratic sentiment.  There was, asked Rothman, no satisfactory reason “why similar investment over the decades from Canada and Western Europe has not had that effect.”  The obvious answer to this is that such investment was minute given the state of the continued US embargo. Pity the dissidents, who find themselves caught up in all of this.

Far from constituting anything supportive of the Castro regime, this neo-Open Door policy is an attempt to strangle by means of a velvet glove. “It does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba towards collapse” (White House, Mar 20).

Presidential doctrines continue to be silly things, but if Obama’s is based on a thought through pragmatism when it comes to such regimes as that of Cuba – tolerance for the sake of change over time – it is hardly different from those adopted by previous US administrations. The stance is merely clearer, a clarity of position that will become more obscured with the next president.  The very essence of hegemony, it seems, is intervention, by overt force, or stealth.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a43271/why-did-obama-go-to-cuba/

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/cuba

[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/cuba

[4] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/obamas-self-affirmation-cuba/

[5] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/obama-in-cuba-engagement-policy-by-jorge-g–casta-eda-2016-03

It has taken a decade but the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has finally granted the US Army a licence to possess and manage DU weapon residues at 15 US installations. However the domestic regulatory framework imposed by the NRC stands in stark contrast to the absence of obligations governing the management of contamination caused by US military actions in Iraq and elsewhere.

This week’s decision by the NRC to grant the US Army a possession and management licence for 15 of its installations known to be contaminated by DU brings to an end a long-running saga that began in 2006 with the discovery of DU on two ranges on Hawaii – Schofield Barracks, Oahu and the Pohakuloa Training Area on the island of Hawaii.

Old M101 round. The main body of the round has corroded significantly.

The DU discovered in 2006 was from M101 spotting rounds – these were used in training for the 1960s Davey Crockett tactical nuclear weapon system. As the system was classified, few records were kept of which installations received the rounds and where they were fired. Each M101 round was 92% DU and 8% molybdenum, which equated to 190g of DU per round; the rounds were fused and also contained white phosphorous. In all, 75,318 rounds were originally produced. Of these, 44,000 were eventually demilitarised by firing them into a sand box where they were produced at the Lake City Ammunition Factory Missouri, a further 2,000 were used for quality testing. The whereabouts of the remaining 29,300 rounds was something of a mystery to the US Army – but equated to around 5,560kg of DU.

The Army clashes with the NRC and campaigners

The US Army initially denied that DU was present on Hawaii but eventually admitted its presence after concerned local activists undertook their own radiation monitoring campaign in 2007. In 2008, Hawaii County Council passed a resolution requiring that the Army cease all live firing at the range due to concerns that the explosions would mobilise contaminated soil and allow it to be blown off site. The resolution also called for the clean-up of the ranges.

The Army grudgingly submitted an application to the NRC in 2008, all the while maintaining that: “While the U.S. Army has not determined that the Atomic Energy Act (Act) requires a license in this situation, we are providing this application to promote cooperation between our agencies and to the extent required by the Act.” The NRC took a different view, and would later find that:“The Army has enough DU at these sites that, under the Atomic Energy Act and NRC regulations, it is required to have a possession license.”

The licence for the two Hawaiian ranges was eventually granted in 2013, but not before years of wrangling between the Army and the NRC. Throughout the period, the Army dissembled, bluffed and frequently found itself facing the ire of the NRC, as well as sustained pressure from Hawaiian politicians and environmental and community activists. Even when the licence was granted, it did not give the Army carte blanche, instead the licence provides for “…NRC inspections and requires the Army to implement a radiation safety plan and a physical security plan. The Army must also provide an air and plant sampling plan for NRC review within 90 days. The NRC must review sampling results before deciding whether to lift existing restrictions on activities that would disturb the DU. The license does not authorize the Army to use the DU or decommission the sites without additional review and approval by the NRC.”

By this time, the question of the whereabouts of the remaining M101 rounds had resulted in the Army having to seek to expand the licence to cover a further 13 installations following an internal review: Forts Benning and Gordon (Georgia); Forts Campbell and Knox (Kentucky); Fort Carson (Colorado); Fort Hood (Texas); Joint Base Lewis-McChord/Yakima Training Center (Washington); Fort Bragg (North Carolina); Fort Polk (Louisiana); Fort Sill (Oklahoma); Fort Jackson (South Carolina); Fort Hunter Liggett (California); Fort Wainwright (Alaska); Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (New Jersey); and Fort Riley (Kansas).

Contrasting regulations

As with the initial agreement on the Hawaiian installations, the licence agreed by the NRC this week requires the Army to submit to inspections and periodic reviews. The licence also requires the Army to meet NRC health and environmental standards and it limits the amount of DU that can be held at each site. Any work to decommission or clean-up sites would require further approval from the NRC.

US DU management policy – tight regulations at home, no regulations post-conflict. 

The contrast with the strict US domestic regulatory framework for DU contaminated sites and the US military’s response to DU following its use in conflict could not be starker. The US has consistently opposed measures to increase transparency over DU use at the UN. It has objected to any suggestion that there might be health or environmental risks associated with its use in conflict. The US and others are also of the view that they are under no obligation to deal with contamination and that it remains the sole responsibility of the country affected. Following the 2003 Iraq War, the US authorities were reluctantto extend any decontamination work to beyond their own bases, or share information on target locations with the Iraqi government. This Janus-like view extends to risk awareness, where the measures now adopted by many militaries to protect their own troops are rarely extended to the civilian population.

These views and practices, which utterly reject the radiation protection and management frameworks that exist for domestic DU use, continue to exist because of the lack of formal obligations for the post-conflict management of DU contamination. Time and again, DU-affected countries lack the financial and technical capacity to manage DU effectively – even to their own national standards, let alone those applicable domestically for the countries responsible for using the weapons. This glaring disparity leaves communities at risk of exposure and places an unwelcome burden on states recovering from conflict.

The saga of the M101 contamination should serve as a reminder of the contradictory and often hypocritical approach taken by the states that employ DU weapons – and of the challenge that the use of DU weapons poses to fundamental international radiation protection norms.

Ask an economist to give an opinion about any controversial subject in society, and they’ll turn to the data and start digging for answers. While I’ve covered the economics of GMOs in the past, Dr. Vandana Shiva, on a recent visit by the visionary sustainability guru to my home state of Hawaii, opened my eyes to the real economics in the GMO equation, and the picture isn’t pretty. Just like coal (which you are heavily subsidizing every day), the GMO food system relies on government handouts and many other subsidies in order to maintain its grip on the global food supply.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is an author (Earth Democracy), and was trained as a physicist. As such, she is a systems thinker. In her recent talk, she described the commodification of life as an affront to all of mankind, and described the system-level view that confronts us as we grapple with the GMO challenge.

The first truly eye opening description she made was that of our system of war. Carcinogenic compounds like Agent Orange have largely been repurposed into the agricultural chemicals of today. For instance, 2,4-D, an extremely potent chemical defoliant and component of Agent Orange, was originally developed to destroy Japan’s rice fields during World War II. It has been used in large scale monoculture style agriculture since the 1940s.

Corn photo from Shutterstock

The same basic premise of war applies to our food systems today, according to Dr. Shiva: it’s a war against nature. Think about it. Companies genetically modify food crops to be resistant to chemicals (like 2,4-D, gluphosate, Roundup, dicamba, imidazolines, and so forth). They then sell the seeds to farmers, and also supply them with the chemicals needed to wipe out everything else except that GMO crop. A smart business model, perhaps, but would it work if you didn’t ignore all the costs that society bears as a result?

Top ten externalized costs (externalities) in GMO agriculture:

1. Soil erosion

In Molokai, where much of the GMO corn seeds are produced, Monsanto’s extensive “farms” generate what local residents refer to as “fugitive dust clouds“. The dust clouds come from uncovered topsoil, a cornerstone of GMO field trials here in Hawaii, since all ground cover is removed by chemical application. The dust clouds contain high levels of pesticide residues, and go wherever the wind blows, bringing pesticides onto neighboring farms, communities, and into watersheds where it inevitably enters drinking water. In addition, when Monsanto or another GMO agribusiness leaves an area after farming for many years, this topsoil erosion is so bad it may take 20 years to regenerate even in ideal conditions, until which time the land is more or less economically unproductive.

The process of monoculture style agriculture itself is nothing less than a war against nature. Upon arriving in Hawaii, Dr. Shiva was given a helicopter tour by a local (non-GMO) farmer. Looking down on the landscape, it was so clear to see the local farms were integrated into the landscape around them, hardly standing out from other landscapes. But the GMO “farms” were like an extension of the military barracks, she said. Straight lines, obliteration. And it’s the same everywhere that monocultures are grown. According to Dr. Shiva, 10% of the formerly fertile agricultural land in the province of Punjab in India are now just dead zones. Nothing can grow there without heavy chemical additions of fertilizer because the soils have nothing left to give.

2. Deliberate inefficiency built into the GMO food model

(image from 80/20 vision)

Did you know that only 2% of GMO soy is actually eaten by people? Or that most of the corn grown in the U.S. is actually not even edible? Or that just 10% of corn ends up being used directly in foods, and about half of that is in the form of high fructose corn syrup? The GMO industry claims that GMOs are needed to feed the world (look at any of their websites and you’ll see this claim as a defense of their agricultural methods). But it’s simply not true. Most GMO corn is either processed into gums, pastes, additives, fillers, ethanol or other products. According to Shiva, 80% of our actual food comes from small farms, whereas only 20% comes from these monocrops that are claimed to be the answer to global hunger. That 20% goes to factory farms as animal feed. Beyond the 2% of soy eaten by people, for example, the rest is factory farms (~70%) and biofuels (~25%). Normal (boring) economists like to look at ROI, but Inspired Economists like to look at EROEI, or Energy Return on Energy Invested, as a holistic metric for sustainable economic development.

As for return on the energy put in, according to Shiva, when we grow GE corn and soy and feed it to animals before we eat the animals, we go from 100 units to 1 unit. If we just grow organically, she said, diverse food on small farms, we go from 100 units to 200, 300, 400…. While the Biotech industry claims GMOs are necessary for feeding the world, the plain truth is that that is simply a bald faced lie. Whilefood waste in the U.S. amounts to 20 pounds per household per month (costing them $2200+ per year), and the completely inefficient channeling of our crops through farm animals, one can only logically conclude that the deliberate overproduction of GMO corn and soy in the U.S. has only one purpose: more money.

Corn ethanol is another great example. It needs just as much energy put into it as it delivers on the other end, so its EROEI is about 1. Basically, to be economically viable, any EROEI has to be quite a bit higher than 1, so how does GMO corn survive the free market? (segue to number 3).

3. The subsidies

In economic parlance, there are incentives, and then there are perverse incentives: money that flows from the government purportedly for public benefit but that has the opposite effect. Think about highway spending: $52 billion in 2010 alone flowed from government coffers into maintaining the US highway system. It’s kind of good for people in that they are able to drive wherever they want without stopping to pay tolls (they’re paying tolls through their taxes), but at the same time, it has subsidized the movement of goods from China such that cheap imports outcompete locally manufactured goods. Here’s a post about why we should privatize highways, in case you’re interested.

The subsidies received by the agribusiness giants are overwhelming. According to Shiva, there are $400 billion in subsidies (globally) for chemical agriculture. In the U.S., large scale meat and dairy operations get 73.8% of all food subsidies over a decade from 1995 to 2005, whereas fruits and vegetables got 0.37%.

What does that mean to GMO corn growers? Huge markets, that’s what. If you look at the EROEI of calories we consume in a cow, it’s mindbogglingly bad. It takes anywhere from 10 to 16 pounds of grains (GMO corn and soy mostly) to produce one pound of beef in the U.S. So we’re subsidizing this inefficient process at every level in the supply chain. If factory farms weren’t receiving ~75% of all subsidies from the government, a Big Mac would cost a heck of a lot more than a salad. And that leads us to…

4. Health effects

According to Dr. Shiva, “When it comes to owning the seed for collecting royalties, they [GMO companies] say, “It’s mine.” But when it comes to contamination, cross-pollination, health problems, the response is “we’re not liable”.” Monsanto has trumpeted the relative lack of toxicity in its keynote product, Roundup, for years. But it has health effects, such as some studies suggesting there are birth defects caused by Roundup (evidence is not conclusive on this, but there’s a feeling that the burden of proof shouldn’t be on those affected by the chemicals to prove that their birth defects were directly caused by Roundup). According to Dr. Shiva, the heavy use of chemicals has left a terrible legacy in Punjab. The green revolution was applied there first and Dr. Shiva describes a train there that locals call the “cancer train”.

Every day, a trainload of cancer patients who’ve been exposed to chemically intensive agriculture leave Punjab to go to Rajasthan for treatment. “It’s an epidemic,” said Shiva, and indicated that if you do a map, the areas where chemical farming is the most intensive, it lines up perfectly with where cancer rates are the highest. How much is that costing society? And who pays for it? Certainly not the chemical companies.

But, is the “food” itself even safe? The answer is….who knows? So it is that safety testing for GMOs are only done by the GMO companies themselves. There is supposed to be oversight by the FDA, but that’s “regulation”, and you may have heard, there are a lot of people who use that word as a boogeyman to scare voters. Not only do politicians (usually from the Republican Party, but not always) cry foul about regulations of any stripe, but they go so far as to make sure that even when regulation happens, it’s completely stripped of all but the thinnest veil of legitimacy. How? By appointing none other than the fox himself to guard the henhouse. GMO lobbyists routinely pepper the halls of Washington, but appointing a former GMO lobbyist to head up the Food and Drug Adminstration? Now that’s just crazy enough to be true. Putting a dollar figure on the health side effects of GMO foods and monocultures is virtually impossible. But be assured, that dollar figure is a big one. And guess who pays for it? Not them. Us.

5. Then there’s the farmer.

The biggest loser in GMO agriculture is a difficult question, since there are so many negatives and so many people, ecosystems, and markets negatively affected. But a strong argument can be made that it’s the farmers themselves that buy GMO seeds and the chemicals needed to grow them that are screwed the most. First, they’re tricked with deceptive advertising. Here’s one I saw advertised on one of the sites where I was doing GMO research:

High yield as a result of Roundup Ready crops. What could be wrong with that? Dr. Shiva pointed out that the GMO companies love talking about “yield”, because they can increase yield in the short term, but it’s to the detriment of “output”. What’s the difference? Output is the plant’s total growth. Yield is just the crop itself. So while they can produce a little more corn (or “corn”), GMO agriculture actively reduces other output from the plant (seeds, leaves, stalks, roots, etc.).

The other aspects of the plant, in a healthy agricultural system, serve as food for detritivores, earthworms, fungi, and beneficial insects that turn it into fertilizer for the next crop. But GMO agriculture’s dependence on chemical inputs can decimate the communities of organisms that create soil, so that the farmer is stuck wondering why their soil fertility drops every year. It’s a one-two punch. The chemicals kill beneficial organisms, and then output is reduced as well, so there’s little to nothing to break down into food for more plants. Ahhh…this is where the business model comes in. Now chemical companies can also sell the farmers fertilizer! Brilliant! Farmers get pinched financially from several angles. Add this to the health problems faced by farmers exposed to chemicals, and the suicide rate among farmers is at an all time high, according to Dr. Shiva. She said you can trace a “suicide belt” across the map of India, where 250,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1995. While there are always many factors involved in such sad statistics, one important one is that many of these farmers were so in debt from buying and then becoming reliant on chemical agriculture that promised improved yields (but couldn’t sustain them as the soils started to die). In a dramatic and bitterly ironic way, many of these farmers have taken their own lives by drinking the same chemicals that put them in a hole financially to begin with.

6. Then there’s the economy

A full 2/3 of India, a country with 1.1 billion people (and one of the fastest growing) is still farming. “Where will all those people find jobs if we move India toward America’s economy (2% farmers)?” asked Shiva. “Agriculture must be the most important vocation for human beings. From a distance you can spray poison. But if living there, you can only give love and support to the land. You have to”. Going from 600 million farmers to 20 million farmers would mean 580 million Indians looking for work. What industry is creating 580 million jobs these days? Wind and solar are growing fast, but there’s no way any industry, or even combination of industries, could absorb 580 million people in one country alone with decent, livable work.

7. Then there’s the shirked liabilities

In 1984, the Union Carbide plant leaked pesticides, in Bhopal. It was one of the biggest environmental and health disasters in Indian history. Thousands of people have died painful deaths from cancer, and many more have been disabled from this one incidence. But it’s not just one incidence: according to Shiva, it has spanned through multiple generations. Shiva spoke about being back last year in Bhopal for the anniversary, and seeing children aged 4, 6, 15, etc., crippled still by the chemical legacy in Bhopal. To date, there is still not an admission of liability in any way from Union Carbide (which is now owned by Dow Chemical, a GMO giant). The merger was worth billions…the people of Bhopal have received little to no financial help for the epidemic illness caused, and still being caused by one single accident involving agricultural chemicals.

8. Viva la resistance!!!

Resistance to chemical agriculture is growing, but not what you might first expect. True, consumers are starting to turn their noses up on GMOs and insisting on labeling laws for GMOs. But more importantly, natural resistance is also growing. It’s just like antibiotics in factory farms. When you douse enough of something at a natural population, eventually that natural population will have a few of its members adapt and evolve some resistance to the killing agent you douse on them. The same thing is happening on GMO crops. Bt resistant crops are causing bollworms (in India) and corn rootworm (in the U.S.) to become resistant. Herbicide resistant crops are breeding superweeds.Superbugs are evolving and growing in strength. According to Mother Jones, more than half of U.S. farms are now plagued with superweeds. According to Shiva, now the chemical companies are talking about doubling down to have two genes producing resistance. Don’t believe they’d be that crazy? Just see the USDA’s pending applications for patents on GMO crops, many with multiple-herbicide resistance. Dow’s got a new soybean with 2,4-D AND glufosinate tolerance. Bayer has a new one with Glyphosate AND isoxaflutole tolerance. Take a moment here to recall Einstein’s definition of insanity: believing that we can use the same thinking that created a problem to get us out of the problem.

The costs associated with superbugs and superweeds are hard to even begin to fathom. But once again, the only ones paying those costs will be everyone except those who caused them.

9. The costs of getting a label

Speaking of GMO labeling laws…isn’t it silly that the United States lags behind so many other countries around the world in terms of protecting its citizens? More than 50 countries around the world require GMO labels. Some have banned GMOs outright. So what gives? According to Fred Perlak of Monsanto, a label for GMOs would confer that there was something wrong with GMOs, so they fight against the labels. It’s so interesting how when asked about whether they should have legal rights to own life, Monsanto and their ilk respond with absolute certainty. But when asked about the health effects of GMOs, they respond as if there’s literally no difference from one corn variety to another. How can it be so different you can patent it, and then so not different that there should never be a question about health effects?

Regardless, fighting labeling laws is expensive business. The “No on 37” campaign spent over $50 million on deceptive advertising to defeat the measure. Monsanto alone spent over $8 million. Advocates for the law spent less than $7 million total. Why should we have to spend $7 million to know what’s in our food? And why would they (as an industry) spend more than $50 million preventing a labeling law? Could you think of any better use for the combined $60 million that was spent on that one small statewide initiative?

10. Finally, there’s the silencing of the spring

According to Shiva, 75% of species destruction is due to industrial farming. This figure includes pollinators, vital organisms that provide billions of dollars in economic activity for free every year.Honeybees pollinate 30% of our food, and the collapse of their populations is directly tied to chemically dependent agriculture. Insecticides? They kill insects. Indiscriminately. Including the good ones. In addition, according to Shiva, chemical agriculture has contributed to 75% of soils in the world now being considered degraded. And from a global perspective, 40% of all GHGs come from industrial agriculture.

So what is the answer? Dr. Shiva summed it all up well. “In Indian philosophy, all of creation is an expression of the divine. At its most basic level, that is what the GMO question is about: the destruction of life, but also the commodification of life. The only sustainable farming is farming of rotation and seasonality. It’s as perennial as the ocean, forest, and prairie, because it is doing everything that those ecosystems are doing in terms of nutrient cycling.”

Shifting our food consumption to small, local, organic farms would help every one of these problems go away on its own. But as long as the side effects of chemical agriculture have no cost to the producers, there is little hope that large scale change will come anytime soon. So how do we change the game on GMO companies? Here’s how.

Top Ten Ways to Challenge GMO companies, which are economically hurting us so much by externalizing the costs of their dirty business:

1. Stop eating factory farmed meat. It financially supports 16 pounds of GMOs for each Big Mac you buy.
2. Start a garden. Plant some organic seeds. Grow some of your own food.
3. Buy organic. Anything labeled organic is by definition not GMO.
4. Shop at Farmer’s markets and health food stores.
5. Avoid packaged junk food and sodas (assume it’s all GMO). Eat more vegetables and whole grains. Your Mom was right about that.
6. Support the Center for Food Safety.
7. Support GMO labeling laws wherever they are, and help mobilize support for your state to label GMOs.
8. Get to know the big offenders: corn, soy, and cotton, and look for organic alternatives. Products like Wesson are all GMO, despite their deceptive labels marking them as 100% natural.
9. Boycott, boycott, boycott. Look for Conagra foods and never buy them again. Look for companies that oppose GMO labeling laws and take your money away from them.
10. Educate your friends and family about GMOs (ahem, feel free to send them this link). It’s just bad business for everyone except the companies making chemicals.

Scott Cooney (twitter: scottcooney) is an adjunct professor of Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai’i, green business startup coach, author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur(McGraw-Hill), and developer of the sustainability board game GBO Hawai’i. Scott has started, grown and sold two mission-driven businesses, failed miserably at a third, and is currently in his fourth. Scott’s current company has three divisions: a sustainability blog network that includes the world’s biggest clean energy website and reached over 5 million readers in December 2013 alone; Pono Home, a turnkey and franchiseable green home consulting service that won entrance into the clean tech incubator known as Energy Excelerator; and Cost of Solar, a solar lead generation service to connect interested homeowners and solar contractors. In his spare time, Scott surfs, plays ultimate frisbee and enjoys a good, long bike ride. Find Scott on Google Plus

Introduction by Peter Koenig.

In this extraordinary essay, Dimitris Konstantakopoulos illustrates what is currently happening in Greece. Dimitris, is a renowned journalist and founder of the Delphi Initiative (website of the Delphi Initiative: http://www.defenddemocracy.press/), a group of Greek and international intellectuals who met last June in Delphi – the birthplace of ‘Democracy’ some 2,500 years ago – in the hope of finding alternatives to the current systematic destruction and looting of Greece by the nefarious so-called troika, the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as to the political decay of Europe.

The forum came up with a few ideas, that – I believe – could have saved Greece from the massacre it is going through since 2010, and especially since early 2015, when the nominally left-wing Syriza coalition, with Alexis Tsipras a President, won the elections. But the Tsipras Government, did not listen. They were under the gun, perhaps literally threatened, to do what the troika and troika’s masters in Washington said they must do, or else – destroying Greece, her people and obliterating her social fabric; and while doing so, letting foreign sharks steal the remaining Greek assets by privatization, concessions and sheer fire-sales.

Thousands of people have died as a result of austerity imposed by the troika on the very social safety net Greece along with the rest of Europe had built after WWII. The thinking then was ‘never again war’. Little did they know, that the US-led NATO cells ‘to protect Europe’ from an imaginary enemy from the east, would never allow lasting peace in Europe.

Under the troika regime of economic strangulation, social budgets had to be cut, schools closed or privatized, health services reduced, again and again; hospitals had to be shut or privatized, imports of medications were cut, pensions and unemployment benefits were reduced multiple times. Unemployment among young people hovers between 60% and 70%, GDP has shrunk by almost a third since 2010. People are starving and dying from lack of access to medical services and medication. The exact numbers will never be known. It is not a linear statistic. This is a troika style massacre which affects the mind. It is not only annihilating Greece and her people, but has and is killing all hope. If there is no hope, there is no energy to fight for one’s rights – there is only fear – and anxiety on how to survive the next day.

Now the criminal and un-solidary European Union has launched a new weapon to further smother Greece: The refugees. The corrupt, immoral, unethical and puppet EU (there are hardly words strong enough to describe the character of the leaders of today’s EU), led by the UK, Germany and France, have ‘bought’ Turk Sultan Erdogan with some 3 to 6 billion euros – get to know the real figure by looking what’s happening under the table! – to keep the refugees within the confines of Turkey. Let me call these poor souls instead of the western sanitized term ‘refugees’, victims of the bloody wars waged by the west, meaning the Empire of Chaos in Washington with its NATO and Middle Eastern vassals.

Will Erdogan abide by this corrupt agreement? Hardly. It’s not in the character of a Machiavellian murderer, liar and traitor. In any case Turkey’s borders to the Aegean Sea are porous, and the Aegean Sea is full with hundreds of Greek Islands, reachable for better or for worse, by the war victims’ rickety dinghies. The fate of these battle-scarred people, in a country that thanks to the troika can hardly feed itself, is best described by my friend Dimitris, who in a recent phone call suggested to correct the title of his essay to” A New Idea: Turn Greece into a Powder Keg”.

A New Idea: Turn Greece into a Concentration Camp, [Powder Keg]!

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos

28 February 2016

It is the triumph of Samuel Huntington and of his project, hidden inside his prophecy of a “Clash of Civilizations”. It is also a triumph for neoconservatives who have engineered all western interventions in the Middle East (and also in Ukraine), during the last 15 years. They can now use their results and consequences, in the form of refugees, immigrants and terrorists, in order to try to alter European geopolitics and even attempt “regime change” in the “first world”.

Globalization, “la mondialisation heureuse” (happy), as its French supporters used to call it, was often confused with … easy traveling by international middle class and the use of iPads. It’s not about them. Every TV news watcher can easily understand now that the era of “globalization” is nothing but a state of permanent, destructive war of everybody against everybody. A Social War, against the poorer classes and nations of Europe, a Hot War, “against Islam”, a Cold War against Russia (tomorrow China). And the culmination of all that, the “War of Wars” against Nature itself.
——

Greece is shrinking under the weight of refugees and immigrants. Thousands of them are now living in terrible conditions around the country, in squares in the center of Athens or everywhere they can find a temporary (?) shelter. Even inside the “Hot Spots”, created for them, the situation becomes explosive, as the refugees do not want to stay in these establishments. They wish to continue their travel to Germany or Scandinavia and they are afraid they will be trapped indefinitely inside them. Often, they violate external fences and begin walking towards the frontiers. The main National Road of Greece, linking Athens to Salonica and then to the border, is now full of hungry and thirsty people, walking hundreds of km to reach only the first of the frontiers they need to cross. Groups of volunteers try to help them by distributing water and food, finding shelters for them to spend the night or help to provide emergency medical assistance.

The situation becomes rapidly surreal. You may find even some Golden Dawn [extreme right, or Nazi party] militants helping Syrian refugees. Or unscrupulous merchants selling a bottle of water for three euros and attacking violently the volunteers, who insist on distributing for free food and water, impeding them to make profit out of the persecuted, as happened in one incident near the town of Larisa. Or you may see, opposite to people walking to the North, buses transporting the refugees, who found the border closed, to the South, back to Athens. Both Greek authorities and the people look extremely confused and shocked by what is happening to their country. Europe and its nations seem to have lost completely their orientation and the same is true with simple people.

Greece can hardly feed, or provide with proper medical care for all its citizens, having been the victim, for six years now, of “bail-out” programs imposed by its European “partners” and the IMF (1). With the massive refugee influx, it has to cope with an unprecedented situation, threatening directly its already shaken social stability and ethnic and national cohesion. The refugee crisis has had so far a cost of about one billion euros, while Athens has received only about 30 million from Europe. Nobody knows if and how important will be the repercussions to tourism, one of the few industries in the country having survived the economic war launched against it by the German and other European governments, EU institutions and the IMF.

But this is nothing compared to what is coming, as the Erdogan regime in the East goes on with sending thousands of people every passing day and the FYROM (2) and also Albanian authorities in the North, under the direct influence and control of Vienna, Ankara and Washington, decided to close hermetically the frontier, even to Syrian refugees whom the EU had said it is ready to accept and who have all the required documents. Hundreds of thousands of refugees risk to be “trapped” inside the Greek borders, further destabilizing the Greek nation-state and adding a new quality to the “death spiral” that Greece is locked in already for six years.

Is all this a mistake or an intended and planned result? We are right in asking the question. As the Wall Street Journal reveals in a recent article, there is already a plan to propose to Greece money to keep the refugees. First you ruin a country, a traditional nation-state, then you propose to transform it into homeland for the part of world population you have turned into nomads, because of the policies you apply in the Arab and the Third World in general! (3)

Maybe you will ask who are they, as different governments are protagonists of different episodes of the whole story. The US were responsible for invading Afghanistan and Iraq in a way that produced an unbelievable chaos there, as President Obama has publicly recognized (he was even elected because of that). Sarkozy was used for the destruction of Libya, Hollande and all the rest for supporting the Islamic State in Syria. In “debt wars”, the German government took the initiative of the financial “debt” war which created the Greek chaos, in alliance with “markets”, EU and the IMF. Erdogan ‘s government was used against Russia and to send the refugees to Europe. Merkel helped the situation by inviting one million refugees to become Gastarbeiters [temporary workers], of limited rights and salaries. Even SYRIZA has emitted, by its mere presence in power and its rhetoric, a signal that everybody is welcome.

It seems what we have here is a collection of what we may call “partial players”. They have only limited understanding of the complex world strategic (geopolitical and economic) environment. They are often trying to give only tactical answers to the challenges they face, but they are unable to really ponder the strategic consequences of their action. A classic example is how the neoconservatives, who do have a global and coherent strategy, as they were facing, after Afghanistan and Iraq, the opposition of a considerable part of US establishment, were able to move the destruction of Libya to Paris, using the Sarkozy government!

I understand well the reasons many people in the West with good intentions don’t want to accept and believe this disaster scenario and how they feel. They would probably like to believe they live in a better world, but they don’t. The sooner they realize it, the better. It seems there is quite a hidden Order inside the present Chaos. As it is a terrible order, we prefer often to disregard it, until we feel its consequences in our own life, or in our countries. But then it is often too late.

Greece again guilty of all sins

It is in fashion these years to accuse Greece and Greeks of everything. In 2009-10, international mass media, controlled as never before by international Finance, launched a quite successful communication campaign to present Greeks and Greece as the main culprits of the huge financial and political problems Europe is facing. This provided the “markets” with the pretext they needed to attack financially Greece and European governments and institutions, and also the IMF, with the justification to impose to Greece the economic program that led to its destruction and continues, by the way, to do so.

Now it became a fashion to accuse Greeks of mistreating the refugees, or of not protecting the borders of the Union. It is exact that there was a delay on the part of the Greek government to build the “hot spots” – which prove already useless. But after, all the government, afraid of the consequences of any delay, mobilized the army, building them before the deadline expires.

A sensational revelation came from the Athens daily “Efimerida ton Sintakton”. It published documents substantiating its claim that high ranking EU officials falsified technical reports of EU inspectors sent to the islands, in order to prove that Greece is not fulfilling its obligations to the EU and thus prepare the ground for expelling Athens from the Shengen area. If true, that means there is already a mechanism inside the EU apparatus, working to prepare the next attack against Greece, as has already happened in numerous occasions since 2009.

But the main accusation repeated from different politicians around Europe is that Greece is not protecting well the frontiers of the Union. The accusation is accompanied by threats to expel it from the Schengen zone (reminiscent of the ever present threat of expelling it from the Eurozone). But this accusation is based on a complete distortion of the facts.

The great majority of refugees and immigrants are leaving now with small boats from the Turkish coast of Minor Asia, which is in a short distance, of some nautical miles, from the Greek islands of Eastern Aegean and the Greek island of Kastelorizo in the Mediterranean Sea. As soon as their boats enter Greek territorial waters, they sink their boats. Then the Greek authorities have to save them and transport them to the land. There is no more fundamental provision in the Law of the Sea and the international humanitarian right than to save under any circumstances persons in danger of life. After saving them, the Greek authorities have the obligation to transport them to the nearest land and this is Greek, as they sink their boats inside Greek territorial waters. Anyway, Turkey does not accept for the refugees to get back to its territory.

Under these conditions, the only way the Greek state could “protect better” the “frontiers of the Union”, as some European politicians suggest, would be to drown the refugees, or let them die in the sea without any help. Maybe some people in Europe would like such a radical “solution”, but one can easily imagine what they would say worldwide about Greece, just the next day, if Greek authorities were to follow such advice.

But there is a state which could very easily stop, or at least diminish in a very significant way, the flow of refugees to Europe. Its name is Turkey. It has the means to do it. Refugees are preparing openly their journey at the Turkish coast. Everybody knows it and everybody, including international televisions, can see it. The Turkish Army, Gendarmerie and secret services control very well their national territory. Maybe even too well. Maybe some boats will leave finally from Turkey, but it would be easy for the Turkish coast guard to stop and return them back. And finally, Ankara could accept back even the refugees and immigrants from Greek territorial waters.

European governments are begging Ankara to do it and the EU has agreed to give Turkey three billion euros for that purpose, in addition to some important political gifts to Turkey. Ankara is asking for major concessions in the Kurdish question and a lot of other things. Turkey agrees and then doesn’t fulfill the agreements, even the ones signed previously with Greece and the EU of accepting back the immigrants.

European governments and the EU have a lot of means to exert pressure on Turkey. But they don’t want really to do it to the extent necessary. They are afraid of harming their exports to the Turkish market. Paris, Berlin and London want to safeguard their “special relationship” with Ankara. The Turkish regime is very useful for various “dirty jobs” in the Middle East or against Russia and, last but not least, they obey, more or less, the American desiderata. Washington remains, more than ever, the geopolitical master in the Mediterranean. Germans, French or the European Commission can be very tough towards small countries like Greece, Cyprus or Portugal, sometimes even Spain or Italy. But they bow in front of the United States of America, even when European interests are in clear opposition to American ones.

For the above reasons, instead of pressing Turkey, European governments and the Union want now to transfer all the burden of the refugee crisis to a member of their own Union, already destroyed by the economic and social policies they imposed on it, and isolate it at the same time inside the Union of which it is a part.

Would you bet your money on the survival of such a “Union”?

A monstrous project: create a refugee and immigrant “state” in Europe

Not wishing to accept any more refugees, not wishing to exert the necessary pressure on Turkey, not wishing also to revert their Middle Eastern policy, which has created an unbelievable amount of ruins in a large region of the world, the European Union is converging to the idea of transferring again the whole pressure it receives to the weakest of its members, transforming Greece into a giant concentration camp. By doing this, it is adding new factors to the already very severe economic and social conditions which push Greece towards a possible collapse of its state structures, chaos and, potentially, even civil war.

The idea is to invoke the “humanitarian emergency”, trying, at the same time, to exploit once more the weakness of the Greek government, which is acting under the blackmail of its creditors, the latter asking for new severe pension reductions (the 12^thconsequent reduction of Greek pensions, since the beginning of the “bail-out” programs) and other terrible measures which will destroy what remained of both middle classes and social security system in the country.

The SYRIZA-An.Ell [Syriza coalition] Government, having capitulated without a battle in July, is facing now enormous pressures from both, the creditors and the social strata which begins to revolt. In addition, there is pressures by the Americans through the EU to make concessions in Greek foreign policy, always without any coherent strategy, but very much relying on US interests, though the Syriza coalition does not understand where these dubious allies are pushing it. It does not seem on the other hand, competent in handling an, anyway, extremely difficult situation.

The method Washington and the EU want to use is very similar to what they did with Greece regarding financial issues. By transferring all the burden of the 2008-09 financial crisis to Greece (and to a lesser extent to other South European countries), they were able to avoid taking any action to control a fraudulent international financial system. They avoided also to face the reality of the consequences of the ill-conceived systems of “globalization” the EU have adopted with the euro concept, except for a wing of German Christian Democrats, who had a plan to expel Greece from the Eurozone as an “answer” to Greece’s problems. The way they attempted to apply their plan, was inflicting great political self-defeat on Germany, the most serious one since 1945. Even if they attain their goal, Berlin risks to be held finally responsible for ruining all Europe, for the third time in a century.

By destroying Greece after 2010, a process which continues, they bought some time of apparent “stability” for both the financial and EU system. Of course the problem was not solved. It is just waiting to explode again.

The same will happen if this “method” is applied in the refugee crisis. Greece will be pushed further to the abyss, the European Union will continue to lose any raison d’ être and the refugees will, sooner or later, find their way to Europe, either by crossing the mountains of Northern Greece and the Balkans, or by trying to escape through the Adriatic Sea to Italy.

What should be done?

Refugees and immigrants deserve all our solidarity, if we wish to remain humans. Especially as we supported, or did not oppose enough, military interventions in their countries which made them refugees (or the economic and “climatic” policies which turned them into immigrants). Still, is it really a solution, for them and for us, to have half of the Middle East and Africa emigrate into Europe, in order to avoid the consequences of the disasters we helped accumulate in their countries? We contributed very much to destroying them, are we going now to complete this process with the emigration of their best educated and more active citizens into Europe?

It is obvious, at the same time, that both the refugee crisis and the terror threats, and also the generalized confusion about their roots and possible solutions, are used to influence in a radical way European politics. These very totalitarian forces, like neoconservatives and their [financial] allies, are mainly responsible for creating the crisis, especially by engineering military interventions in the Middle East, through their influence in the US, French, British and other states and governments. Who could have imagined, only some months ago, that a country like France, the motherland and the symbol of European Liberty, during the last few centuries, would enshrine martial law into its Constitution?

To face the situation, without being destroyed in its fundamentals and keeping its cohesion, unity, possibility of independence, but also its own democracy, Europe has to do two things in the short run. First, organize the accommodation for people having already crossed its borders and do it in an equitable and just way between EU members. Second, exert the necessary pressure on Turkey to stop the influx of more refugees into Europe through Greece. Measures should be taken to help refugees where they are now, waiting for conditions of safe return in their countries to be established. Such a policy is now absolutely necessary. Still it is not enough.

We need to reverse radically course in the Middle East. We need to stop destabilizing all independent Middle Eastern powers, we need to help immediately stop the war in Syria and help restore its territorial integrity, we need massive economic help to permit the reconstruction of the countries we demolished or helped demolish. In the long run we need also to exert the necessary pressure for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Many people will say that all this is nice but unrealistic, “utopian”. Ok, we can try to avoid such policies. But we should be conscious of the real, “realistic” alternative. And the real, “realistic” alternative is to import into Europe the Middle Eastern chaos, permitting, at the same time, the very same forces who provoked the chaos, to continue their destructive work (and in reality to impose their regime) on our continent.

We are not speaking about abolition of the nation-state. It remains, but it remains as a sheer formality, with the real power taken away from its institutions. Such an experiment requires also a demographic change which is already happening with massive emigration of young well educated Greeks abroad and the dramatic falling of new births as a result of the bail-out program. A man with an enormous intuition, as all great artists, like Mikis Theodorakis, told me in an interview, back to 2012, when I asked him what is the aim of the program, he said, it wants to create “a Greece without Greeks”. After all, since the times of Pericles, we know that sovereignty follows the people.

—–

(1) After six years of applying a program supposedly to “help”, imposed by German and other European governments, EU and the IMF, under the “guidance” of international finance, put under the quasi-direct rule of a Troika of Creditors, Greece has lost nearly 30% of its GDP, two thirds of its young people are unemployed, social benefits are massively cut, investment has fallen more than 50% and its debt is rapidly increasing. These numbers represent by far the biggest economic and social disaster in capitalist Europe after 1945, the material losses of the country being superior (in relative terms) to those suffered by France or Germany during the First World War.

(2) FYROM is the official name used by UN and EU for what is widely known as “Republic of Macedonia”. Greece is not recognizing the name “Republic of Macedonia”, considering that its use betrays territorial claims on its own province, named also Macedonia and implies that the historic and multinational region of Macedonia, now belonging to four Balkan countries, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and FYROM, should belong only to the latter. This difference has not permitted so far to FYROM to become a member of NATO.

(3) By the way, such prospects tend to confirm a number of analysts who expressed, during recent years, the opinion that in Greece we don’t have just another, albeit extremely harsh, neoliberal “adjustment program” but an “experiment” aimed at destroying the very heart of a “nation-state” – its state and popular (democracy) sovereignty and the social protection system usually associated with nation-states. By the way, during the EU debates about the refugee crisis, a draft providing for the possibility of Frontex to act even without the consent of the country where it would operate, was accepted as basis for further discussion. Nobody asked the simple question for what purpose such a provision was deemed necessary.

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos is a philosopher, journalist, writer. He has written many book, uncountable articles and is the founder of the Delphi Initiative – http://www.defenddemocracy.press/.

A number of commentators have compared President Rouhani’s policies of opening Iran’s markets to Western business with those of China’s Deng Xiaoping following the death of Mao Zedong some four decades ago [1]. A closer look at President Rouhani’s open-door economic policies indicates, however, that they are more akin to those of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia following the collapse of the Berlin Wall than those of China since Deng Xiaoping.

This study makes an argument that both in theory and practice the Rouhani administration is following an economic model that is widely known to create indebtedness, warped industrialization and dependent development, which also often leads to a loss of political/geopolitical independence. To this end, the study focuses on the administration’s approach to trade and development, to foreign capital, and to industrialization and technological transfer.

The opening of China to foreign capital since Deng Xiaoping has been very methodical and highly disciplined. The country’s leaders have been vigilant against allowing their country to become a consumer market for foreign goods and services. They have consciously shunned the deceptive theory of free trade, which tends to punish the economically weak and reward the strong. Instead, they have followed the model of smart or strategic trade, which means protecting one’s infant industries against the mature or more competitive foreign producers while, at the same, promoting one’s exports where one is competitive. Accordingly, they have been very selective in their choice of foreign capital: while encouraging foreign direct investment, or investment in manufacturing, they have steadfastly resisted importation of commercial or commodity capital, that is, capital in the form of finished goods and services.

By contrast, the Rouhani administration’s efforts to re-integrate Iran into global markets has been inspired by the doctrine of economic liberalism/neoliberalism and the concomitant theory of free trade which, as just mentioned, tends to benefit the economically strong and hurt the weak or noncompetitive.

Threat of Deindustrialization

Prior to President Rouhani’s open-door economic policies, Iran viewed economic sanctions as an (unsolicited) opportunity, a blessing in disguise, to become self-reliant: to rely on domestic talents and resources in order to become economically self-supporting by producing as many of the consumer goods and industrial products as possible. And it did, indeed, made considerable progress in scientific research, technological know-how and manufacturing industries.

Iran became self-sufficient in producing many of its industrial products such as home and electric appliances (television sets, washers and dryers, refrigerators, washing machines, and the like), textiles, leather products, pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, processed food, and beverage products (including refined sugar and vegetable oil). It made significant progress in manufacturing steel, copper products, paper, rubber products, telecommunications equipment, cement, and industrial machinery. Iran also produced the largest operational population of industrial robots in West Asia [2].

Most remarkable of Iran’s industrial progress, however, can be seen in the manufacture of various types of its armaments needs. Iran’s defense industry has taken great strides in manufacturing many types of arms and equipment. Iran’s Defense Industries Organization (DIO) has produced its own tanks, armored personnel carriers, guided missiles, radar systems, a guided missile destroyer, military vessels, submarines and a fighter plane. In 2006 Iran exported weapons to 57 countries.It is also developing a sophisticated mobile air defense system dubbed as Bavar 373 [3].

Iran’s scientific, technological and manufacturing progress under conditions of war and sanctions shows that, despite the oppressive economic sanctions, it managed to emerge as an industrialized country. Even the proverbial bible of the world financial elites, The Economist magazine of London, recently acknowledged that “Iran has a diversified economy, including a significant manufacturing sector” [4].

Alas, the Rouhani administration’s open-door economic policy and the resulting flood of foreign goods, combined with the neglect of domestic producers, especially of small producers, have greatly undermined these technological gains. Inspired by the free-trade philosophy, the administration has removed or drastically reduced import duties on numerous foreign goods and services, including imports of products for which there are domestic substitutes.

According to Mohammed Serfi, an Iranian economics analyst, the degree of import-substitution in Iran could be as high as 70%; meaning that as much as 70% of Iran’s imports could be substituted by domestically produced products. Yet, due to the Rouhani administration’s free-trade policy, the crucially important industrialization strategy of import-substitution—vigorously pursued by all the currently more developed countries at the earlier stages of their development—is ignored. [5].

Complaining about the administration’s lack of an economic strategy, Gholam-Hosein Shafe-ei, former chairman of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, points out that while relief from economic sanctions is obviously necessary it is not sufficient; perhaps more importantly are government-championed macroeconomic objectives and carefully-guided ways or plans to achieve those objectives. In the absence of clearly defined economic objectives, Shafe-ei further points out, Iran could become a heaven for foreign producers while many of domestic producers would be driven out of business [6].

Sadly, this is exactly what has happened: “. . . many of domestic producers . . . driven out of business.” According to a recent Fars News report, the excessive flow of foreign goods into Iran’s markets has led to the idling or closing down of 14,800 manufacturing or production units. The report further indicated that, using budget constraints as justification, the administration has even shut down many research projects [7]. According to Hamid Haaj Esmaili, an Iranian expert on the country’s labor market, “65 percent of workshops or production units in industrial parks have gone out of business” [8].

Evidence thus indicates that if these inauspicious developments are not tempered, stopped or reversed, Iran would be experiencing an ominous trend or phenomenon called deindustrialization, President Rouhani’s and his economic team’s good intensions notwithstanding.

Threat of Indebtedness and Loss of Sovereignty:

The Rouhani administration has shown a strong tendency to external borrowing for financing its spending needs: to pay for its imports of goods and services, or for its domestic outlays. This tendency to debt financing threatens to burden Iran with unsustainable debt a la Greece, or other south/east European countries.

Soon after the formal implementation of the nuclear deal on 16 January 2016, the president took a trip to Europe in which he embarked on a shopping spree of big-item purchases and the signing of a number of business contracts that tend to ultimately commit Iran to a debt obligation of more than $50 billion. The office of the French president estimated the total value of the signed deals during Mr. Rouhani’s visit to France would be approximately €30 billion ($32.8 billion). The accord with Airbus alone (for the purchase of 118 aircrafts) is worth €22 billion ($25 billion). President Rouhani and his entourage also signed contracts with Italy worth about $18 billion, which included oil explorations and automobile deals [9].

Details or terms of agreement of these deals are not divulged to the Iranian people. One thing is clear, however: the deals are to be financed through external borrowing. To secure borrowing in global financial markets, however, Iran would need a favorable rating of its creditworthiness by the international rating agencies such as Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch. This explains why the Rouhani administration is actively soliciting credit rating by these agencies. “An official says Iran is in discussions to get its first credit rating as the country is emerging from years of sanctions and seeking to put its economy on strong footing” [10]. That official turned out to be President Rouhani’s Chief of Staff Mohammad Nahavandian, who told Reuters in an interview in London, “We are in negotiations with some of these rating agencies,” adding that he expected the agencies to provide a full rating [11].

Borrowing from abroad is not good or bad as such; it all depends on how the borrowed money is spent or invested. If it is invested productively, that is, in manufacturing projects that would yield a rate of return higher than the rate of interest paid for the borrowed capital, then borrowing can play a positive role in the economic development of the borrowing country, without the problem of repayment. On the other hand, if borrowing is to import consumer product, especially luxury products, it can lead to indebtedness and the inability to pay.

Sadly, President Rouhani and his economic advisors seem to have been oblivious to the importance of this critical distinction when they devoted the major bulk of the debt undertaken in France ($25 billion out of $32.8 billion) to the purchase of aircrafts that, incidentally, can be accommodated by only one airport in Iran, The Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran. 73 out of the projected 118 Airbus airplanes to be purchased by Iran are the long-haul, wide bodied planes, including 12 A380 superjumbos [12].

Inappropriate Choice of Economic Paradigm: Free Trade vs. Strategic Trade

To criticize President Rouhani’s economic policies is not to question his or his advisors’ intentions or objectives of trying to bring about economic development in Iran. It is, rather, to question the means they employ—free trade and economic liberalism/neoliberalism—in order to achieve those ends. They must certainly be eager to pull their county’s economy out of the deep recessionary hole. Why, then, do they insist on pursuing economic policies that have proven—time and again, and in country after country—to be resulting in economic problems of indebtedness, deindustrialization and dependence?

The answer, in a nutshell, is that the president and his economic advisors seem to be infatuated with an economic paradigm that is regrettably detrimental to the goal of self-sustaining development for the less-developed countries. It is an inappropriate, unsuitable and misleading paradigm, crafted by economic ideologues or theorists of the more developed countries as economic “science,” whose practical outcome for the less-developed economies has been trade deficit, indebtedness, dependent development, and extreme socio-economic inequality. It is the notorious economic liberalism of the neoclassical school of economic thought, which postulates that free trade and unrestricted pursuit of self-interest lead to economic expansion and prosperity for all; that state-sponsored social safety-net programs or strategic trade policies are “costly trade-offs” in terms of lost productivity; and that, therefore, government intervention in economic affairs must be avoided.

According to this doctrine, solutions to economic stagnation, poverty and under-development lie in unhindered operations of capital and unreserved integration into world capitalist system. Recessions, joblessness and economic hardship in many less-developed countries are not so much due to economic mismanagement, uneven or unfair competition in international markets, or the nature of global capitalism as they are because of government intervention and/or exclusion from world capitalist markets.

Free trade is a major component of this school of economic thought. It postulates that international trade would be most efficient and most beneficial to all trading partners if it is grounded on an international division of labor that is based on specialization on the basis of comparative cost advantages. Specifically, it means that since country X, for example, cannot produce all its material needs efficiently, or equally efficiently, it should therefore prioritize its production objectives. It should concentrate on, or specialize in, the production of those products in which it has a comparative cost advantage and, then, trade their surplus with other countries in exchange for those products in which it lacks such an advantage. And if this pattern of trade is adopted by all countries of the world, international trade would be a win-win proposition for all trading partners.

There is a prima facie reasonableness to this theory: by forcing producers in the less-developed countries to compete with the producers of the more-developed countries, free trade would lead to increased efficiency and, therefore, economic growth and prosperity for all. Despite this apparent reasonableness, however, this proposition is highly deceptive. It is axiomatic that, to be fair or meaningful, competition ought to take place on a level playing ground. Otherwise, the weak or non-competitive would be crushed.

There is yet another superficial or deceptive reasonableness to the theory of free trade. It stems from the fact that the premise, or the starting point, of the theory—that at any moment in time each country has a comparative advantage in producing certain products—cannot be contested or rejected. It is, indeed, a self-evident premise. The objectionable part of the theory stems from the fact that it portrays this self-evident proposition, the short-term or temporary advantage, as natural or inherent advantage that should serve as grounds for long-term or permanent specialization in international trade. Obviously, trade on the basis of this theory of specialization is bound to condemn or relegate the less-developed countries to specialization in, or production of, primary or less-processed products while leaving the production of, or specialization in, high-tech, high-value-added products to the more developed countries.

A number of critics of this theory of trade have made a distinction between static and dynamic advantages. These critics do not view a country’s endowments or advantages as inherent, natural or permanent, but carefully acquired through deliberate policies and institutions. This means that a country can and should take advantage of its short-term advantages in order to create dynamic advantages over time. More specifically, whatever endowments and advantages a country might have at a given moment in time are, in large part, products of past policies and developments, and that, therefore, they can be changed over time and new, superior advantages can be created [13].

All of the now more developed countries adopted elaborate regulatory strategies in the early stages of their industrialization in order to gain trade advantages. These included not only the somewhat common protectionist policies of export subsidies and import tariffs but also the more intricate and detailed strategies such as regulation of production methods, control of output quality in export industries, training of skilled labor force in such industries, and the like.

The earliest systematic theorizing of international trade in modern times dates back to the classical Mercantilist doctrine of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As the Protestant revolutions shattered Roman Catholic Europe into competing national states, nation-building absolutist princes embraced Mercantilist policies.

The essence of that doctrine is an extensive state regulation of the economy, especially of foreign trade, in order to mobilize economic resources, both domestically and internationally, in the interest of national industrialization and development. Not surprisingly, the emerging European nation-states from the ruins of the Middle Ages viewed this economic doctrine as the cornerstone of their nation-building strategy.

Mercantilists relied heavily on trade to bring about development. They viewed trade surpluses as a major source of investment, accumulation and growth. From this followed an active policy of export promotion and import curtailment, as this would maximize the net inflow of funds or investible resources into a country. The impact of trade on development was so important in this view that it is sometimes said that to Mercantilists a nation’s balance of trade reflected that nation’s international balance of power, as measured by economic, not military, strength.

While free trade has almost always been the bible of the economically strong, self-righteously preached to the weaker trading partners, the fact is that, historically, all of the now industrialized countries initially adopted the protectionist strategies of Mercantilism to jump-start their economic development. They became champions of free trade only after becoming competitive or dominant in global markets by virtue of earlier policies of Mercantilism/protectionism. This includes the UK, the US, France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea.

Free Trade vs. Smart Trade: Static vs. Dynamic Advantages—the Case of the UK

Before achieving international market superiority in the second half of the eighteenth century, the UK diligently shunned free trade doctrine. It relied heavily on Mercantilist policies for economic gains in global markets. This meant that the British government played an active role in mobilizing and channeling both domestic and external economic resources toward industrialization and development of the country. Colonial policies of territorial conquest and transfer of their economic resources to England was a major part of the Mercantilist theory of industrialization. So were the strict policies of protection of British industries against their international rivals, especially against the Dutch manufacturers who were at the time more efficient than the British.

More than two centuries of Mercantilist policies helped England achieve international economic superiority by the second half of the eighteenth century. International industrial superiority, combined with the disproportionately high cost of maintaining a gigantic colonial apparatus, led many of the leading British elite to suggest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries an alternative to Mercantilism in pursuit of international economic gains.

That alternative view (which was most effectively expounded by a number of well-respected economic thinkers of the time such as Josiah Tucker, Adam Smith and David Ricardo) maintained that Britain’s ability to dominate international markets by virtue of its competitive market forces made Mercantilist policies, as well as most of its colonial military and administrative apparatus, superfluous.

The question the British manufacturers and their political representatives in the Parliament were grappling with at this time was how to end Mercantilist policies and the formal colonial ties, and cut its enormous costs, without disturbing the existing pattern of trade specialization that England had methodically established as result of two centuries of successful Mercantilist policies. The essence of that pattern of trade specialization, also called international division of labor, consisted of Britain supplying its satellites of trading partners with manufactured products in exchange for their minerals and raw materials products.

Proponents of transition to free trade and economic liberalism argued that, once having achieved economic superiority, England’s continued support of protectionist policies of Mercantilism could actually undermine its economic leadership because such policies provided other countries the opportunity to achieve what England had accomplished as a result of pursuing those policies for two centuries. On the other hand, they further argued, if England switched its trade policies from Mercantilism to free trade and, more importantly, prevailed in having its trading partners adopt such policies it could thereby deter them from nurturing their own industrial independence, that is, from adopting protectionist policies vis-à-vis superior British industries. In other words, free trade doctrine was beneficial to England only if it was adopted internationally.

Having achieved worldwide industrial superiority by virtue of Mercantilism and colonialism, England then moved to impose free trade policy on world markets so that it could maintain the existing international division of labor, hence its industrial leadership, through free trade instead of regulated or restricted trade. Whereas proponents of the new doctrine called it laissez-faire, or economic liberalism, always portraying it as freedom or democracy in general, critics called it “free trade imperialism,” signifying a preference by the economically superior to use its market power for economic gains instead of military power [14].

Free Trade vs. Smart Trade: Static vs. Dynamic Advantages—the Case of the U.S.

By the time the United States gained its independence, England had already achieved economic superiority and competitive edge in international markets. Thus as England was gradually abandoning the Mercantilist principles of trade and development in favor of the free trade doctrine, the United States was invoking those principles in pursuit of its own economic development and nation-state building objectives. Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) and Friedrich List offered the strongest policy and theoretical arguments against the emerging doctrine of economic liberalism, which, incidentally, had just received a new publicity boost by the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

Hamilton set out to prove that the laissez-faire doctrine, promoted at the time by the technologically stronger European countries, was inappropriate for the fledgling, non-competitive U.S. economy. Instead, he invoked the major Mercantilist arguments in support of a state-guided trade and development policy.

The arguments that the European champions of free trade counter-posed to Hamilton’s views were similar to those of the free trade advocates of our time. They argued that the best trade policy for the United States was to focus on and specialize in the area of its “natural” endowment or advantage: agriculture, “on the account of their immense tracts of fertile territory, uninhabited and unimproved” [15].

While acknowledging that, at the time, the United States had a trade advantage in agriculture, Hamilton reasoned that it did not follow from this that, therefore, the advantage in manufacturing should be left to Europe; and that the United States, while taking advantage of its superior agriculture, should and must try to create advantages also in manufacturing industry. Industrialization and diversification of the economy was not only important in and of itself, it also enhanced whatever advantage the U.S. already had in agriculture. Industrial diversification, Hamilton further pointed out, would also reduce the vulnerability of the nation’s largely agricultural economy to external economic shocks/forces [16].

Hamilton enumerated a number of specific policy measures that would help the United States achieve international competitiveness—measures that were actually followed by the U.S. before it achieved global competitiveness more than a century later. These included: “Protection Duties—or duties on those foreign articles which are the rivals of the domestic ones intended to be encouraged”; “Prohibition of the Exportation of the Materials of Manufactures,” that is, the raw materials that are needed for domestic manufacturing; “Pecuniary Bounties [and] Premiums,” or subsidies to domestic producers and/or exporters; “The Exemption of the Materials of Manufactures From [Import] Duty; The Encouragement of New Inventions and Discoveries; [and] Judicious Regulations for the Inspection of Manufactured Commodities” [17].

Like Hamilton, Friedrich List (1772-1832) argued that, by throwing the U. S. infant industries into competition with the mature British ones, free trade would impair the process of industrialization and development in the United States. He strongly defied trade specialization endorsed by the British economists Adam Smith, David Ricardo and their co-thinkers as condemning the United States to specialize in agriculture, thereby depleting its soil and mines while stinting its chances of advancing its manufacturing industries. Also like Hamilton, List did not deny the advantages of free trade under “right” circumstances, that is, a level playing or competing grounds, or comparable technological advancement between trading nations. In other words, both List and Hamilton defended protectionism as a temporary or intermediate stage to nurture fledgling industries: once protective policies achieved their goals and trading partners were on an equal technological footing, free trade could reign.

The relevance of List’s and Hamilton’s recommendations for trade and development needs of the U.S. of their time to trade and development needs of many of today’s less developed countries is unmistakable. But because of the competitive edge the United States now enjoys in global markets, it denies the developing world such recommendations—in essence, telling the developing countries: do what we say, not what we do, or did!

Concluding Remarks?

The brief overview of the early industrialization policies of the UK and the US provided here clearly shows that, contrary to what they claim today, these countries diligently shunned the free trade paradigm in favor of strategic/Mercantilist policies in the early stages of their development. Not only did the UK and the US follow this pattern of economic development, but so did all of the other presently advanced countries such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea [18]. This overview also shows that the currently more developed countries became advocates of free trade only after they became competitive in international markets by virtue of earlier strategic/Mercantilist policies of trade and development.

Despite the relevance and applicability of these instructive experiences to trade and development needs of Iran, they are altogether ignored by President Rouhani and his economic advisors. The president and his economic team are sometimes criticized as West-oriented or Euro-centric. The real problem, however, is not so much that they are West-centric, but that they are West-centric in a misplaced, inappropriate and mistaken way: Instead of drawing logical lessons from these highly educational experiences, which means following trade and development strategies of the presently more developed countries in their earlier stages of industrialization, the Rouhani administration follows their strategies of today, of mature or advanced capitalism. In other words, instead of pursuing the strategic or Mercantilist paradigm of trade and development, they follow the paradigm of free trade and economic liberalism.

Iran’s economy is severely anemic, and the overwhelming majority of its citizens are under tremendous financial distress. Sadly, though, economic doctors of the country tend to insist on issuing wrong prescriptions for the ailing economy: free trade, unrestricted imports, lack of an export promotion policy (except for oil and other raw materials), tendency to borrow from abroad, lack of a serious banking/financial regulation—in short, lack of any economic plan, guidance or direction. Unless these misguided, anti-developmental policies are modified or reversed, Iran’s economic difficulties are bound to deteriorate: its markets flooded by foreign products, its manufacturing base weakened, its foreign debt escalated and, with it, its national sovereignty compromised.

References

[1] See, for example, Patrick Buchanan, Is Iran Taking the China Road?; and Pepe Escobar, Iran: The New China?

[2] Wikipedia, Economy of Iran.

[3] Ibid.

[4] The Economist, “All that glitters: Assessing opportunities and risks in post-sanction Iran,” A report by The Economist Intelligence Unit, spring 2016, p. 3 (of the PDF version).

[5] Mohammed Serfi, “Gentlemen, the Party is Over,” in Farsi:

آقایان! ضیافت تمام شد!(یادداشت روز).

[6] For one of many sources on the unbridled flow of foreign products into the Iranian markets see, for example, برجام تبدیل به مجوز واردات و تقسیم رانت بین گروه‌های سیاسی شده.

[7] Fars News, در نشست ۱۰ اقتصاددان ائتلاف اصولگرایان مطرح شد.

[8] Fars News, چراغ 65 درصد بنگاه‌های شهرک‌های صنعتی کشور خاموش شد .

[9] Russia Today (RT), Iran to purchase 118 Airbus planes & set up joint venture with PSA Peugeot Citroen.

[10] Presstv.ir, Iran in talks to get first credit rating.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Russia Today (RT), Iran to purchase 118 Airbus planes & set up joint venture with PSA Peugeot Citroen.

[13] See, for example, Pankaj Mishra and Elif Shafak, “Worldwide Mutinies against Globalization”; or Bela Balassa and Marcus Noland, “The changing comparative advantage of Japan and the United States,” Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Volume 3, Issue 2, June 1989, Pages 174-188.

[14] See, for example, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson. “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (August 1953), pp. 1-15.

[15] Alexander Hamilton, “Report on Manufacture,” reprinted in The Theoretical Evolution of International Political Economy, by George T. Crane and Abla Amawi, Oxford University Press 1997, pp. 37-47. This quotation is from pp. 37-38.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., pp. 44-46.

[18] For a thorough discussion of these issues see Michael Hudson, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, ISLET (2009); for the cases of Japan and other South-East Asian countries see Pankaj Mishra and Elif Shafak, “Worldwide Mutinies against Globalization”; and for the case of South Korea see Alice Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989).

The New York Times recently ran a big front-page piece, taking up more than a full page, seeking to explain the recent developments in Syria. Anne Bernard, the Times’ leading reporter on the Middle East, who mainly operates from Beirut and gets her information from rebel sources, unfortunately grossly fails to inform her readers on some very basic and easily accessible facts that would be journalistic commonplace if we had anything remotely resembling a free press in the US.

The piece begins with some good reporting on the ceasefire and the problems and successes of its implementation, and then goes on to note one of the main talking-points of the opposition: “One of the main concerns of beleaguered opposition forces was that the government would continue to take territory, attacking all insurgents while claiming it was battling only the two groups excluded from the truce: the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate.”

Firstly, the characterization of the rebels as “opposition” and “insurgents” is common practice in Western media reports, yet it shields the fact that the rebel opposition is, and has been for years, dominated by al-Qaeda and ISIS.(1) In failing to report this fact, which is also available from multiple US intelligence agency reports, Bernard and the NYT in effect protect the al-Qaeda forces on the ground from the eyes of the Western public, and in doing so protect the complicity of Western governments in supporting them.

Instead of fulfilling its journalistic function of holding accountable those in power, the NYT instead serves to propagandize for government policy.

Bernard further does this by describing the non-ISIS opposition as “a broad array that includes the Nusra Front, Islamists, and relatively secular groups led by army defectors and backed by the United States and its allies,” failing to note the prominence of the extremists and the fact that the “relatively secular groups” “only operate under license from the extreme jihadists.” Also, describing the “moderates” as secular is entirely misleading and false, as almost all want some form of Islamic stateand are almost exclusively Sunni Muslim.

Going further the intimate, longstanding, and “brotherly” working relationship between the US-backed FSA and al-Qaeda is described in the piece only as “different degrees” of “tactical alliances.”

Initially after the signing of the ceasefire deal, the US-backed FSA were some of the biggest critics of the fact that their al-Qaeda ally was not included, which the US initially tried to make happen before the proposal of protecting al-Qaeda terrorists was rejected by Russia. Main FSA leaders described al-Qaeda as their “partners”, as an “honorable” faction, and claimed that it fights on the ground with “most of the brigades that attended the Riyadh conference,” which essentially includes all the main groups except for Nusra and ISIS.

A few months before that al-Qaeda made a video showing a Nusra leader presenting a gift to an FSA commander, thanking him for using US-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles in support of al-Qaeda while claiming that al-Qaeda and the FSA “are one.”

In 2013, the US-backed FSA commander Col. Okaidi, described as one the biggest recipient of US aid, who to this day can be seen being given air time by Western media to mobilize support for the opposition, described his relationship with ISIS as “good, even brotherly” after having won a main victory while exercising a degree of operational command over ISIS. After having admitted to fighting alongside al-Qaeda, Okaidi explains that al-Nusra does not “exhibit any abnormal behavior, which is different from that of the FSA,” admitting that the sectarian ferocity of al-Qaeda which is often pilloried by the West was no different from the actions of his FSA rebels, that the US supports.

Yet not only is this an intimate alliance that is years in the making, it is as well one that has been ordered by the US and its allies.

In the overtaking of Idlib in 2014, Charles Lister, at the time of the Brookings Doha Center, revealed from interviews with rebel commanders that they received specific instructions from US-led operations rooms to align themselves within al-Qaeda’s ranks and to use their increasing shipments of US-supplied weapons in support of al-Qaeda.

Earlier in 2014 the commander of the US-backed SRF revealed that “those who support us”, i.e. the CIA and its allies, specifically “told us” to “send weapons to [Islamist fighters in] Yabroud” and therefore “we sent a lot of weapons there.”

Anne Bernard however thought only to describe all of this as the rebels having “joined in tactical alliances to different degrees.”

This, in turn, is said to be a “political conundrum” since “Mr. Assad and his allies argue that that makes all rebels legitimate targets.”

In the world of the NYT, the fact that the US and the CIA are supporting al-Qaeda, arming and funding fighters that fight alongside them and pass weapons to them, thus actively committing treason by providing material support to US-designated terrorists organizations, is not something of much note or something that necessitates further investigation to get to the bottom of. Even if such collaborations were only “tactical alliances to different degrees”, this should be headline news. Instead, Assad and Russia are made out to be the irrational ones, arguing that they have a right to strike US-backed rebels operating under license from and in support of al-Qaeda within an al-Qaeda dominated insurgency.

Yes, of course they are the crazy ones, and not us for openly supporting rebels that make up al-Qaeda’s ranks.

And despite this ubiquitous narrative of “Russia and Assad are targeting the moderates”, the NYT informs us that in reality Russia has attempted to alleviate US concerns by “challenging Washington to provide the coordinates for the groups it supports to prevent them from being attacked.” So far, however, the US has refused.

And it’s easy to see why, if they complied it would expose the fact that in effect the US-sponsored groups operate mainly as weapons conduits for the al-Qaeda rebels winning the battles. This allegation is so strong in fact that it was enough for the UK courts to drop multiple cases against individuals they attempted to prosecute for aiding terrorist organizations, the defendants arguing that if they were guilty so was the UK. In addition, classified US intelligence reports which detail how most of the CIA arms shipments were going to “hard-line Islamic jihadists” was reported by the NYT itself back in 2012. Further, in 2014 none other than Vice President Biden said that “there was no moderate middle” that the US was supporting since “the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers,” and instead “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.”(2)

This non-controversial, easily-accessible information is however spared from the informed readers of the NYT.

Furthermore, one of the biggest pieces of recent news wasn’t even reported in the NYT piece.

Just a few days ago Kurdish forces in the district of Sheikh-Maqsood near Aleppo claimed that they were struck by chemical weapons that were launched at them from the Turkish-backed al-Qaeda rebels. They go on to directly accuse Turkey of supplying the chemical weapons. This claim is not at all far-fetched, as recently a Turkish MP has come out with various forms of evidence linking Turkish authorities to aiding the smuggling of sarin precursors into Syria prior to the 2013 attacks. So while the Western media, as the former British ambassador Craig Murray notes, fakes allegations of chemical weapons attacks by Assad it specifically refuses to cover when rebels backed by the West use similar chemical weapons against the Kurds.

Lastly, the Anne Bernard report correctly notes that, “There is no clear count of [ceasefire] violations, though various parties are trying to keep track.” However, it is interesting the note the few examples that she did include; all of the so-called government violations were within or on the borders of Idlib Province. It just so happens that Idlib is completely dominated by al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda is not included in the ceasefire.

Also to note is the fact that multiple instances of “insurgent” violations were shellings and sniper attacks against the besieged towns of Foua and Kafarya. Kafarya and Foua are towns that have been under brutal siege by al-Qaeda and US-backed “moderate” rebels, and have been besieged for many months prior to the beginning of the highly publicized government siege of Madaya. Residents there are suffering from starvation, a lack of adequate food and water supplies, a severe shortage of fuel, electricity, and badly needed medicine. Despite some recent aid deliveries, as with Madaya it is not enough, and on top of all of it the civilian population areconstantly subjected to deadly attack by the rebels in the form of unrelenting rocket shellings, suicide bombings against civilians, and murderous sniper attacks. Apparently they are “unworthy victims”,(3) as the paper doesn’t even attempt to provide context for their plight, nor explain, let alone show outrage, over the fact that the Western-backed opposition is constantly attacking the trapped civilians, not even relenting during the ceasefire. Instead it is just reported in passing that “Insurgent snipers attacked the besieged towns of Fouaa and Kfarya, killing at least one person and injuring several,” and “Islamist insurgents shelled a village near Fouaa.”

One wonders how different the report would look if Assad or Russia had been indiscriminately shelling and sniping off trapped civilians in Madaya.

The New York Times, and its chief Syria reporter Anne Bernard, continually fail to in their journalistic duties. Instead they have served to mobilize support for the government and the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.(4)

If we even had a pretention of living in a society with a semblance of a free press these kinds of basic facts would be readily reported to the American public.

Instead, the NYT continues to mislead and deceive.

Notes:

1.) “… [2014] the Syrian military opposition is dominated by ISIS and by Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda representative, in addition to other extreme jihadi groups. In reality, there is no dividing wall between them and America’s supposedly moderate opposition allies.” Patrick Cockburn, “The Rise of ISIS”, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (Brooklyn, NY, 2015), pg. 3. Print

2.) Ibid.

3.) Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, “Worthy and Unworthy Victims”, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, 2002), pg. 37-86. Print.

4.) Ibid, pg. xi.

It is now revealed that not only were at least three bombers involved in the March 22 Brussels attack well-known to Western security agencies, two – brothers Brahim and Khalid El Bakraoui – were both arrested, charged, and imprisoned for violent crimes in 2010 and 2011, the elder brother for shooting at police with an AK-47s automatic rifle during a holdup, and the younger brother for carjacking and possession of several AK-47s, respectively.

It is also now confirmed that the elder brother, Brahim El Bakraoui, was arrested and deported from Turkey last year for suspected terrorist activity, but not before Ankara attempted to notify Brussels in order for El Bakraoui to be detained upon his arrival back in the EU. Brussels, however, failed categorically to act on the alert, allowing El Bakraoui to return home without consequence.

The third suspect, Najim Laachraoui, had traveled to Syria between 2012-2013 and has had an international warrant out for his arrest since 2014 for allegedly aiding in the recruitment of Europeans for the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS).

Germany’s largest press agency, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, reported in their article, “Reports: Brothers known to police were among Brussels suicide bombers,” that:

Two Brussels brothers who were known to police are among the suicide bombers who carried out deadly terrorist attacks on the international airport and subway in the Belgian capital, local media reported Wednesday.

And that:

[Khalid El Bakraoui] had been sentenced in early 2011 to five years in prison for carjackings, after having been arrested in possession of Kalashnikov rifles, according to the Belga news agency. 

His brother, 30-year-old Brahim, had been sentenced in 2010 to nine years in prison for having shot at police with a Kalashnikov rifle during a hold-up, Belga said.

The New York Times, in their article, “Brussels Attack Lapses Acknowledged by Belgian Officials,” would report regarding Brahim El Bakraoui’s arrest and deportation from Turkey that:

The Belgian justice and interior ministers acknowledged that their departments should have acted on a Turkish alert about a convicted Belgian criminal briefly arrested in Turkey last year on suspicion of terrorist activity, who turned out to be one of the suicide bombers. And the Belgian prosecutor’s office said that person’s brother — another suicide bomber — had been wanted since December in connection with the Paris attacks.

Apparently in Belgium, you can possess a small military arsenal, even use it against police, and still get out of jail early enough to travel to Syria to join a known terrorist organization before being deported without consequence, then join a terrorist network back home lined by equally known criminals to Belgium security agencies, before carrying out a deadly high profile terrorist attack.

And unlike most ISIS suicide attacks, featuring suicide belts or vests, the bombers involved in the Brussels attack appear to have been pushing carts that contained bombs. It is more than possible that the brothers were unaware of the “one-way” nature of their attack, as a third bomber – Laachraoui, the suspected “bomb maker” – managed to escape, and several reports indicate at least one of the brothers may have possibly dropped off a device at the airport which was remotely detonated before moving onward to the Brussels metro to carry out a second bombing.

Suspects “Escaped” Police Raid a Week Before the Attacks 

In addition to the El Bakraoui brothers’ previous arrests in 2010 and 2011, as well as the eldest brother’s arrest and deportation from Turkey last year for suspected terrorist activity, they were also allegedly involved in a police raid just one week before the Brussels attack. During the raid, at least one suspect was killed while two others escaped, the El Bakraoui brothers.

The London Telegraph in their article, “Brussels shootout: Four arrested as Islamic State flag found near the body of gunman,” reported that (emphasis added):

According to Dernière Heure, the two suspects at large are thought to be Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui, respectively 26 and 30. Known for gangster-related crimes, the name of one has cropped up in anti-terror investigations, according to Le Monde. 

After the standoff, police and special forces expanded their search and homed in on a neighbouring street, rue de l’Eau, after finding two gun cartridges and dark clothing in the area. During a raid on a house, they picked up another Kalashnikov. 

The Belgium police and the Western media have categorically failed to foster understanding and help form a clear picture of the terrorists they are allegedly attempting to apprehend. At least four suspects were arrested after the raid, but then released without charges. The identity of the suspects and the circumstances of their release have not been reported.

Terrorists Under Security’s Noses, in their Clutches, Yet Still Carrying Out Attacks 

Virtually every single terror suspect involved in the Charlie Hebo massacre and Paris attacks last year in France, and the Brussels attack this week, have been long-known to Western security agencies.

Many have even been detained, convicted, and even imprisoned for violent crimes, with at least one Charlie Hebo massacre suspect having had been previously arrested in 2005 specifically for terror-related charges.

Slate Magazine would report in their article, “The Details of Paris Suspect Cherif Kouachi’s 2008 Terrorism Conviction,” that:

To answer the question that is the title, we have to know of what the US consists. Is it an ethnic group, a collection of buildings and resources, a land mass with boundaries, or is it the Constitution. Clearly what differentiates the US from other countries is the US Constitution. The Constitution defines us as a people. Without the Constitution we would be a different country. Therefore, to lose the Constitution is to lose the country.

Does the Constitution still exist? Let us examine the document and come to a conclusion.

The Constitution consists of a description of a republic with three independent branches, legislative, executive, and judicial, each with its own powers, and the Bill of Rights incorporated as constitutional amendments. The Bill of Rights describes the civil liberties of citizens that cannot be violated by the government.

Article I of the Constitution describes legislative powers. Article II describes executive powers, and Article III describes the power of the judiciary. For example, Article I, Section 1 gives all legislative powers to Congress. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to declare war.

The Bill of Rights protects citizens from the government by making law a shield of the people rather than a weapon in the hands of the government.

The First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, the press, and assembly or public protest.

The Second Amendment gives the people the right “to keep and bear arms.”

The Third Amendment has to do with quartering of soldiers on civilians, a large complaint against King George III, but not a practice of present-day armies.

The Fourth Amendment grants “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and prevents the issue of warrants except “upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The Fourth Amendment prevents police and prosecutors from going on “fishing expeditions” in an effort to find some offense with which to charge a targeted individual.

The Fifth Amendment prohibits double jeopardy, self-incrimination, the taking of life, liberty, or property without due process and the prohibition of seizing property without just compensation.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees speedy and public trial, requires that a defendent be informed of the charge against him and to be confronted with the witnesses, to present witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of an attorney.

The Seventh Amendment gives the right of trial by jury to civil suits.

The Eighth Amendment prevents excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments.

The Ninth Amendment says that the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution does not deny or disparage others retained by the people. In other words, people have rights in addition to the those listed in the proscriptions against the government’s use of abusive power.

The Tenth Amendment reserves the rights not delegated to the federal government to the states.

The Tenth Amendment is a dead letter amendment. The Third Amendment protects against an abandoned abusive practice of government. The Seventh Amendment is still relevant as it allows damages in civil suits to be determined by a jury, once a protection against unfairness and today not always the case.

The other seven amendments comprise the major protections of civil liberty. I will examine them in turn, but first let’s look at Section 1 and Section 8 of Article I. These two articles describe the major powers of Congress, and both articles have been breached. The Constitution’s grant of “all legislative powers” to Congress has been overturned by executive orders and signing statements.

The president can use executive orders to legislate, and he can use signing statements to render sections of laws passed by Congress and signed by the president into non-enforced status. Legislative authority has also been lost by delegating to executive branch officials the power to write the regulations that implement the laws that are passed. The right that Section 8 gives to Congress to declare war has been usurped by the executive branch. Thus, major powers given to Congress have been lost to the executive branch.

The First Amendment has been compromised by executive branch claims of “national security” and by extensive classification. Whistleblowers are relentlessly prosecuted despite federal laws protecting them. The right of assembly and public protest are overturned by arrests, tear gas, clubs, rubber bullets, water canons, and jail terms. Free speech is also limited by political correctness and taboo topics. Dissent shows signs of gradually becoming criminalized.

The Fourth Amendment is a dead letter amendment. In its place we have warrantless searches, SWAT team home invasions, strip and cavity searches, warrantless seizures of computers and cell phones, and the loss of all privacy to warrantless universal spying.

The Fifth Amendment is a dead letter amendment. The criminal justice system relies on self-incrimination as plea bargains are self-incrimination produced by psychological torture, and plea bargains are the basis of conviction in 97% of all felony cases. Moreover, physical torture is a feature of the “war on terror” despite its illegality under both US statute and international law and is also experienced by criminals in the US prison system.

The Fifth Amendment’s protection against deprivation of life, liberty, and property without due process of law has been lost to indefinite detention, executive assassination, and property takings without compensation. The Racketer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) passed in 1970. The act permits asset freezes, which are takings. The Comprehensive Forfeiture Act passed in 1984 and permits police to confiscate property on “probable cause,” which often means merely the presence of cash.

The Sixth Amendment is a dead letter amendment. Prosecutors routinely withhold exculpatory evidence, and judges at prosecutors’ requests have limited attorneys’ ability to defend clients.The “war on terror” has introduced secret evidence and secret witnesses, making it impossible for a defendant and his attorney to defend against the evidence.

The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive bail and torture are routinely violated. It is another dead letter amendment.

It is paradoxical that every civil liberty in the Bill of Rights has been lost to a police state except for the Second Amendment, the gun rights of citizens. An armed citizenry is inconsistent with a police state, which the US now is.

Other aspects of our legal protections have been overturned, such as the long standing rule that crime requires intent. William Blackstone wrote: “An unwarrantable act without a vicious will is no crime at all.” But today we have crimes without intent. You can commit a crime and not even know it. See for example, Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.

Attorney-client privilege has been lost. The indictment, prosecution, and imprisonment of defense attorney Lynne Stewart is a good example. The DOJ prevailed on her to defend a blind Muslim regarded by the DOJ as a “terrorist.” She was informed that “special administrative measures” had been applied to her client. She received a letter from the federal prosecutor informing her that she and her client would not be permitted attorney-client privilege, and that she was required to permit the government to listen to her conversations with her client. She was told that she could not carry any communications from her client to the outside world. She regarded all this as illegal nonsense and proceeded to defend her client in accordance with attorney-client privilege. Lynne Stewart was convicted of violating a letter written by a prosecutor as if the prosecutor’s letter were a law passed by Congres and present in the US code.

Based on a prosecutor’s letter, Lynne Stewart was sentenced to prison. No law exists that upholds her imprisonment.

Our civil liberties are often said to be “natural rights” to which we are entitled. However, in historical fact civil liberty is a human achievement that required centuries of struggle. The long struggle for accountable law that culminated in the Glorious Revolution in England in the late 17th century can be traced back to Alfred the Great’s codification of English common law in the 9th century and to the Magna Carter in the early 13th century. Instead of issuing kingly edicts, Alfred based law on the traditional customs and behavior of the people. The Glorious Revolution established the supremacy of the people over the law and held the king and government accountable to law. The United States and other former British colonies inherited this accomplishment, an accomplishment that makes law a shield of the people and not a weapon in the hands of the state.

Today law as a shield of the people has been lost. The loss was gradual over time and culminated in the George W. Bush and Obama regime assaults on habeas corpus and due process. Lawrence Stratton and I explain how the law was lost in our book,The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Beginning with Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century, liberals saw the protective shield of law as a constraint on the government’s ability to do good. Bentham redefined liberty as the freedom of government from restraint, not the freedom of people from government. Bentham’s influence grew over time until in our own day, to use the worlds of Sir Thomas More in A man for All Seasons, the law was cut down so as to better chase after devils.

We cut down the law so that we could better chase after the Mafia.

We cut down the law so that we could better chase after drug users.

We cut down the law so that we could better chase after child abusers.

We cut down the law so that we could better chase after “terrorists.”

We cut down the law so that we could better chase after whistleblowers.

We cut down the law so that we could better cover up the government’s crimes.

Today the law is cut down. Any one of us can be arrested on bogus charges and be helpless to do anything about it.

There is very little concern in legal circles about this. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) does attempt to defend civil liberty. However, just as often the ACLU is not defending the civil liberties in the Bill of Rights that protect us from the abuse of government power, but newly invented “civil rights” that are not in the Constitution, such as “abortion rights,” the right to homosexual marriage, and rights to preferential treatment for preferred minorities.

An attack on abortion rights, for example, produces a far greater outcry and resistance than the successful attack on habeas corpus and due process. President Obama was able to declare his power to execute citizens by executive branch decision alone without due process and conviction in court, and it produced barely audible protest.

Historically, a government that can, without due process, throw a citizen into a dungeon or summarily execute him is considered to be a tyranny, not a democracy. By any historical definition, the United States today is a tyranny.

Yemen’s Ansarullah movement leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, says Saudi Arabia is committing genocide against the Yemeni people as it continues with its deadly aggression against the impoverished nation.

The Saudi forces and its mercenaries have come to Yemen to wipe out a generation, Houthi said during a televised address on Friday, adding that they want to raze Yemen to the ground.

He said the Saudi regime has committed numerous crimes against the Yemenis.

The Saudi regime knows no limit in its massacre of women and children, he said, adding, however, that the Saudis are neglectful of the Yemeni popular will.

Houthi said the US and UK are helping Saudi Arabia in the aggression against Yemen.

This Saudi regime has neither respected the concept of neighborliness nor Islam, he added.

The Ansarullah leader said the Al Saud regime and its mercenaries fighting in Yemen are under the sway of the Saudi-Israeli-US axis.

Houhti further slammed the silence of the UN Security Council regarding the Saudi aggression, saying the body is providing security only for arrogant powers, saying the UN charters have not been drawn up for the oppressed and only serve bullying and dictatorial regimes.

It is shameful to remain silent vis-à-vis such crimes, the Ansarullah leader said, adding, however, that some countries have openly taken the side of the Yemeni people and provided any assistance they could to the nation.

A Yemeni boy runs past buildings that were damaged by air strikes carried out by Saudi Arabia on March 23, 2016 in the UNESCO-listed old city of Yemeni capital Sana’a. (AFP Photo)

The resistance shown by the Yemenis shows the legitimacy of the demands of the Yemeni people, Houthi said.

He said the main objective of the Saudi aggression is the destruction of the entire region so that the Zionist regime of Israel will turn into an unrivaled power in the region.

The Saudi crimes have overshadowed the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians, the Ansarullah leader said.

Pointing to retaliatory attacks by the popular forces, Houthi said heavy and deadly blows have been inflicted on the Saudi military equipment.

The Yemenis do not have a great amount of military equipment, but we have been standing against the enemy, the Ansarullah leader said, adding that the Yemenis feel obliged to defend their principles.

The Saudis launched their aggression under the slogan of serving the Yemenis, however, we have seen how they have served the Yemenis with their missiles and destruction by killing women and children, Houthi said.

The Ansarullah leader said the enemies cannot and will not be able to reach their objectives because Yemenis of all walks of life will continue to stand by their national commitments.

“What we are seeing now is the result of our steadfastness,” he said, adding, “The blood of our martyrs has struck heavy blows at the aggressive enemy.”

Yemen has been under military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March last year. At least 8,400 people, among them 2,236 children, have been killed so far and 16,015 others have sustained injuries.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, who served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan administration, shares his view that there is a real likelihood of a nuclear war breaking out. Below are the main points covered in this radio programme.

Firstly there is the Wolfowitz doctrine, which basically makes it clear that the United States should prevent the rise of any state that could present sufficient power to threaten American unilateral action. Russia has risen and has displayed such power. This is the reason for the constant demonisation of Russia’s leader. We have the number one candidate for the democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, who now compares the President of Russia with Hitler. So what has happened is that every American president during my lifetime, especially Nixon and Reagan, worked to create trust between the two major nuclear powers. But beginning with the Clinton regime, the trust that had been achieved was progressively destroyed.

When you destroy trust between nuclear powers you recreate the possibility of nuclear war, either by intent, or miscalculation. So this is a reckless and irresponsible act on the part of Washington. The information war that is going on now is to prepare the American population and NATO allies for military conflict with Russia. We now have high level people in the US government and military who go to Congress and say that Russia is an existential threat. This is rubbish! You have to remember that before the wars started in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, it was the constant demonisation of the leaders of the governments, against the Tailban, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad. When you see these kinds of demonisation it fits a pattern.

A hot war can come from a new cold war. Another factor is the American military industrial complex, with a turnover of a trillion dollars annually. Their entire revenues come from serving the war capability of the US government. They have a huge interest in having a major enemy. They tried to make terrorists that enemy, but that is not serious enough, so this complex has great interest in recreating the Russian threat. From the neo- conservative standpoint, they actually regard any country with an independent foreign policy to be a threat to the United States. So that part of the equation means that they can move the cold war into a hot war, it only takes a small amount of miscalculation. I don’t see how the Russian government can believe one word coming out of Washington.

Some neocons say: what’s the good of nuclear weapons if you can’t use them? They have a theory that the US has sufficient superiority to win a strike against Russia. If the US cannot win against a few thousand Taliban, it will not be able to win a possible conventional war against the Russian Army, Washington will go nuclear rather than lose a conflict with Russia (or China). A nuclear war cannot be won.

The neoconservatives now have no competition. There is nobody out there apart from Washington wishing to take over the world. As long as the American vassal states that comprise NATO accept American hegemony, they magnify the chance of a new massive war. Republican candidates are competing with each other to see who can treat Russia the most aggressively.

Listen to interview: http://sputniknews.com/radio_brave_new_world/20160317/1036455898/the-real-likelihood-of-a-nuclear-war.html#ixzz43r6PRvu8

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

ISIS, Oil and Turkey: Ankara’s Illegal Trade with the Terrorists

By RT, March 24 2016

An RT Documentary crew filming in northern Syria has seen Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL) documents abandoned by retreating terrorists and found by the Kurds that, along with captured IS recruits, provide a stunning insight into the alleged Turkey-IS oil trade links.

The Chinese Government’s Phony Anti-Poverty Plan

By John Ward, March 25 2016

This video, provided by B’tselem, an Israeli group that monitors the occupation, clearly shows a soldier executing a Palestinian in Hebron. He is killed with a shot to the head after he is already disabled and lying on the ground, posing no threat to anyone.

The Israeli army has called this a “severe incident” and is investigating. Let’s see how seriously they deal with the soldier. One can be sure he would face no action had this not been caught on film.

What I find most significant about the clip is the routine way it is viewed by all those in the vicinity. Two Israeli officers standing close by don’t bat an eyelid as the Palestinian man is murdered next to them. The soldier who executes the Palestinian even confers with another officer seconds before the deed, apparently getting permission.

All of them seem to view this as standard operating procedure. And it is: in Israeli military parlance, it is called “confirming the kill”.

 Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism 

The only reason the UK is having a referendum on whether the UK should stay in (Remain) or leave (Brexit) the EU, is because of the difference of opinion within the Conservative Party.

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) was formed by disgruntled Tory MPs.  It has no real policy except to get out of the EU.  That doesn’t stop it from shouting about how awfu lEuropeis and how much better off an independent UK would be.

But many Tory MPs also dislike Europe, and faced with the prospect of half his government marching off to join UKIP and destroying his small majority in Parliament, Prime Minister David Cameron promised them a referendum.  Given all the other problems Britainis facing at the moment, the very divisive argument and unnecessary expense is something it can do without.

One begins to wonder if, by the time the UK has its referendum in June there will be any viable Conservative Party left in power.  Ministers are supporting opposing sides, Ministry officials are told to keep their mouths shut, business leaders’ opinions and polls cause outrage – all of it a huge storm in the Tory teacup.  They are imploding; day by day another split, another fight amongst themselves.

Nor, if the UK votes to leave, will there be much left of the United Kingdom.  It will become very disunited indeed. Scotlandhas made it clear that if England votes to leave while Scotland votes to remain, another Scottish independence referendum won’t be long in coming.

And now the First Minister for Wales is saying very much the same.  If Wales, which gets a lot of beneficial support from the EU for Welsh business, trade and farming, votes to stay while the English vote to leave, it will, he says, create a ‘constitutional crisis’.

We haven’t yet heard definitively from Northern Ireland but, like Wales, it’s more likely to benefit from the EU than not.  And following a report from the Oxford Economics consultancy for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment and a CBI ‘breakfast event’ in Belfast, maybe they will be persuaded to stay within the EU.  They could of course return to Eire and create a reunited Ireland.

What is clear is that if parts of the UK are at odds with England(where the majority population resides) over this, it will become even more obvious to all the British that what really matters for both sides of this wholly political argument is Englandand Westminster, an aspect that many English people are also unhappy with.  Divisive is a mild word for what is happening.

Leaving the EU, dire and in need of reform though it is, would severely cut down and destroy what most people would think of as democracy.  Looking at some of the people who want to leave, do the British seriously think that Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove represent genuine democracy?

There’s Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, presiding over the wholesale closure of museums and galleries in the north of England, while still ensuring culture in London deserves subsidies.  Let’s face it, it’s only the rich who ‘understand’ culture, just as only they ‘know how the countryside works’ when defending their love of killing wildlife.

And speaking of killing wildlife, let’s not omit Own Paterson, ex-Environment Secretary who presided over the hated badger culls.  He’s also hugely supportive of genetically modified crops even if he doesn’t understand them, has a major climate change sceptic as brother-in-law, and according to a recently published book, once suggested replacing low-paid migrant fruit pickers with our own elderly pensioners.

With such ultra-right-wing people in charge, what hope for the averageUKcitizen?

But then staying in the EU, with Prime Minister Cameron, Chancellor Osborne and their pals in charge, doesn’t look any more enticing, with Cameron’s desire to get rid of the ‘green crap’, the Human Rights Act and the Hunting Act making the future look grim.

Osborne’s ‘austerity’ programme benefits no one but big business and the very well-off.  His determination to keep chasing the chimera of a ‘budget surplus by 2020’ when he is responsible for the UK being more indebted than ever promises disaster for theUK.  The Tories and their ideological belief in handing all state responsibilities over to the private sector bodes ill.

And all the while these rich men and/or their friends own large tracts of land which suck up unearned  subsidies from the EU, while small farmers for whom the subsidies were intended crash out of existence.  Farmers are being encouraged to vote ‘Leave’ in the hope that British money that was paid to Europe will be given to the farmers.  But will it?  Has a backroom deal been done by the Brexit side?

The arguments are very polarised.  The Remain side focuses on how business and trade would suffer if the UKwas outside Europe.  Brexit calls that ‘Project Fear’.  No, no, cries Remain, we are ‘Project Fact’.  Brexit promises ‘freedom from Europe’s red tape’.  We can negotiate our own trade deals, claims UKIP.

Maybe, if they have the time.  “And who,” asked Tony Blair’s pal Lord Mandelson, “would want to negotiate with us?”  He has a point.  But the fact is both sides hate Europe’s red tape and want to be free of it because it gets in the way of making money.

Have UK citizens understood yet that all the politicians screaming ‘in’ or ‘out’, ‘Project fear’, and ‘Project fact’ happen to be well supplied with money that will protect them either way?  However much they try to frighten the common man, in an uncertain world whatever either side claims on the economic front can only be speculation (an accurate term to use for such money grubbers).

And what a ‘frightener’ this is meant to be: ‘Out vote could weaken Nato’, says US general.  Considering that Nato has long since passed its sell-by date and has had to manufacture a whole new cold war in places like the Ukraine in order to justify its existence, I am almost tempted to vote ‘leave’.  Except that I love the soil beneath my feet far too much to risk it.

Ah yes, the soil.

That is at the heart of why the UK should remain with the rest of Europe, broken and battered as it is by years of poor and often corrupt leadership.  For it is the people of Europe who defend what we love, not the politicians, not the financiers or global corporations and their lobbyists.

So much of the UK’s environmental protections come from Europe.  When Monsanto wants to cover our fields with genetically engineered crops it is the European citizens who rise up and lobby the MEPs with the result that much of Europe is GM-free.

When our precious bees, pollinating the crops on which we depend, were being seriously harmed because of the use of neonicotinoids, it was the people (over 2 million of them) who persuaded the European Parliament to enforce a ban.  A review of this policy is now being carried out, but latest research has produced yet more evidence of the damage done and it is likely the ban will remain.  The UK of course has already opted out.

EU citizens campaigned to stop the use of Monsanto’s prize weed killer, Roundup.  So widely used is Roundup that its main toxic component glyphosate can be found in our urine, blood and breast milk.  Roundup was taken off the shelves.  The EU Parliament will be voting again on this in April and although the vote will be close, it will probably reauthorize the ban.

Europe doesn’t do fracking.  Nor do the British people, but the Tories do.  In Britain, Wales and Scotland have a ban/moratorium in place.  The majority of the public are now anti-fracking, particularly as the government has withdrawn support for renewable energy and keeps changing the regulations that would restrict fracking.

EU legislation could mean that the UK might be fined for out-of-control air pollution, responsible for increasing deaths.  Our country is being covered in a tide of rubbish, beaches polluted by sewage and plastic bottles.  No one as yet has pointed out that, with budgets slashed by Osborne’s austerity plan, local authorities simply cannot cope.

Gove and Johnson thought the litter problem could be solved by asking us all to ‘Clean for the Queen!  That project seems to have been buried under a tide of ridicule and laughter.  EU environmental laws should prompt the government to take action.  Without those laws, what would the country look like in 5 or 10 years’ time?

Those who want us to leave would say that Europe governing all these issues is taking away our ‘sovereignty’ and we will only regain it by becoming independent of the EU.  Conversely, the Remain lobby has Cameron saying he will ‘protect’ our sovereignty by negotiation and reform from within.

But precisely whose sovereignty are they all talking about?  Not yours.  Not mine.  Not ours.  Whichever side ends up governing the UK (or England) after the referendum, it will be the sovereignty of the ruling classes, the self-important, moneyed politicians whose aim will always be to protect their own investments.

A crucial problem in news media coverage of the Syrian civil war has been how to characterize the relationship between the so-called “moderate” opposition forces armed by the CIA, on one hand, and the Al Qaeda franchise Al Nusra Front (and its close ally Ahrar al Sham), on the other. But it is a politically sensitive issue for US policy, which seeks to overthrow Syria’s government without seeming to make common cause with the movement responsible for 9/11, and the system of news production has worked effectively to prevent the news media from reporting it fully and accurately.

The Obama administration has long portrayed the opposition groups it has been arming with anti-tank weapons as independent of Nusra Front.  In reality, the administration has been relying on the close cooperation of these “moderate” groups with Nusra Front  to put pressure on the Syrian government. The United States and its allies–especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey–want the civil war to end with the dissolution of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is backed by US rivals like Russia and Iran.

Reflecting the fact that Nusra Front was created by Al Qaeda and has confirmed its loyalty to it, the administration designated Nusra as a terrorist organization in 2013.  But the US has carried out very few airstrikes against it since then, in contrast to the other offspring of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State or ISIS (Daesh), which has been the subject of intense air attacks from the US and its European allies.  The US has remained silent about Nusra Front’s leading role in the military effort against Assad, concealing the fact that Nusra’s success in northwest Syria has been a key element in Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomatic strategy for Syria.

When Russian intervention in support of the Syrian government began last September, targeting not only ISIS but also the Nusra Front and US-supported groups allied with them against the Assad regime, the Obama administration immediately argued that Russian airstrikes were targeting “moderate” groups rather than ISIS, and insisted that those strikes had to stop.

New Arab (5/8/15). Note that the Syrians “coming together to fight Assad”
are doing so under the leadership of an Al Qaeda affiliate.

The willingness of the news media to go beyond the official line and report the truth on the ground in Syria was thus put to the test.  It had been well-documented that those “moderate” groups had been thoroughly integrated into the military campaigns directed by Nusra Front and Ahrar al Sham in the main battlefront of the war in northwestern Syria’s Idlib and Aleppo provinces. For example, a dispatch from Aleppo last May in Al Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab), a daily newspaper financed by the Qatari royal family, revealed that every one of at least ten “moderate” factions in the province supported by the CIA had joined the Nusra-run province command Fateh Halab (Conquest of Aleppo).  Formally the command was run by Ahrar al Sham, and Nusra Front was excluded from it.

But as Al Araby’s reporter explained, that exclusion “means that the operation has a better chance of receiving regional and international support.” That was an indirect way of saying that Nusra’s supposed exclusion was a device aimed at facilitating the Obama administration’s approval of sending more TOW missiles to the “moderates” in the province, because the White House could not support groups working directly with a terrorist organization. A further implication was that Nusra Front was allowing “moderate” groups to obtain those weapons from the United States and its  Saudi and Turkish allies, because those groups were viewed as too weak to operate independently of the Salafist-jihadist forces—and because some of those arms would be shared with Nusra Front and Ahrar.

After Nusra Front was formally identified as a terrorist organization for the purposes of a Syrian ceasefire and negotiations, it virtually went underground in areas close to the Turkish border.  A journalist who lives in northern Aleppo province told Al Monitor that Nusra Front had stopped flying its own flag and was concealing its troops under those of Ahrar al Sham, which had been accepted by the United States as a participant in the talks.  That maneuver was aimed at supporting the argument that “moderate” groups and not Al Qaeda were being targeted by Russian airstrikes.

But a review of the coverage of the targeting of Russian airstrikes and the role of U.S.-supported armed groups in the war during the first few weeks in the three most influential US newspapers with the most resources for reporting accurately on the issue—the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal–reveals a pattern of stories that tilted strongly in the direction desired by the Obama administration, either ignoring the subordination of the “moderate” groups to Nusra Front entirely or giving it only the slightest mention.

Washington Post (10/1/15)

In an October 1 article,Washington Post Beirut correspondent Liz Sly wrote that the Russian airstrikes were being “conducted against one of the few areas in the country where moderate rebels still have a foothold and from which the Islamic State was ejected more than a year and a half ago.” To her credit, Sly did report, “Some of the towns struck are strongholds of recently formed coalition Jaish al Fateh,” which she said included Nusra Front and “an assortment of Islamist and moderate factions.” What was missing, however, was the fact that Jaish al Fateh was not merely a “coalition” but a military command structure, meaning that a much tighter relationship existed between the US-supported “moderates” and the Al Qaeda franchise.

Sly referred specifically to one strike that hit a training camp in the outskirts of a town in Idlib province belonging to Suquor al-Jabal, which had been armed by the CIA. But readers could not evaluate that statement without the crucial fact,reported in the regional press, that Suquor al-Jabal was one of the many CIA-supported organizations that had joined the Fateh Halab (“Conquest of Aleppo”), the military command center in Aleppo ostensibly run by Ahrar al Sham, Nusra Front’s closest ally, but in fact under firm Nusra control. The report thus conveyed the false impression that the CIA-supported rebel group was still independent of Nusra Front.

New York Times (10/13/15)

An article by New York Times Beirut correspondent Anne Barnard (co-authored by the Times stringer in Syria Karam Shoumali—10/13/15) appeared to veer off in the direction of treating the US-supported opposition groups as part of a new US/Russian proxy war, thus drawing attention away from the issue of whether the Obama administration support for “moderate” groups was actually contributing to the political-military power of Al Qaeda in Syria. Under the headline “US Weaponry Is Turning Syria Into Proxy War With Russia,” it reported that armed opposition groups had just received large shipments of TOW anti-tank missiles that had to be approved by the United States. Quoting the confident statements of rebel commanders about the effectiveness of the missiles and the high morale of rebel troops, the story suggested that arming the “moderates” was a way for the United States to make them the primary force on one side of a war pitting the United States against Russia in Syria.

Near the end of the story, however, Barnard effectively undermined that “proxy war” theme by citing the admission by commanders of US-supported brigades of their “uncomfortable marriage of necessity” with the Al Qaeda franchise, “because they cannot operate without the consent of the larger and stronger Nusra Front.” Referring to the capture of Idlib the previous spring by the opposition coalition, Barnard recalled that the TOW missiles had “played a major role in the insurgent advances that eventually endangered Mr. Assad’s rule.” But, she added:

While that would seem like a welcome development for United States policy makers, in practice it presented another quandary, given that the Nusra Front was among the groups benefiting from the enhanced firepower.

Unfortunately, Barnard’s point that US-supported groups were deeply embedded in an Al Qaeda-controlled military structure was buried at the end of a long piece, and thus easily missed. The headline and lead ensured that, for the vast majority of readers, that point would be lost in the larger thrust of the article.

Wall Street Journal (10/5/15)

The Wall Street Journal’s Adam Entous approached the problem from a different angle but with the same result. He wrote a story on October 5 reflecting what he said was anger on the part of US officials that the Russians were deliberately targeting opposition groups that the CIA had supported. Entous reported that US officials believed the Syrian government wanted those groups targeted because of their possession of TOW missiles, which had been the key factor in the opposition’s capture of Idlib earlier in the year. But nowhere in the article was the role of CIA-supported groups within military command structures dominated by Nusra Front even acknowledged.

Still another angle on the problem was adopted in an October 12 article byJournal Beirut correspondent Raja Abdulrahim, who described the Russian air offensive as having spurred US-backed rebels and the Nusra Front to form a “more united front against the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies.” Adbulrahim thus acknowledged the close military collaboration with Nusra Front, but blamed it all on the Russian offensive. And the story ignored the fact that those same opposition groups had already joined military command arrangements in Idlib and Aleppo earlier in 2015, in anticipation of victories across northeast Syria.

****

The image in the media of the US-supported armed opposition as operating independently from Nusra Front, and as victims of Russian attacks, persisted into early 2016. But in February, the first cracks in that image appeared in theWashington Post and New York Times.

Reporting on the negotiations between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on a partial ceasefire that began on February 12, Washington Post associate editor and senior national security correspondent Karen DeYoung wrote on February 19 that an unresolved problem was how to decide which organizations were to be considered “terrorist groups” in the ceasefire agreement. In that context, DeYoung wrote, “Jabhat al-Nusra, whose forces are intermingled with moderate rebel groups in the northwest near the Turkish border, is particularly problematic.”

It was the first time any major news outlet had reported that US-supported armed opposition and Nusra Front front troops were “intermingled” on the ground. And in the very next sentence DeYoung dropped what should have been a political bombshell: She reported that Kerry had proposed in the Munich negotiations to “leave Jabhat al Nusra off limits to bombing, as part of a ceasefire, at least temporarily, until the groups can be sorted out.” At the same time, Kerry was publicly demanding in a speech at the Munich conference that Russia halt its attacks on “legitimate opposition groups” as a condition for a ceasefire.  Kerry’s negotiating position reflected the fact that CIA groups were certain to be hit in strikes on areas controlled by Nusra Front, as well as the reality that Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and Ahrar al Sham were central to the success of the US-backed military effort against Assad.

New York Times (2/22/16). In an accompanying story, the Times
described Nusra as “an insurgent group linked to Al Qaeda.”

In the end, however, Lavrov rejected the proposal to protect Nusra Front targets from Russian airstrikes, and Kerry dropped that demand, allowing the joint US/Russian announcement of the partial ceasefire on February 22. Up to that point, maps of the Syrian war in the Post andTimes had identified zones of control only for “rebels” without showing where Nusra Front forces were in control. But on the same day as the announcement, the New York Times published an “updated” map, accompanied by text stating that Nusra Front “is embedded in the area of Aleppo and northwest toward the Turkish border.”

At the State Department briefing the next day, reporters grilled spokesman Mark Toner on whether US-supported rebel forces were “commingled” with Nusra Front forces in Aleppo and northward. After a very long exchange on the subject, Toner said, “Yes, I believe there is some commingling of these groups.” And he went on to say, speaking on behalf of the International Syria Support Group, which comprises all the countries involved in the Syrian peace negotiations, including the US and Russia:

We, the ISSG, have been very clear in saying that Al Nusra and Daesh [ISIS] are not part of any kind of cease-fire or any kind of negotiated cessation of hostilities. So if you hang out with the wrong folks, then you make that decision…. You choose who hang out with, and that sends a signal.

Although I pointed out  the significance of the statement (Truthout, 2/24/16), no major news outlet saw fit to report that remarkable acknowledgement by the State Department spokesperson. Nevertheless, the State Department had clearly alerted the Washington Post and the New York Times to the fact that the relationships between the CIA-supported groups and Nusra Front were much closer than it had ever admitted in the past.

Kerry evidently calculated that the pretense that the “moderate” armed groups were independent of Al Nusra front would open him to a political attack from Republicans and the media if they were hit by Russian airstrikes.  So it was no longer useful politically to try to obscure that reality from the media.  In fact, the State Department now seemed interested in inducing as many of those armed groups as possible to separate themselves more clearly from the Nusra Front.

The twists and turns in the three major newspapers’ coverage of the issue of relations between US-supported opposition groups and Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria thus show how major news sources slighted or steered clear of the fact that US client armed groups were closely intertwined with a branch of Al Qaeda—until they were prompted by signals from US officials to revise their line and provide a more honest portrayal of Syria’s armed opposition.

Gareth Porter, an independent investigative journalist and historian on US national security policy, is the winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.  His latest book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published in 2014.

While America and Europe changes their social media profile pictures to show solidarity with victims of one European country, then another, victims of terrorism in non-European and American countries are receiving virtual no attention – let alone sympathy – when they receive even higher death tolls from ISIS.

After the horrific attack on Brussels, it’s worth noting how the major attacks that have recently been carried out by ISIS, or ISIS-sympathizing groups, have been reported in the media – and subsequently how they have been received on social media:

March 22, 2016, Brussels, 34 killed – HEADLINE NEWS

March 20, 2015, Yemen, 137 killed – no headline

April 18, 2015, Afghanistan, 33 killed – no headline

June 26, 2015, Tunisia, 38 killed – no headline

June 29, 2015, Yemen, 35 killed – no headline

October 10, 2015, Ankara, Turkey, 97 killed – no headline

October 31, 2015, Russian plan, 224 killed – HEADLINE NEWS

November 21, 2015, Beirut, 43 killed – no headline

November 13, 2015, Paris, 130 killed – HEADLINE NEWS

December 2, 2015, San Bernardino, 14 killed – HEADLINE NEWS

January 8, 2016 Libya, 50 killed – no headline

March 6, 2016 (only two weeks ago), Baghdad, 47 killed – no headline

March 13, 2016 (last week), Grand-Bassam, 22 killed – no headline

March 15, 2016 (last week), Ankara, Turkey, 35 killed – no headline

ISIS is killing more Muslims and Africans than any other group. Yet for some reason Western media is only highlighting when Europeans and Americans get killed.

This feeds into a “Muslims are against us” mentality, when in fact what we are facing is an imperialist terrorist cult, that targets Muslims more than any other group of people.

Just last week, Grand-Bassam’s beaches were filled people enjoying the Sunday afternoon.

With temperatures on the rise, many across Ivory Coast came to the city’s oceanfront resorts to enjoy the ocean.

For terrorists, this was a perfect opportunity.

Six figures all in black appeared on the beach, wearing balaclavas and carrying guns. Before anyone could process what was going on, the terrorists opened fire.

They had AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades, which they used on anyone within sight.

They marched across the sand, shredding men, women and children – both Ivorians and foreigners alike.

When security forces arrived, the terrorist gunmen killed two of them as well.

“They killed a child, despite him kneeling down and begging,” one witness told the BBC. “They shot a woman in the chest. I swear, I heard them shouting ‘Allahu Akbar.’ They’ve killed innocent people.”

But aside from sources like the BBC and NPR, this story was simply not covered in the mainstream Western media.

Security video below shows deadly Ivory Coast attack…

The death told reached 22 dead, including the six gunmen, two soldiers and 14 civilians.

The Washington Post reports that “among the dead civilians were four Westerners, including a French and a German national, according to the BBC. The U.S. Embassy in Abidjan said it had no evidence that U.S. citizens were targeted or harmed,” according to the Associated Press.

The attack was claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), according to the SITE Intelligence Group, but they are basing that only on what they’ve seen on the internet. The reality is that very little has gone into investigating this attack.

Grand-Bassam’s president Alassane Ouattara said “these cowardly terrorist attacks will not be tolerated in the Ivory Coast. We have taken important measures. These attacks were brought under control in three or four hours thanks to our security and defense forces.”

The Post reports that “the bloodshed followed several similar attacks in neighboring countries in recent months,” none of which were highlighted by the Western media.

In November, a siege on a hotel in the Malian capital of Bamako killed 27 hostages, including one American. Another al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Mourabitoun, claimed responsibility.

In January, a hotel attack in Burkina Faso killed at least 23 people, including an American. Two of the four assailants were women, and the attack was claimed by AQIM.

The Associated Press reports that these “attacks led some security analysts to warn that Ivory Coast would be next.”

The trio of attacks in West Africa has triggered fears that radical Islamist terror groups are extending their reach to previously untouched corners of the continent. All three incidents resembled an attack on a Tunisian beach in North Africa in June that killed 38 people and was claimed by the Islamic State.

“It was carnage,” one witness said. “They shouted ‘Allahu Akbar.’ They were getting people to shout those words and they killed anyone who didn’t. There were at least four of them. Three walked side-by-side along the beach and there was a fourth man who finished off any survivors.

“A lot of people ran out into the sea to escape. So apart from the people who died from gunshots there may be people who have drowned and have been swept out to sea,” he continued. “They were sub-Saharan Africans. Even though they wore balaclavas everyone saw they had brown hands.”

“Truly, truly it was terrifying,” one woman told Reuters. “It was definitely terrorists. We never thought this could happen here under these circumstances. It’s not easy. It’s not easy.”

Another man told of his friend being killed right in front of him.

“He came up to my friend as he was speaking on the phone and shot him in the head,” he told Reuters. “When he shot him in the head, he shouted Allahu Akbar, and at that moment three others arrived and started shooting.”

With all of that said, why do you think these attacks not receiving much attention in the Western media?

“Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.” – Johan Cruyff

With a rotten world football organisation (for some, it is soccer) still breathing, it falls upon spectators and participants in the game to reflect on the players that count. They, rather than FIFA, do the heavy lifting – or in this case, kicking – that matters.

Of those who played, only a few can ever be said to have physically, even cerebrally, changed the way the game of football was played.  The late Johan Cruyff, who became a casualty of lung cancer at the age of 68, was one such person. “You play football with your head,” claimed the Dutch great, “and your legs are there to help you.”[1]

He articulated with a balletic approach to ball and strategy.  Off the pitch, he demonstrated an eloquence lacking in the more simian, trudging variants of the game. Former English striker Gary Lineker would claim that football had “lost a man who did more to make the beautiful game beautiful than anyone in history.”

When footballing administrators were attempting to curb back bad boy images and trim happy-go-lucky exuberance, Cruyff stood out.  He became the first Dutch player to earn a red card in play – during his second international match in 1966 against Czechoslovakia.  The Oranje captain, as he subsequently became, made amends by transforming his side into a footballing wonder of spell binding dribblers which led to the 1974 World Cup final in West Germany.  Unfortunately for him, and his team, the West German outfit, clinical and resilient, prevailed.

At Ajax, he faced threats from the Dutch club’s boardroom to limit his playing time.[2]  There was much gossip that his spare frame would not be up to the task.  He was also happy to delve into such wicked pleasures as smoking in full public view, an 80 a day one which he indulged throughout his playing career.  It took head coach Rinus Michels to see the potential of the gifted athlete in the 1960s to make him a regular, though his arrogance did have the habit of putting noses out of joint.

Wither those noses and bruised egos – his talent won him three consecutive European Cups with Ajax from 1971, and near glory at the World Cup.  It also won him a slew of domestic trophies and titles.  Such performances earned Cruyff the world player of the year award on three occasions.

His foremost claim to fame was a creation that the football world refuses to forget, or abandon: Total Football.  Many Dutch players preferred to dismiss the term as a media appellation, one only descriptive of the natural force of simple, stunning yet logical play.  What characterised it was an interchangeable function of the players, involving the entire team in full assault – the team as an overcoming, and ultimately all-conquering rash.  The roots of such experimentation could be found back at Ajax, where coaches tended to make juniors play out of their usual positions.[3]

A period of global defensive football drudgery was dramatically overturned by the Dutch team of the 1970s.  Hard-nosed defenders more familiar with tripping their opponents in the name of conservative play were caught off guard.  Adding to this such manifestations as Cruyff’s own mercurial genius as “the turn”, a move he pioneered against Jan Olsson of Sweden in the 23^rd minute of a 1974 World Cup group match, and a singular form was popularised.[4]  Between 1970 and 1974, the Netherlands only lost one of its 29 matches – the final against West Germany.

His evolution from player to coach was a logical one. The brilliant journeyman, having played in Europe and the United States, proceeded to turn his talents to making Ajax the repository of Total Football.  It was a nursery that produced a host of footballing geniuses, transforming not only Dutch football, but the Spanish game, where FC Barcelona played host to Cruyff’s talents.  It proved to be a modern variant of seventeenth century Dutch mercantilism, transformative and aggressive – on the football pitch.

Bayern Munich’s own coach, Pep Guardiola, got a good measure of the Cruyff magic when playing for Barca. His former manager was pioneer, designer, and architect.  He “painted the chapel and Barcelona coaches since have merely restored or improved it.”

One of Cruyff’s remarks on himself went to the issue of immortality.  For one who did not believe in God, he still entertained the notion that he might be “probably immortal”.  His body told him otherwise, but in one vital sense, he was right.  The “Total Football” pioneer is dead, but the global murmurings of his system remain, studding forms of play and spawning new variants.

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

Notes:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/mar/24/johan-cruyff-dies-aged-68-holland-football-legend

2. http://www.dw.com/en/johan-cruyff-the-football-philosopher/g-19141848

3. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/mar/24/johan-cruyff-revolutionary-changed-football-richard-williams

4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/03/24/johan-cruyff-and-his-sacred-principles-leave-eternal-marks-on-fo/

Belgium has recently become the main supplier of jihadi fighters to Syria and Iraq and and an important logistical hub of militants operating in Europe. Only according to the information provided by the Belgian authorities, some 380 Belgian citizens arrived in Syria to join ISIS. This makes Belgium the most jihadi-infiltrated country in the EU with 34 militants per 1 million citizens. For instance, these numbers in Germany and France are 22,3 and 18,1 ISIS members per 1 million citizens.

Molenbeek municipality in Brussels, a major part of people there follow Islam, plays a key role in the jihadi movement in Europe. The jobless rate there is about 37% and, according to Belgium Itinera Institute any equipment and weapons needed for a terror attack could be found there if you have a half hour and 500-1000 EUR. Furthermore, for different radicals, this municipality is a good place to go off the grid. These facts look especially strange considering that Brussels is a heart of the EU bureaucracy and the main EU institutions are located in the city. If this isn’t explained by a high level of incompetence and unwillingness to work of the Belgian and EU security services, there are only conspiracy theories in reserve.

According to Western experts, Belgium has been a rear base of militants for a long time. Its advantageous geographical location, a wide black market of arms and a significant Muslim society allowed radicals to recruit new militants, plan operations and spread propaganda there.

The radical group “Shariah4Belgium”, which was created in 2010, played an important role in involvement of Beligian jihadists into the war in Syria and Iraq. Militants recruited by “Shariah4Belgium” set a Belgian fraction in the Mujahideen Shura Council led by Amr al Absi who was one of the persons involved in the creation of ISIS. The most part of militants, arrived from Belgia, joined ISIS in 2014. According to researches, 80% of Belgian citizens which joined ISIS are born in Belgium and represent a diverse range of social strata.

The Mar.22 terror attack in Brussels was one of ISIS’ attempts to start a jihadi war in Europe in order to draw away the EU’s attention from the main battlefields in Libya, Iraq and Syria. Terrorists are aimed to set the climate of fear and hate, fuel clashes on national and religious field destroying the shaky European unity. The incompetence of EU security services and the EU leadership’s criminal practice of ignorance of the problems play into the terrorists’ hands.

This week’s terrorist attacks in Belgium, which have left 31 dead and 300 wounded, are the latest in a series of similar high-profile attacks in the 15 years since the beginning of the “war on terror.”

In each of these incidents, the script follows similar lines: the attackers were known to intelligence agencies and were either active or prospective fighters in Western-backed destabilization and regime-change operations in the Middle East and throughout Eurasia. After each attack, the failure to act on information already in the possession of the intelligence agencies is explained away by the supposed “failure to connect the dots.” Finally, despite monumental breakdowns in basic security protocols, no officials are fired or otherwise disciplined.

In previous incidents, such as the September 11 hijackings, the Boston Marathon bombings, the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the November 2015 Paris attacks, the extent of state intelligence foreknowledge has come out only in the subsequent months and years, allowing these facts to be carefully hidden away from the media and relegated to the realm of “conspiracy theories.”

But what is unprecedented about Tuesday’s events in Brussels is the rapidity with which the extent of state foreknowledge of the attacks has been revealed.

On Wednesday, Israeli daily Ha’aretz revealed that Belgian intelligence had precise information on when the attacks would occur and what their targets would be.

The next day, Turkish President Recep Erdogan said that one of the attackers involved in the airport bombing, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, had been twice deported from Turkey to the Netherlands after trying to enter Syria, and that Belgian authorities had been told of his affiliation with Islamist militias. Ibrahim’s brother, Khalid, who participated in the attack on the Maelbeek metro station, was known to have been involved in November’s Paris attacks and had an international arrest warrant issued against him.

These revelations have triggered a crisis in the Belgian government, with Interior Minister Jan Jambon and Justice Minister Koen Geens offering their resignations, which were rejected by Prime Minister Charles Michel.

What can explain why these attacks are not prevented?

The basic reality is that all of these attackers are drawn from a broad pool of active fighters in the wars in Iraq, Syria and other countries, and who have been financed with the support of NATO and intelligence agencies in both Europe and the United States.

The New York Times, in an article posted yesterday, acknowledged that the “Franco-Belgian network is part of the wider trend of European fighters in Syria and Iraq, estimated by security services to number 4,000 to 6,000.” The newspaper added that it is “not clear how many have returned to Europe; while some officials estimate 10 percent, others have disputed that as exaggerated.”

Whatever the precise number, it is clear that the individuals who carried out the March 22 bombings and the November 13 and Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris are part of a broader group of people who have been allowed to freely travel to and from the Middle East. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the ease with which these forces permeate national borders and conduct operations is that there are protocols in place to ease their passage and lower any red flags. They operate under a veil of official protection.

Attacks such as those in Brussels are not intelligence “lapses,” but rather the inevitable product of the deep integration and institutional connections between terrorist networks and the intelligence agencies of Europe and the United States.

To stop their movements across borders, to subject them to standard security protocols, would have negative consequences for the wars these forces are waging across the Middle East. This would greatly endanger the entire strategy pursued by the Obama administration and its European allies—the use of Islamist proxy forces, often linked to Al Qaeda or its offshoot ISIS, in place of “boots on the ground.”

The attacks such as those in Brussels take place either as “blowback” operations by Al Qaeda or Islamic State forces, embittered by the failure of the US and European governments to carry out their promised overthrow of the Assad regime, or they are facilitated by sections of the state for whom terrorist acts in Western countries serve the purpose of shifting foreign and domestic policy—or some combination of the two.

It is notable that the attacks in Brussels come less than a week after theAtlantic published an extensive interview with US President Barack Obama in which he defended his decision not to commit the resources in toppling the Assad government that many had demanded. Leading figures in the US media, including the New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen, have already seized on the events in Brussels to call for a more aggressive US intervention in Syria.

Whatever the specific circumstances and motivations, the Brussels attack—like the Paris attacks last year and others before them—flows from the military operations of the imperialist powers in Libya and Syria and their drive to destabilize and dominate the Middle East.

These wars, steeped in recklessness and criminality, which have led to countless thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions, are now having deadly consequences for the population of Europe. Horrific acts such as those that have taken place in Belgium can be stopped only if the wars are stopped.

The Little-Known Secret to Destroying ISIS Propaganda

The G-77 and China affirmed their solidarity with Venezuela after President Barack Obama renewed an executive order classifying Venezuela as a threat. The Group of 77 and China reiterated this week:

“its rejection to the latest decision of the Government of the United States of America to renew its unilateral sanctions against the Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”.

A March 3 executive order signed by President Obama renewed sanctions against Venezuela, referring to the South American state as “a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela”.

The G-77 is the largest intergovernmental organization of developing countries in the United Nations, which “provides the means for the countries of the South to articulate and promote their collective economic interests and enhance their joint negotiating capacity on all major international economic issues within the United Nations system, and promote South-South cooperation for development,” according to their website.

The group represents the global south, and features many Latin American countries such as Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia. Other regions are represented by members, including the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

The statement goes on to say that the “G-77 and China underlines the positive contribution of Venezuela to the strengthening of South-South cooperation, solidarity and friendship among all peoples and nations, with a view to promoting peace and development”, conveying solidarity.

It also demands the U.S. government “evaluate and implement alternatives for a dialogue” with Venezuela, “under the principle of respect to sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples. Therefore, it urges to repeal the aforementioned Executive Order.”

At this month’s National People’s Congress (NPC), Chinese Premier Le Keqiang boasted that the central government would increase its poverty alleviation budget by 43.4 percent this year and lift at least 10 million people out of poverty by year’s end and another 55 million by 2020.

While the percentage was widely reported in the Chinese media, the actual monetary increase will be only 20.1 billion yuan ($US3 billion) out of total budget of 2.7 trillion yuan. Moreover, even if the programs are successful, it will raise the income of those affected above the austere official poverty line of 2,300 yuan per year or about one US dollar per day.

Poverty alleviation is formally part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) grand vision of “building a moderately prosperous society” by 2020. In reality, it reflects fears within the Beijing regime that the accelerated pro-market economic restructuring announced at the NPC will lead to rising unemployment, a deepening divide between rich and poor and provoke resistance by workers and the rural poor.

The pittance spent on poverty alleviation is in marked contrast to the money allocated in the national budget for “public security expenses” was 158.4 billion yuan, up 7 percent. The CCP is determined to ensure that its extensive police-state apparatus has the means to suppress social unrest.

An estimated 70 million Chinese live below the official poverty line of 2,300 yuan per year (at 2010 prices). By comparison, the legal minimum wage is 2,310 yuan a month in Guangdong, one of the country richer provinces, and falls to 1,210 yuan a month in smaller towns and more impoverished areas.

Beijing claims to have largely eradicated urban poverty in large part because of a government subsidy paid to urban dwellers to lift incomes to a minimum level of 4,476 yuan per year. A survey of 140,000 households by the China Household Income Project found that only 1.4 percent of the urban population was below the minimum level.

The benchmark poverty level is set at just $US2 a day compared to the official minimum wage levels on which workers struggle to survive. In many cases, workers are paid below the minimum or paid only after lengthy delays or not at all.

Hundreds of millions of people live on very low incomes. According to the World Bank, the number of people in China living on $1.90 per day or less has decreased from 194.1 million in 2008 to 149.6 million in 2010. Those surviving on $3.10 per day or less decreased from 436.6 million in 2008 to 364.4 million in 2010. China’s total population is nearing 1.4 billion.

Social inequality is increasing at a far greater pace. China now has one of the most unequal wealth distributions of any large economy on the planet. The latest World Bank figures rate China at 60th out of 157 countries, ranked from most unequal to least. On this ranking, China is more unequal than the United States (63), Japan (122) and Germany (135).

China has a Gini coefficient of 42.1—a coefficient of 0 signifies complete equality while 100 indicates complete inequality. Other research by Chinese academics published in 2014 puts China’s coefficient as high as 58.8. In the mid-1970s, China ranked as one of the most equal countries in the world with a Gini score below 30.

World Bank figures from 2010 show that 30 percent of income goes to the top 10 percent of the population while 47.1 percent goes to the top 20 percent. The bottom 20 percent received 4.7 percent of national income while the bottom 10 percent only received 1.7 percent.

According to the latest 2016 Hurun Global Rich List, released in February, mainland China now has 470 US dollar billionaires. It also has four of the top ten cities by “billionaire residents” with Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou and Beijing now having more billionaires than New York City. The number of Chinese billionaires has grown by 80 percent since 2013 even as economic growth slowed markedly.

This super-rich layer is integrated with the top levels of the state apparatus. According to the 2015 Hurun Rich List, 211 Chinese billionaires were given political appointments: 114 as delegates to this year’s National People’s Congress, 79 as members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee (CPPCC), nine to the standing committee of the CPPCC and nine became members of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.

China’s four richest people on the Hurun Rich List are Wang Jianlin and family $26 billion, Li Ka-shing $25 billion, Lee Shau Kee $24 billion, Jack Ma Yun and family $21 billion. Their combined wealth outstrips the total amount that the government plans to spend on poverty alleviation for tens of millions of people.

The NPC announced plans to put greater reliance on private charity. NPC Standing Committee vice chairman Li Jianguo declared that charitable programs will be “indispensable” in the future fight against poverty. A new Charity Bill was proposed to provide tax breaks to wealthy donors and to regulate the sector. According to the China Daily, “philanthropy has rapidly gained momentum in the nation over the past decade, growing from 10 billion yuan (about $1.5 billion) in 2006 to 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in 2014.”

These so-called poverty alleviation plans come as preparations are being made for a massive assault on the working class. Up to six million jobs are slated to be destroyed over the next six years as Beijing eliminates huge overcapacities in basic industries, such as coal, steel, cement and plate glass causing severe social dislocation. Far from eliminating poverty, the Chinese regime is creating an immense social gulf between the ultra-rich oligarchy whose interests it represents and the vast majority of the population.

Why did the western liberal media (WLM) engage with such passion in the US-led ‘humanitarian war’ against Syria? Have western journalists shown any recognition of their own moral and, at times, criminal responsibility for the consequences?

In December 2015, almost five years into the war, the BBC ran a lengthy radio program called ‘Al Qaeda in Syria’ in which it asked whether Britain had created ‘an unspoken alliance of convenience’ with jihadi groups including al Qaeda to help ‘destroy the Assad regime’. It spoke of western attempts to ‘rebrand al Qaeda as an organisation with which we can do business’ and acknowledged that the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ had fought alongside al Qaeda groups for years (BBC4 2015).

To informed observers, none of this was new. It was just surprising the BBC was reporting it.

A few weeks later the British state broadcaster reverted to form, claiming the Syrian Army’s offensive against those same al Qaeda groups ‘threatens’ the peace talks in Geneva (BBC 2016). At the same time the UK Guardian, using jihadist-linked sources, once again falsely blamed the Syrian Army of gassing civilians (Shaheen 2016). This came in the midst of reports that the ‘moderate rebels’ (mainly Ahrar as Sham and Jaysh al Islam, alongside Jabhat al Nusra) were again using chemical weapons against parts of Aleppo. The British allegations, once again, deflected attention from the armed groups’ crimes, boosting NATO’s propaganda.

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How does the entrenched bias of these media channels reflect on the claimed purpose of the WLM, which pretends not to be a cheer squad for its government’s latest war? The WLM maintains the idea of a ‘watchdog’ role, an independent voice that somehow assists social accountability. Yet it is precisely this liberal media that has projected the greatest enthusiasm for the recent ‘humanitarian wars’ on Libya and Syria. Critical faculties were switched off.

They did this by constant reliance on partisan sources, such as the UK-based Rami Abdul Rahman (the self-styled Syrian Observatory on Human Rights), the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (USA), the latter two firmly embedded in a ‘revolving door’ relationship with the US State Department, at least under Democrat administrations (Alternet 2014; Wright and Rowley 2012; Anderson 2016: Ch. 7).

Amnesty International relies on data from another partisan body, the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), whose body counts have no real verification. The VDC has noted some dead ISIS fighters as ‘martyrs’, exposing its sympathies (Sterling 2015).

The implications of the WLM’s campaigning zeal are far worse than simply some distorted stories. To consistently misrepresent dirty wars with proxy armies as simply a ‘civil war’, while barracking for ‘humanitarian intervention’, can lead to active collaboration with war crimes.

Let’s look some examples, in context.

For years there has been constant, daily repetition of claims that the Syrian Army was killing ‘civilians’. On the other side, ‘rebels’ backed by ‘activists’ were said to be struggling against a tyrannical and illegitimate ‘regime’. The language was always partisan, as were the sources.

Yet evidence shows very clearly that armed attacks on Syrian soldiers, cities and civilians have been led by al Qaeda groups, from the very beginning, and that western governments have known this. Regardless, the western liberal media acted as megaphones for the false stories.

For example, in May 2011, well before ISIS came to Syria, the genocidal slogan ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the tomb’ was reported (Blanford 2011), chanted in the city of Homs by the Farouq Brigade, the largest ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA) group. At the same time Syrian Salafi leader Adnan Arour, declared ‘we shall mince [the Alawites] in meat grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs’ (MEMRITV 2011). All through this period the WLM was chanting ‘peaceful protestors’.

Farouq was joined in Homs by foreign jihadis from Jabhat al Nusra, their foreign al Qaeda support group, and both engaged in a series of sectarian massacres, often falsely blaming them on the Syrian Army (Anderson 2015). By early 2012 the Christian media was reporting large scale ethnic cleansing in the Homs area as ‘Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist forces seize a golden opportunity to terrorize infidels with impunity’ (Crimi 2012).

During most of this time the WLM stuck with the White House and Human Rights Watch (HRW) story that Syrian security forces had been massacring ‘unarmed protestors’, that the Syrian people ‘had no choice’ but to take up arms, with this ‘protest movement’ having been ‘overwhelmingly peaceful until September 2011’ (HRW 2011, HRW 2012). Based on that argument, NATO countries proceeded to arm the ‘peaceful protestors’.

Important contradictions emerged in the western governments’ war stories, but the WLM ignored them. The UN reported in early 2012 that there had been around 5,000 deaths, more than half of them from the military and security forces, to be specific: “478 police and 2,091 from the military and security forces” (OHCHR 2012: 2; Narwani 2014). So ‘peaceful protestors’ killed as many as ‘the regime’? How was that possible? The WLM stuck with the official story.

Even after Syrian nun Mother Agnes Mariam had denounced ‘false flag’ crimes and reported on the recycling of photos of dead bodies (SANA 2011), and after western journalist Nir Rosen (2012) reported that the Islamist ‘rebels’ were dressing up their own casualties as ‘civilians’, the WLM stuck to its jihadist-linked sources, reporting that the Syrian Army was constantly targeting ‘civilians’.

Western think tanks, too, trotted out the official war line. Backing what used to be called ‘the supreme crime’ of a war of aggression (these days ‘regime change’) became the ideological fulcrum. The WLM would not question successive justifications for war (humanitarian intervention, protective intervention), effectively blacklisting dissident commentators.

Western ‘think tanks’ fell into line. A September 2012 Quilliam Institute briefing claimed that ‘The vast majority of the opposition fighters are legitimate nationalists fighting for the country’s freedom and the establishment of a democratic state … most members within the FSA are pious rather than Islamists and are not motivated by sectarianism’ (Benotman and Naseraldin 2012: 1). Similarly, in October 2012, the International Crisis Group, while recognising a Salafi strand in the fighters, spoke of ‘a moderate Islamic tradition’, suggesting that Farouq might be a secular group (ICG 2012: i, 6).

This was more than a year after Farouq had been blamed for the ethnic cleansing of Homs, had publicised its bombing of hospitals, had imposed an Islamic tax and had committed several massacres in the Homs area (Anderson 2016: Ch.6). As foreign jihadists poured in across the Turkish border, clearly with NATO approval, the WLM persisted, beyond all bounds of plausibility, with the ‘civil war’ and ‘moderate rebels’ story.

But the US government had better sources. Two months earlier US intelligence had reported that ‘The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq = ISI] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria’. They want to create a ‘Salafist principality in eastern Syria’ and that was ‘exactly’ what NATO and the Gulf Monarchies want, ‘in order to isolate the Syrian regime’ (DIA 2012).  This was well before ISIS came to Syria. Even after this cable was revealed, in 2014, the WLM did little to question the Washington line.

Created by the Bush administration in 2006 – to prevent Baghdad getting close to Tehran – and drawing on Saudi patronage, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) moved across into Syria in 2013. Despite the failure of a merger with Jabhat al Nusra, this second al Qaeda group began to collaborate with the NATO-backed FSA. In mid 2013 FSA commander Abdul Jabbar al-Okaidi (prominently photographed with the former US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford) joined forces with ISIS in the battle for Menagh airbase, in Aleppo Province. FSA man Al-Okaidi fought alongside ISIS leaders Abu Jandal (from Egypt) and Abu Omar al Shishani (US-trained, from Georgia) and was filmed celebrating victory with Abu Jandal (Anderson 2016: Chapter 6). Such facts were publicly available, through the jihadists’ own online propaganda, but they barely made a dent in Washington’s revised line: ISIS was the new evil and the western-backed ‘moderate rebels’ were fighting them.

False allegations against the Syrian Army blocked sympathy amongst WLMN audiences for all Syrians who were fighting to defend their country from foreign-backed terrorists. One of the first ‘false flag’ massacres, created to incite a Libyan-styled foreign intervention, was the terrible Houla massacre of May 2012. More than 100 mostly pro-government villagers (some of whom had participated in the recent congress elections) were killed after the Syrian Army drove jihadists out of nearby Homs city. An initial UN team led by Dutch General Robert Mood went to Houla and found conflicting stories, in the then jihadist-occupied area. A second UN team, hastily convened and co-chaired by US diplomat Karen Koning AbuSayd, tried to blame un-named pro-government ‘thugs’. They could not provide any motive, and ignored evidence from 15 independent witnesses who identified four local gunmen, two clans and a large Farouq FSA group led by Abdurrazzaq Tlass and Yahya Yusuf (Anderson 2015; Anderson 2016: Ch. 8). Syria was internationally sanctioned on the basis of these fabricated claims. But dissent at the Security Council prevented UN intervention.

Syria became the site of many similar ‘false flag’ incidents. Some were even exposed by western journalists, such as the 2012 FSA massacre of villagers at Aqrab (Homs) and of many hostages in Daraya (south Damascus). In both cases the Army was initially blamed, but western observers (Thompson 2012; Fisk 2012) reported convincingly that the al Qaeda groups were responsible.

The Western Liberal Media’s dishonesty became criminal. The BBC assisted in the cover up of the March 2013 murder of Syria’s most senior Sunni scholar, Sheikh Ramadan al Bouti. The Sheikh, a strong Syrian pluralist on religious matters, had spoken out against violent sectarianism. For that he had been branded, by the Islamists and the western media, as a ‘Pro-Assad Cleric’ (Mourtada and Gladstone 2013). That may have helped justify his murder. Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda) operatives set off a bomb in a Damascus mosque where Sheikh Bouti was speaking, killing him and more than 40 others. The terror group threatened to kill him, did kill him and then, as had been their habit, tried to blame the Syrian Government.

The social media smokescreen created by the sectarian killers was repeated and amplified by BBC journalist Jim Muir, who claimed ‘it was inconceivable that such a small blast could have caused the death of around 50 people, as reported by state media.’ Muir pointed to video which showed that Sheikh Bouti did not die immediately. The suggestion was that the attack was faked and the Government had somehow used a fake incident to kill the ‘pro-Assad’ Sheikh themselves (Muir 2013). Muir’s insinuation was a disgraceful lie, a criminal attempt to cover up mass murder. More than forty people died. Photos of the mosque’s blood soaked floor were widely published.

Later that year six Jabhat al Nusra terrorists were arrested and confessed on Syrian television to the murder in great detail, including how they sought a special fatwa from their sheikh to kill Muslims in a mosque. ‘After Sheikh al Bouti criticised al Nusra operations in Syria we were ordered to kill him, due to a fatwa by the legislative general official of al Nusra Front’, one of the group said (Syrian Alikhbaria 2013). Neither Muir nor the BBC retracted their story. By this time the British state was providing substantial material support to armed Syrian groups, including ‘moderate rebels’ working closely with Jabhat al Nusra (Hopkins 2014).

The western liberal media actively promoted a major chemical weapons incident staged by the sectarian groups in the East Ghouta (countryside Damascus) in August 2013. Long after an array of independent evidence disproved allegations that the Syrian Army was responsible, the WLM repeated these false claims. That incident, complete with video of drugged or dead children, did involve real chemical weapons. An unknown number were killed; 1,400 un-named victims were mentioned, but only eight bodies were reported buried (ISTEAMS 2013).

At the time of this incident, UN chemical weapons inspectors were in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian Government, to investigate the al Qaeda groups’ use of sarin gas in Khan al-Asal, near Aleppo. Those same groups used the occasion to divert attention from that incident, stage another attack and blame it on the government.

Yet the government had no plausible motive. Further, studies by US experts at MIT showed the rockets to have a much shorter range than was suggested. The final report by Lloyd and Postol (2014) was fatal to the US story. It concluded that the rockets ‘could not possibly have been fired at East Ghouta from the ‘heart’, or from the eastern edge, of the Syrian Government controlled area shown in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30, 2013’.

US intelligence sources confirmed this. Veteran North American journalist Seymour Hersh (2013) interviewed US agents and concluded that Washington’s claims on the evidence had been fabricated. He found “intense concern” and anger amongst US agents over “the deliberate manipulation of intelligence”. Other reports from Syria (e.g. Gavlak and Ababneh 2013; ISTEAMS 2013) further exposed the fabrication.

The independent evidence was overwhelming and inescapable: chemical weapons had been used in East Ghouta, but the charges against the Syrian Army were fabricated. Logically this meant that the al Qaeda groups based in the East Ghouta (Jabhat al Nusra, Jaysh al Islam and Ahrar as Sham) had staged the attack, to blame the Army in an attempt to attract greater foreign military support.

Regardless of this evidence, the western media in general, and the WLM in particular, endlessly recycled the lie that the Syrian Army and the Syrian President ‘gassed children’ in the East Ghouta. So, for example, Anne Gearan at the Washington Post (19 June 2014) claimed repeatedly that the Syrian Government had used chemical weapons. Michael Crowley at Time magazine (26 June 2014) wrote ‘President Bashar al Assad murdered civilians with nerve gas last year’, while Jon Snow at the UK’s Channel Four (4 September 2014) claimed ‘It’s only one year ago that chemical weapons were used by Syrian forces on its own population’. Ruth Sherlock at the UK Telegraph (10 September 2014) falsely claimed that ‘Bashar al Assad’s regime made ‘systematic’ use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians’. All these stories were false and in reckless disregard of the evidence.

The fake claims carried on for years. The UK Guardian (14 March 2016) repeated the East Ghouta claims, adding it to other alleged Syrian government ‘chemical weapons attacks’, citing a report by the US-based Syrian American Medical Society (Shaheen 2016). SAMS is an Ohio-based partisan group which had also made false claims about Russia bombing hospitals in the terrorist held areas; the Red Cross did not support those allegations (RT 2015). Another front group, ‘Physicians for Human Rights’, falsely blamed the Syria Government for bombing al Kindi hospital in Aleppo. In fact, Jabhat al Nusra published video of its destruction of this hospital, using truck bombs and crying out ‘God is Great’ (Anderson 2016: Chapters 7 and 11). At the time of the Guardian story the Turkish Government backed ‘moderate rebels’ were under fire for using chemical attacks on Kurdish areas of Aleppo (ARA News 2016). Nevertheless, Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (‘The Obama Doctrine’, April 2016) repeated the East Ghouta lie: ‘In the Damascus suburb of Ghouta … Assad’s army had murdered more than 1,400 civilians with sarin gas’.

In context of a war where it was well known that the US President had announced a military attack would follow any Syrian use of chemical weapons, these repeated fabrications amount to propaganda for war, itself an international war crime. Whether through malice or laziness, this is an exceptionally grave crime and, were there an independent tribunal, would attract severe penalties.

Another example of active BBC collusion in fabrications was brought to light by British man Robert Stuart, who pursued the British broadcaster over a 30 September 2013 documentary titled ‘Saving Syria’s Children’. That story and linked news reports claimed the Syrian Army had launched an incendiary bomb attack on a school’, using ‘napalm’ or chemical weapons. The attack was said to be on 26 August 2013 in Urm Al-Kubra, Aleppo, just days after the East Ghouta incident. The BBC made use of prominent anti-Syrian Doctor Rola Hallam. But the ‘evidence’ was once again fabricated.

This was not simply a case of a story being compromised by partisan sources. The video was filmed by BBC staff and associates at a hospital near the school. Stuart presents evidence to show this footage was ‘largely, if not entirely, staged’. Experts examined the footage and say, effectively, that the portrayed burns victims are actors and not burns victims. Further, the audio track of Dr Hallam’s claims (she wore a surgical mask) was edited and her words changed between different versions of the video. Stuart (2013; 2015) has pursued the BBC over this fabrication, posting a catalogue of evidence online.

Just before a Geneva peace conference in January 2014, the tiny petro-monarchy of Qatar, a major sponsor of armed groups in Syria, released a report it had purchased from some British lawyers. The report showed thousands of photos of dead bodies, presenting an anonymous witness ‘Caesar’ who claimed these were victims of mass torture and murder by the Syrian Government. After two years of mass exposure of Qatar’s report, backed by US and Israeli groups, no WLM channel proved capable of pointing out one obvious fact: half the photos were of Syrian soldiers and other victims of terrorism.

The State Department linked group Human Rights Watch, which was given special access to the ‘Caesar’ archive, admitted that almost half the photos (24,568 of 53,275), at face value, showed: “dead army soldiers or members of the security forces” and “crime scene photographs taken in the aftermath of attacks … [from] several categories of incidents including the aftermath of explosions, assassinations of security officers, fires, and car bombs” (HRW 2015: 2-3). However HRW thereafter ignored all those photos and discussed the rest – those said to have died ‘in government detention’. So at the outset of a report subtitled ‘Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria’s Detention Facilities’, HRW selectively ignored 46% of photos which did not fit its theme.

It took another genuinely independent report to point out this extraordinary selectivity, and that many of the dead in the remaining 54% of photos had clearly not died in custody. There was evidence that some had died in conflict, others in hospital (after receiving treatment), while other bodies had been picked up after decomposing. Further, ‘thousands’ of the photos had been manipulated to obscure notations (Sterling 2016). That is, these were the records of hospital morgues during a war, with a wide variety of deaths and no single or reliable explanation of how they had died. Yet the UK law firm Carter Ruck, Human Rights Watch and much of the western media, simply and dishonestly asserted these were all or mainly deaths in government custody. The WLM showed no sign of even the most basic investigation, as suggested by its self-styled ‘watchdog’ role.

The BBC’s December 2015 admission that Britain was in ‘an unspoken alliance’ with al Qaeda groups ‘to destroy the Assad regime’ came 18 months after senior US officials (Vice President Joe Biden, Army chief Martin Dempsey and Senate Armed Forces chair Lindsay Graham) had admitted that their regional allies the Saudis, Turkey and Qatar were funding terrorist groups including ISIS (Anderson 2016: Ch.12). Biden and Graham blamed Turkey and the Saudis for throwing arms and money at anyone who would fight Assad. Graham pointed out ‘they fund [ISIS] because the Free Syrian Army couldn’t fight Assad, they were trying to beat Assad’ (Rothman 2014).

One full year after those senior officials admitted that their closest allies were financing ISIS, specifically to overthrow President Assad, the WLM continued to blame the Syrian President for ISIS. For example, Dominic Tierney in The Atlantic, whether stupidly or dishonestly, claimed ‘the Syrian dictator’s sinister plan … it seems, is to deliberately aid the rise of ISIS—what I call the devil’s gambit’ (Tierney 2015). Undeterred, western governments and the compliant western media kept asserting the fiction that their ‘moderate rebels’ were being armed to fight ISIS. In fact, throughout 2014-2015, thousands of US-armed mercenaries defected to Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS, along with their US weapons (Anderson 2016: Chapter 12).

The western liberal media spectacularly failed in its self-proclaimed watchdog role and, at times, engaged directly in fabrications to assist the western governments and their al Qaeda proxy armies. They did not simply fail to investigate the ‘false flag’ massacres of the western-backed groups, their complicity encouraged further massacres. They ignored the exposed ‘false flag’ massacres (e.g. in Daraya and Aqrab) and repeated the faked claims (e.g. East Ghouta) even when multiple sources of independent evidence had destroyed those claims.

Constant repetition of lies that the Syrian Army was ‘targeting civilians’ and ‘gassing children’, emboldened the al Qaeda groups, encouraging further atrocities and making any peace settlement much more difficult. The steady stream of lies and systematic reliance on partisan sources – such as the ‘Syrian Observatory of Human Rights’ – has aggravated and prolonged the dirty war on Syria. The western liberal media acted not as ‘watchdogs’ but as ‘attack dogs’, compliant creatures of their governments.

A number of the references in this article are to the author’s book The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance, available at Global Research, here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-dirty-war-on-syria-washington-regime-change-and-resistance/5504372

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 Syrian Alikhbaria (2013) ‘Terrorists affiliated to Jabhat al-Nusra confess to assassination of Sheikh al-Bouti’, YouTube, 2 January, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PIyoy3tI_A

 Tierney, Dominic (2015) ‘Bashar al-Assad and the Devil’s Endgame’, The Atlantic, 28 September, online: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/assad-syria-devil-endgame-putin-obama/407635/

 Thompson, Alex (2012) ‘Was there a massacre in the Syrian town of Aqrab?’ 14 December: http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/happened-syrian-town-aqrab/3426

 Wright, Ann and Coleen Rowley (2012) ‘Amnesty’s shilling for US Wars’, Consortium News, 18 June, online: https://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/18/amnestys-shilling-for-us-wars/

The battle for Palmyra has begun and it has not gotten off to a great start for Western-backed ISIS/terrorist fighters. What was once one of the most publicized instances of ISIS victory in Syria as well as the brutality and fanatical nature of the Western proxies is now becoming an example of the resilience and determination of the Syrian Army and the unwillingness of the Syrian people to submit to Western imperialism.

This is because SAA incursions into Palmyra from the east, west, and south of the city are spelling the end (and a very near one) for ISIS. Members of the Desert Falcons team, the SAA, and Syrian Specials Operations forces have entered the city and are now in the process of taking out the ISIS fighters stationed there in a combination of tactics ranging from air assaults to tanks and even hand to hand combat. Many terrorists have been reportedly killed by bayonet as well as by SAA bombing.

According to some reports, surgical strikes are being made possible due to civilians working with the SAA and Syrian intelligence forces and providing exact locations of strongholds, headquarters, and fortifications.

Ziad Fadel of Syrian Perspective is predicting the fall and liberation of Palmyra within a day.

Zen Adra of Al Masdar reports

Amid soaring morale to restore the world heritage site, the Syrian Armed Forces have fully recaptured Semiramis Hotel (formerly the Meridian), Mouza Palace and Al-Zera’a roundabout located at the entrance of Palmyra.

The attacking forces also secured Muhtar Mount and the Tombs valley, and are now preparing to liberate Brigade 550.

A few kilometers to the north, the sever sandstorm was no obstacle for the highly-trained government troops to impose full control on at-Tat (Al-Tar) Mountain, from where they pound, with heavy artillery, ISIS barricades near the ancient castle of Palmyra before storming it.

Leith Fadel of Al Masdar continues by writing,

The Syrian Armed Forces and their allies are rolling in the Homs Governorate’s eastern countryside, entering the strategic Palmyra Orchards after liberating the Semiramis Hotel this morning.

Currently, the Syrian Armed Forces are fighting their way through the rugged terrain at the Palmyra Orchards in order to infiltrate the enemy’s defenses and enter this ancient desert city’s southern sector.

Minutes ago in the Homs Governorate’s eastern countryside, the Syrian Arab Army’s “Tiger Forces” – backed by the Desert Hawks, Hezbollah, and Syrian Marines – liberated the village of Tamthil after a violent battle with the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) that began this morning.

According to a military source, the village of Tamthil is located in Palmyra’s (Tadmur) northern countryside; it was originally abandoned by the terrorist group until the situation on the ground forced them to return in order to to strengthen their front-lines.

Fierce fighting has been reported at three different flanks around Palmyra; however, ISIS’ defenses are quickly crumbling as the Syrian Armed Forces and their allies advance to the city gates.

While not the most strategically significant location in Syria, if Palmyra falls, it will be a massive public relations victory by the Syrian government since Palmyra was once touted as proof that ISIS was unstoppable.

ISIS is clearly stoppable.

All that is needed is for Western support to dwindle.

Regardless, after the boost of Russian airstrikes, the Syrian people are demonstrating that Syria is no place for Western proxies.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville 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.

Latin America is an often forgotten theater in World War 4 America’s war on the planet that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In many ways World War 4 is merely a continuation of World War 3 aka the Cold War and nowhere is this more apparent then in Latin America. Wherever the US maintained it’s control it carried on with the horrific dirty war assassinating anyone who dares to dream and work for a better world. The recent murder of COPINH co-founder Berta Caceres has briefly drawn attention to this never ending wave of murder and assassinations.

In My October 2015 article Operation Condor based on J. Patrice McSherry’s excellent “Predatory States” I dealt with this campaign of torture, murder and assassination that continues to this day to terrorize Latin America. Colombia is one of the most terrible examples hundreds of thousands have been murdered, raped, tortured over the past 50 Years. Millions have been driven from their lands and Colombia’s dirty war is second only to Syria in the number of refugees that have been created. Mexico is perhaps even worse where 160,000 have died in the ever expanding phony war on drugs. On a smaller scale the same things are taking place in Honduras the most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists.

Activist Berta Caceres

Not even the attention Berta Caceres murder has drawn has slowed the wave of killings days later Nelson Noel Garcia was also killed the 15th activist murdered so far this year alone in Honduras. As if this wave of terror is not enough the US is backing coups against the governments that continue to defy it in places like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil. This is part of a much wider campaign aimed at the BRICS countries and their allies targeting Russia and China obviously but also South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Iran and many other countries. The empire of chaos has been quite successful in waging economic war on the planet by sending commodity prices tumbling they have managed to destabilize countries around the world. The future of the planet depends on halting this renewed imperialist offensive aimed at reversing all that the late Hugo Chavez was able to accomplish in liberating much of Latin America from US domination. Chavez’s death was perhaps the most high profile of these assassinations new details emerged recently about his death. His bodyguard has been revealed to be a CIA/DEA informant who likely was involved in his death. However since I plan to focus on the lesser known victims you’ll have to read about the details in the sources below.

Not content with murdering the great revolutionary Hugo Chavez the empire of chaos decided to humiliate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Brazil’s former president having him dragged away in handcuffs on nationwide television in order to prevent his political comeback aimed at stabilizing the Rousseff government who is the object of a political corruption witch hunt. Meanwhile Dilma Rousseff faces a US funded color revolution attempt funded by the Koch brothers among others. Pepe Escobar who is from Brazil wrote the definitive account of this shameful episode.

Basically the Right wing which is far more corrupt then Brazil’s workers party is hypocritically trying to oust Dilma using a trumped up investigation that selectively prosecutes only the left. I can’t help be reminded of the coup in Ukraine where the far more corrupt Yanukovych regime was ousted and yet the US somehow had managed to find even more dangerous thieves to replace him. Only the empire of Chaos could figure out how to make the most corrupt country in the world 10 times worse. Obviously then corruption is the last thing in the world the US actually wants to combat ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, Afghanis where the US set up some of the most corrupt governments imaginable. Along with the political war there is a media war using Brazils Oligarch owned media to constantly attack and attempt to discredit Dilma Rousseff. Luckily despite the Media barrage in Brazil against Rousseff many Brazilians were not fooled and thousands poured into the streets in opposition to this coup attempt. Seeing their beloved former President Lula being arrested was just too much.

Thousands of Venezuelans also took to the streets in a massive anti-imperialist march in response to Obama’s repeating the same absurd lie that made him a laughingstock last year namely that Venezuela was a threat to United States national security. The murder of Chavez, the failed coup against Maduro, and this current soft coup attempt by the opposition controlled national assembly are ample evidence that as usual this was turning truth on it’s head. Meanwhile in Argentina where the soft coup has been a success the new President Macri has declared all out class war on his own people firing thousands, smashing protests with riot police firing rubber bullets that can cripple or kill.

He has started a campaign to attempt to vilify former president Christina Fernandez-Kirchner. He also decided to hand over Billions to vulture capitalists for no apparent reason other then doubtless secret rewards and secret orders from his CIA masters. In Bolivia Evo Morales lost an important vote that would have allowed him to run for another term in office. In Ecuador another destabilization campaign is raging. All of the progressive governments of Latin America are under assault and Argentina is already fallen. The whole world must oppose the dangerous rebirth of fascism in Argentina where one of the ugliest chapters in the dirty war took place in the 70’s and 80’s. And it must oppose the dangerous threat that the whole continent could once again fall under the control of fascism repeating all the horrors of Operation Condor.

As you will see this is no exaggeration there is no limit to the horrors the US has been committing in those countries that never escaped their control like Colombia or Mexico. In Honduras a 2009 coup has unleashed a wave of murder targeting activists. Hillary Clinton oversaw a coup that lead to a massive increase in violence against women rape, torture, and murder are skyrocketing. Yet even in the face of this wave of repression activists in Honduras have been organizing the poor and the indigenous, to resist attempts to force them off their land so that the local elites can build a dam. Berta Caceres was one of the most important of these activists founding COPINH and struggling fearlessly in the face of death threats from dangerous death squads to fight on behalf of indigenous land rights. Her life had been in danger for many years but she refused to back down and was finally murdered one of her comrades Gustavo Castro was shot twice during the attack and then arrested. Yet despite drawing world attention the Dirty War on Honduras continues uninterrupted.

Another COPINH member Nelson Garcia was killed. Dozens more have been imprisoned beaten, tortured. Others narrowly escaped assassination attempts. Honduras remains the most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists. Meanwhile the death squads & their masters the local oligarchs who are deeply involved in  drug trafficking retain complete impunity. Needless to say their american masters who were responsible for setting up the death squads in Honduras as part of Operation Condor’s expansion into central america will never be discussed let alone punished. I should note that Predatory States has an excellent chapter on the creation of Honduras’ Death Squads. Future “Queen of Chaos” as Diana Johnstone calls Hillary in her new book bragged openly in her memoirs about her role in the 2009 coup . Just one of the countries she destroyed along with Haiti and Libya to name the most obvious examples. With the possible exception of the first Bush I’m hard pressed to think of an example since Nixon who where a presidential candidate has been involved in so many war crimes before even coming to office. Remember Berta Caceres and the many other heroic activists of Honduras who have given their lives in the fight for justice.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Colombia has been the scene of 50 years of Dirty War. 220,000 people have been killed 7 million displaced. 50 Years ago the American advisers arrived and since then their has been an ongoing dirty war. Actually the war began even before that with an earlier civil war known as La Violencia but I don’t have time to go into the complex history of Colombia birth place of one of my favorite writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In his famous novel “100 Years of Solitude” he depicted the massacre of workers by the United Fruit company better known for it’s later role in the Guatemalan coup which has lead to 60 years of dirty war in Guatemala that  continues to this day with activists still being murdered. Apologies for the tangent I couldn’t resist pointing out the interconnected nature of the war on Latin America even then. Guatemala should not be forgotten even though I don’t have time to deal with it today.

To return to Colombia the advisers arrived before the revolution had even begun. Ironically the FARC would form in response to the dirty war being waged by the US in their country who were using it as yet another experiment in their counter-insurgency doctrine. Death Squads were formed to kill any potential opposition the oligarchs used them to drive peasants off their lands so that they could expand their holdings. FARC was formed to defend the peasants and fought for years to defend the people of Colombia against the dirty war. Currently they are attempting to sign a peace deal with the Santos Government.

But of course peace is obviously the last thing the empire of chaos is interested in and doubtless have given the green light to the former President Uribe to disrupt things. Uribe is a close friend of the US he is also a major drug trafficker as the DIA admits in addition to being a former death squad commander. He oversaw the massive expansion of privatized death squads while in office. Of course it was the US itself which oversaw a massive expansion of this war back in the late 90’s as a result of their infamous Plan Colombia. Needless to say the “War on Drugs”  is just as absurd as the war on terror with the United States spending billions funding the forces they are claiming to be fighting. Obviously I have more then enough to deal with in covering this dirty war being waged on two continents to go into the fraudulent nature of this war.

Check out Doug Valentines two books “Strength of the Wolf” and “Strength of the Pack” for an inside account of this war which is also responsible for putting millions of people in prison within the US itself. Also check out Peter Dale Scott’s “American War Machine” and “Drugs, Oil and War” for even more on the topic. The CIA creates drug dealing networks as part of their covert wars. They created first the golden triangle in south east Asia and then  the golden crescent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Today Afghanistan supplies 90% of the Worlds Heroin when the CIA first arrived they had only a tiny share in the global drug trade. The money ends up in the big banks the capitalists are in league with the gangsters and always have been. Hundreds of billions of dollars from the illegal drug trade are the only things preventing a complete financial collapse by the big banks. Meanwhile the money is used to buy politicians in the United States and around the world. In reality America is just as much of a Narco-State as countries like Colombia or Mexico.

Thus it should come as no surprise that the billions in military aid was sent to train the drug traffickers death squads so they could kill union leaders who threatened America’s corporate profits. They set up an incentive system for high body counts and the Army and the death squads started murdering random people and dressing them up as guerrillas so they could claim their reward. The Death squads were used to drive people from their lands so the big landowners could steal even more land leading to millions of displaced persons. The death squads were trained by CIA, Special forces, and mercenary companies to kill people in the most horrific manner possible in order to terrify the population into submission. Rape, torture, and ISIS Style mutilation became commonplace. As in Honduras violence against women has skyrocketed. Not content with terrorizing it’s own citizens Colombia has exported it’s death squads and criminal networks to Venezuela where they have sent the crime rate through the roof. But of course it is far worse then that! The United States regards Plan Colombia as a major success story. After all Colombia remains under their control. Thus Colombia has been selected as their proxy in spreading mercenaries and death squads around the world. The US recruits Colombian forces to train police and militaries around the world. Colombia has also become a major recruiting ground for american owned mercenary firms like Xe formerly blackwater a fact that has been exposed as Colombian mercenaries have died as part of the US backed Saudi war on Yemen.

FARC

Unsurprisingly despite the peace negotiations with FARC or rather because of the peace negotiations Colombia has only further increased their terror campaign. So many activists have been murdered there in recent weeks that I can’t list them all. However I can give names to at least a couple recent victims. Klaus Zapata was a member of the Marcha Patriotica which is a huge coalition of progressive groups in Colombia. He was also a member of the Bogata Anti-Fascist Coordination. He had heroically tried to defend the people from the death squads on  previous occasions and so was murdered while playing soccer. Only hours before his death Rigoberto Abello, and William Sanchez his comrades had been seized and tortured. Jorge Luis Sanchez was murdered by death squads riding motorcycles and wielding machine guns who attacked a group of artisanal miners to force them off the land then sprayed a panicked crowd with bullets. The Latest victim is Luis Rodriguez Castro. This surge in killings is seen as an attempt to sabotage the peace negotiations by former President Uribe. The last time the guerrillas agreed to make peace they were simply murdered in cold blood. Unfortunately for FARC their desire for peace will prove impossible given the ruthless nature of the Colombian government and it’s even more ruthless backers in Washington.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to do justice to Mexico perhaps the most complex of all the dirty wars. Mexico is bursting with revolutionary activity and the murder of activists by death squads is perhaps even more common there. Then there are the wars between the drug cartels who often employ the police and military to fight for them allowing for the illusion of a war on drugs in what is in reality an endless war between the oligarchs for control of the drug trade. Of course the United States is intervening to spread chaos and disaster so a weakened Mexico will be even more vulnerable for exploitation. They have secretly flooded the country with guns for the gangs while sending in the usual array of advisers to fight Mexico’s equally endless dirty war. To defend themselves from the drug Cartels people have begun forming self defense units.

The Government has responded by framing their leaders and locking them up. In addition there are still revolutionary movements like the Zapatistas and indigenous groups fighting to defend their lands like the Yaqui who have a fascinating history of resistance. To do it all justice would require books not a paragraph or two. However I can recommend a new series I discovered on Libya 360 which attempts to document the many social movements in Mexico as well as describing the constant string of murders, tortures, and unjust imprisonment they face. It’s called Insumision and It’s Written by Scott Campbell of the El Enemigo Comun site each one has been epic in scope but you’ll have to read it for yourself.

The fate of two continents lie in the balance. The Bolivarian bloc cannot afford to fall because not only would it destroy one of the few rays of hope in the world it would undoubtedly unleash the same nightmare in Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador that it has brought to Honduras, Mexico, and Colombia. In Argentina it may already be too late but the people must be supported as they resist this new rebirth of fascism. Venezuela and Brazil must be defended at all cost. The world can no longer ignore the horrors of the war on the people of Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras. Despite the dangers they face the people continue to struggle for justice and we must offer them our solidarity and support. Obama Ironically is in Cuba where he asked us to forget the past. We must never forget the past or ignore the present. The revolutionary spirit of Latin America is an inspiration to the world.

References:

The Forces behind the Murder of Berta Caceres

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/drugs-dams-and-power-the-murder-of-honduran-activist-berta-caceres/

Wave of Assassinations of Activists in Colombia

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/wave-of-right-wing-violence-threatens-peace-for-colombia/

New Details in the Assassination of Hugo Chavez

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/the-murder-of-chavez-the-cia-and-dea-cover-their-tracks/

An analysis of Colombia’s Dirty War by James Petras

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/colombias-killing-fields-peace-is-war/

50 Years of War in Colombia 220,000 Killed

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/plan-colombia-and-us-backed-death-squads/

The Latest Insumision

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/insumision-victories-dont-slow-the-struggle/

The El Enemigo Comun Site

http://elenemigocomun.net

Eric Draitser has started a great series on the War on The BRICS the first one is on Brazil

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/brics-under-attack-the-empire-strikes-back-in-brazil/

Pepe Escobar on the soft coup attempt in Brazil

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/brazils-revolution-starting-to-reveal-its-true-colors/

Repression continues in Honduras

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/honduras-interview-with-rafael-alegria-mp-and-leader-of-via-campesina/

If some intelligent extraterrestrial beings were circling over our planet in their spaceship, monitoring for decades and centuries all that has been and is taking place on its surface, they would, most likely, be horrified by our brutality, and shocked by the countless contradictions, double standards and inconsistencies.

For instance, after registering the recent loss of lives in Brussels, visitors from outer space would immediately detect the enormous amount of activity all over the Belgian metropolis: police cars, the military, ambulances, and media vans. More than 30 people were killed at the airport and at the metro station, while over 200 were injured. Needless to say, the blood of innocent people was spilled.

Our visitors – the extraterrestrials – (let’s really imagine that they were here) are most likely totally ‘color blind’; they cannot make any distinction between different skin colors, different races or genders. To them, one victim in a sub-Saharan African village or in the Middle East has exactly the same ‘value’ as a casualty in Paris or Houston. To them, a wound is a wound, a body is a body, a corpse is a corpse; and a victim belonging to any ethnic or social group or geographic location is only and exclusively that – a victim.

Therefore, they were wondering: why is it that when few hundreds or few thousands of innocent people die in such places like war-torn Syria or Iraq, there are just a few ambulances detectable from above, and no cameras to record people’s suffering? Nobody seems to be shocked – why? And why are these countries ‘war-torn’ to begin with?

By then, our friends from the different galaxy would have a considerable amount of data at their disposal. Several mighty computers on board their spaceship would be analyzing and processing all the samples and information collected from our Planet.

Tens of thousands of books would be fed into the system.

What is it that one of the greatest writers of Latin America – Eduardo Galeano – wrote in his ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ several decades ago?  He penned with passion and disgust about Western rule in South America: “You could build a silver bridge from Potosí to Madrid from what was mined here – and one back with the bones of those that died taking it out…”

In the past, 8 million people vanished in the mines of Potosi alone, so that Europe could have its high life and ‘culture’.

And Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his book ‘Colonialism and Neocolonialism’:

“You know very well that we are exploiters. You know very well that we took the gold and the metals and then the oil of the ‘new continents’ and brought them back to the old mother countries. Not without excellent results: palaces, cathedrals, industrial capitals; and then whenever crisis threatened, the colonial markets were there to cushion or deflect it. Europe, stuffed with riches, granted de jure humanity to all its inhabitants: for us, a human being means ‘accomplice’, since we have all benefited from colonial exploitation… What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour, country and who knows what else?”

Our extraterrestrial friends would be thinking and thinking, scratching their heads, fondling their thick whiskers: obviously, throughout its history, the West slaughtered nearly one billion human beings in Africa, Central and South “America”, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania. And it is still murdering millions worldwide.

Those who are not butchered by the West directly are treated worse than animals by an inserted turbo-capitalist system and by countless right-wing dictatorships cynically called ‘democracies’. Billions of people on our Planet eat shit, literally. And they don’t really live; they just exist. Their only purpose is to work hard for nothing, supporting the ‘high life’ of the Empire.

Finally, over some fluorescent power drink, at a big round conference table in the spaceship, the captain decides to address his crew: “This does not seem to me like a particularly good and honest arrangement for this or any other planet!”

All crew members raise their feelers in agreement. They have had exactly the same thoughts for several centuries (“our – human centuries” – translated to their perception of time – for several weeks).

“I would say that most of the people on their so-called Earth have absolutely legitimate reasons to feel endlessly pissed-off!” declared their chief analyst for Outer Space Political Affairs.

Others suggested that those countries that have been plundered, destroyed and terrorized by the West have the full right to defend themself, or at least to retaliate. But for some reason, they don’t.

But could blowing up a subway station or an international airport, could the killing of innocent civilians, be considered ‘legitimate retaliation’?

Everybody agrees that it cannot be, although the Empire itself has already slaughtered hundreds of millions of innocent men, women and children all over the world. But the Empire, and again, there is this absolute consensus on board the spaceship, could not be judged by any normal international or interplanetary standards, as it has been, already for centuries, behaving as a debauched genocidal maniac.

It could not be held to any standards, as it had exterminated entire nations, destroyed cultures, polluted entire Planet and imposed on almost everyone the most appalling and inhuman economic and social system imaginable. It ruined all enthusiasm, injected nihilism, indoctrinated people, and shackled everyone by fear and ignorance.

But killing the people, even those submissive, narcissist and ignorant citizens of the Empire, would still be totally wrong. There was no disagreement about that on board the spaceship.

*

But who actually killed those people in Brussels? Who killed Parisians just a few months earlier?

Was it some external enemies of the Empire that have been perpetrating these violent acts.

There was no exact data regarding this on board the flying saucer.

But the crew had collected enough information from almost all previous ‘events’ and so it began to believe that the Empire itself could have also easily done the killing.

In Europe concretely, who could overlook the terror campaign unleashed by the NATO countries during the so-called ‘Operation Gladio”? Who can forget how governments were kidnapping and murdering people, how they were blowing up entire train stations and trains, in order to point fingers at the Communists, discrediting them, blaming them for the attacks?

The Empire always felt spite, total and unconcealed, for non-white, non-Christian human beings. It never hesitated to gas, to bomb, and to burn millions, sometimes tens of millions of them, in just one go. But periodically, it also ‘sacrificed’ a few dozens or even hundreds of its own people. It was done for some ‘excellent and sacred cause’, naturally: in order for the white Christian race to maintain its control over the planet, for savage capitalism to flourish, and for dogmas about the ‘exceptionality’ of the European and North American civilization/culture to persevere.

Most of the ET’s who were now circling over our Planet were able to see clearly through the Western propaganda. They were enduring with twisted noses that entire unsavory stench coming from the Empire’s intellectual belches and farts, and they were laughing at the numerous moral pirouettes and somersaults it was displaying.

But laughter would always freeze on their lips, whenever they realized that this was not a game, that human beings are being torn to pieces, that entire villages, neighborhoods and countries have been sacrificed and destroyed.

The spaceship crew counted among them some avid readers of Umberto Eco’s Numero Zero. Disgusted with the mainstream Western propaganda media, everyone from the captain to several janitors turned to alternative media sources that, recently have begun to flourish on the Planet Earth. RT was blasted in the reading room, day and night. Others were watching TeleSUR and Press TV in their cabins.

Hardened by watching and reading opposition media, the question everyone on board was asking was: were Belgian people really sacrificed by one of those terrorist groups like Al-Qaida, al-Nusra, or maybe by ISIS?

Then the Western media reported that ISIS/Daesh had claimed responsibility for the attacks.

But in his essay published by Global Research, Michel Chossudovsky asked, “Is the ISIS Behind the Brussels Attacks? Who is Behind the ISIS?”

‘Very good question’, admitted the crew. To them, as to Professor Chossudovsky, it was clear that behind ISIS stood both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and therefore, the West.

Then Peter Koenig, Swiss economist and thinker, published his essay, “The Brussels Attacks – Another False Flag”, where he argued, after describing the carnage in Belgium:

“…In the meantime, the Belgian government has ordered a clampdown on police and journalists reporting on the case. 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. …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.”

Most likely the future US President, Donald Trump, is already enjoying swelling support from the North American public, after promising new and taller walls, more advanced spying/surveillance, more savage torture as well as advanced racial/religious profiling.

Christopher Black, a prominent international lawyer based in Toronto, added:

“A common factor in all these false flags is that no political demand is ever made by the alleged actors. A terrorist act is a political act, designed to instill fear in the public to pressure a state to do something the actors want. But in none of these recent attacks are any demands ever made nor any compelling reasons ever given for the attack. And what demands could there be since the EU has been supporting Daesh along with the US. And why would the ISIS make an attack on the EU to draw more attacks on them (supposedly)? It does not make sense from a political or military point of view. The media report that ISIS claims the attack was on Belgium for taking part in the coalition bombing but Belgium halted that months ago and as we know there were no real attacks on ISIS by the coalition.

So if not ISIS then who? Who benefits is always the question to ask. The answer may lie in the immediate response of everyone from Trump to Hollande to Cameron and the rest, that the war on ISIS must be intensified, which means a bigger war against Syria, and Iraq. So, one can see this attack as a reaction to the Syrian-Russian success in Syria against ISIS and an attempt to sabotage the Geneva Peace process. But, once again, the people are kept in the dark, huddled around their computers and TV screens waiting for the next set of lies.”

And this is what was written by Koenig’s and Black’s comrade, Andre Vltchek:

“I mentioned this recently in one of my essays about North Korea, but I have to repeat it once again, “after Brussels”: We are living in a twisted, truly perverse world, where mass murderers act as judges, and actually get away with it. The objectivity lost its meaning. Terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are now determined by only one criterion: ‘good’ is all that serves the interests of the Western Empire, ‘bad’ is what challenges its global dictatorship.”

No matter how the information about what took place in Brussels was twisted or turned, one thing was hard to dispute: directly or indirectly, the West was right behind the attacks. And not to see it would take truly incredible discipline.

Of course it was not just the events that occurred in Brussels. Looking at the whole modern human history, with just a few exceptions, the West was always behind the most horrid atrocities and aggressions.

*

The crew of the spaceship held a meeting to assess the situation on Earth.

The conclusions of this gathering were pronounced and recorded, then sent to their capital city thousands of light-years away from the Planet Earth:

“There are many objective reasons to believe why it is that the Planet Earth entered an irreversible spiral of terminal decline. It is now ruled by only a handful of perverse nations obsessed with power and consumption. For decades and centuries, these countries terrorized, murdered, even exterminated people living in all the other corners of Earth. However, they were never stopped, reprimanded and restrained. As we see from above, there is very little chance that the situation will change in foreseeable future. Just a few countries, including China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Iran and the DPRK are still insisting on their own course. They are, however, constantly intimidated, antagonized and provoked.

Furthermore, the environment of the Planet Earth is irreversibly damaged, and if there is no immediate reversal of the trend, the entire globe may become uninhabitable in the foreseeable future.

Our recommendation to the citizens of the Planet Earth: immediately occupy and disarm both Europe and North America. Then disarm their ‘client’ states and the terrorist groups they have injected into the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Impose real (direct) democracy and implement strong detox educational programs in order to reverse the long decades and centuries of consistent indoctrination and supremacist theories. For at least three generations, reduce Europe and North America to strictly agricultural societies, with no military and no heavy industry. The flow of foreign students to all Western universities should be stopped immediately, as these are not really centers of knowledge, but extremely dangerous hubs of indoctrination. Propaganda messages engraved into the mass media disinformation campaigns should be detected, exposed, publicly analyzed and ridiculed systematically.”

According to the ET’s, these were only some of the emergency steps that would have to be taken immediately, in order for the Planet Earth to survive.

But all this was said and then put on the record just for the sake of the people who inhabited other galaxies. Earth appeared to be already lost. There was very little hope that human beings would rebel against their torturers.

“No hope”, was the general consensus on board the spaceship.

“The rot is too deep, too widespread. Russia, China, Latin America and few other countries could create an alliance and forge a united front against the West. But with nukes, a propaganda apparatus and technology, the West cannot be defeated. It can only collapse from within. But the people of Europe and North America are the most obedient, indoctrinated and uniformed. And they enjoy many exclusive privileges. They will never defend the Planet, only their own interests.”

The captain downed yet another fluorescent drink, grimaced and pointed finger towards the transparent floor of his flying saucer: “They fucked up no end. It all appears to be hopeless. Time to go home!”

They voted, and decided to depart. Then the captain stepped on it, and the saucer accelerated to a neck breaking speed of several light-years per second, shooting straight towards home.

Would the crew try to stop the madness they had witnessed on Earth, would they approach the rulers in London, Brussels or Washington, chances were they would end up like their counterparts in that old great Soviet SCI-FI film “The Silence of Doctor Evans”. In that film, a spaceship sent by an advanced civilization made contact with several inhabitants on Earth. But the crew was hunted down by evil imperialists who were terrified by the possibility that an advanced (naturally Communist) society would be spreading extremely dangerous and subversive ideas, reminding people of some basic principles; morality, kindness, decency and humanism.

*

And so the madness will go on. For us who have no opportunity to escape to another galaxy, the prospects are bleak; especially for those of us who by some miracle have managed to escape indoctrination.

Those who are still capable of seeing what is happening around, those who understand the insanity and brutality of the Western ruling power, are condemned to living in constant agitation, stress and outrage.

The people who are ruling over this planet may still physically fit to human form, but in reality they are beasts, mass murderers, and brigands. In fact, there are no words derogatory enough to describe them.

So what should we expect now, when even ET’s have given up on our Planet? A little entrée in a form of a right-wing coup in Ecuador, perhaps? And then a main course, like nuking of North Korea? The assassination of President al Assad? Or something really fatal, like a provoked naval confrontation with China? Or maybe something local and ‘modest’, like the bombing of few city buses in Rome or trams in Amsterdam, so even tighter surveillance will be ‘demanded’ by and ‘given’ to the people of the West? Will Europe soon be sinking boats that are carrying thousands of refugees from the very countries destroyed by the Empire? What else, really? What can we expect later this year, in April, May, and June?

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

Two Fake CC surveillance Videos of the bomb attacks,  Ibrahim’s  Laptop Computer discovered in a Rubbish bin; 

The  alleged Will (Testament) of one of the Daesh suspects; 

Foreknowledge of the Attacks by the Belgian police and security authorities; 

An EU terror emergency drill simulating a Metro attack held three weeks earlier, …  

Mystery, “Evidence” concerning the deceased suicide bombers?

The role and death of suicide bombers Khalif and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui respectively at the Maelbeek metro station and Brussels airport? 

Where are the official surveillance video recordings? Sofar they have been suppressed? 

The Mysterious Photo: Three Daesh Suspects at Brussels Airport Caught on the CC Surveillance Camera?   

A review of official police statements suggests that the still photos allegedly from the Airport CC Surveillance Camera were not initially released by the Police, they were first published by Dernière Heure, DH.be, which is part of Belgium’s media giant Groupe Multimédia IPM S.A.

It is worth noting that DH.be together with La Libre (also part of Groupe IPM) (mistakenly) published the fake CC surveillance video of the Brussels airport bomb attacks by using the footage of the Moscow terror attack of January 2011.

The “real” video footage from the airport CC surveillance cameras has sofar not been made public  

Below is the picture of the three Daesh suspects walking in Brussels airport. There is no mention as to when (at what time) the still video picture was taken.

Apart from this still image, no official CC surveillance video footage was released. (See our analysis on the fake CC videos).

As mentioned above, there are contradictions regarding the time of release and the source of the above images.

Derniere Heure DH.net.be published the still photo from the CC camera at 10.27am, two and a half hours BEFORE its alleged official release by the Brussels police: at 12.58pm.

The airport was closed shortly after the 8am attack: there are three possible answers:

1) that the airport security authorities made the video images available to DH.be prior to releasing it to the police.

2) that the Brussels police authorities released the images to DH.be as an exclusive, prior to their official release. Unlikely

3) that the source of the still image did not emanate from the airport surveillance CC cameras, but from another source which was used by Derniere Heure DH.be

Most media reports acknowledged that the mysterious photo of the alleged suicide bombers was released by the Brussels police.

The twitter entries below confirm the exact time at which the airport photos were released:

First Release by DH.be at 10.27am (entitled “Photo Exclusive” by DH.be)

Second Release by Politie Brussel/Police de Bruxelles: 12.58pm   

The press release of the federal prosecutor’s office on March 23rd confirms the identity of one of the suspects, Ibrahim El Bakraoui and mentions the photo. The time of its release is not mentioned.

https://5052.fedimbo.belgium.be/sites/5052.fedimbo.belgium.be/files/explorer/persbericht_23_mars_2016_FR.pdf

See also

http://www.dhnet.be/actu/belgique/ils-transportaient-leurs-bombes-dans-des-valises-apres-avoir-pris-le-taxi-56f153de35708ea2d3ce72ab

Analysis: Are the airport images genuine?

In other words, can we trust DH.be which published a fake surveillance video of the bomb attack (using footage from Moscow January 2011) on March 22 at 09.07 (one hour after the bomb attack). (See our earlier report on this issue, see summary in the text box below)

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The Moscow Airport January 2011 and the Minsk, April 2011 terror attacks

The CC surveillance videos of the attacks in real time published by Belgium’s media on March 22  at both the airport and the metro are fake,

This is confirmed by an earlier Global Research report. The Belgian corporate media published footage from the Moscow airport attacks (January 2011) and the Minsk Metro terror attack (April  2011).

Video 1 scan (Moscow airport, January 2011)

Video 2 scan (Minsk Metro, April 2011)

Here is a screenshot of  the Minsk 2011 video footage broadcast on Belgian network TV and on the internet depicting the explosion in the Metro in Brussels, March 22, 2016

For full report see:

Fake Video Used in News Coverage of Brussels Terror AttacksBy Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 22, 2016

 

Media Manipulation: More Fake Video Reports of the Brussels Terror AttacksBy Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 23, 2016

 

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Contradictions

In contradiction with the official Prosecutor’s press release which identifies only one of the suspected terrorists, namely Khalif , several media reports identified the three men as Khalif and Ibrahim el Bakraoui at Brussels airport together with Najim Laachraoui. The quoted source was the official surveillance camera.

Khalif allegedly committed the suicide attack at the metro station. So why was he walking together with his brother at the airport? The airport was closed down immediately after the bomb explosions. The Prosecutor’s press release (March 23) quoted above gives a superficial explanation.

In this regard, several media changed their stories, first Khalif died at the airport as the second kamikaze. The media subsequently clarified quoting The Belgian Federal Prosecutor “that one detonated at the airport and the other at the Maelbeek metro station.”

In a subsequent statement emanating from the Prosecutor’s office, Najim is confirmed as the second kamikaze at the airport. In turn, media reports then confirmed that Najim Laachraoui was the second attacker at the Zaventem Airport. Subsequent reports confirm the death of Ibrahim and Najim at the airport, without any substantiating evidence.

According to Le Monde “a second man, carrying a large bag, was seen on CCTV in the Brussels metro with Khalid el-Bakraoui” (quoted in the Guardian).

News reports say that “authorities identified” brothers Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 30 as the suicide (Kamikaze) bombers.”Ibrahim el-Bakraoui died at Zaventem Airport while Khalid el-Bakraoui died at the Maelbeek Metro Station”

But where is the evidence, where are the bodies? Has a post mortem (autopsy) been conducted which confirms the identity of the kamikaze bombers. Is there a coroner’s report?

Ibrahim’s Computer and Will Found in a Rubbish Bin 

According to the Prosecutor’s press release, a  computer was found abandoned in a rubbish bin which contained the will of Ibrahim. This was discovered thanks to the testimony of  the taxi driver who took Ibrahim to the airport. In addition to the explosives, a flag of the Islamic State was also found.

The full text of the alleged will (testament) is not available.

Some media call it a “letter”. From what has been released to the media,  the alleged will does not say anything. In fact it is not a will but a text focussing on Ibrahim’s personal fears. Daesh is not mentioned, neither is the planned bomb attack.

Suspects were Known to Police and Intelligence

What is of significance is that all the suspects were on the radar of police and intelligence.

The two el-Bakraoui brothers “were already being sought by police due to suspected links to the November terror attacks in Paris.”

Ironically, Brussels police categorizes Ibrahim as unknown suspect (suspect inconnu)

 

Unknown suspects at Zaventem airport?

Foreknowledge of the Attacks

Not only were the suspects known to police authorities, the government had advanced information,  foreknowledge of a possible attack in Brussels:

“The Belgian security services, as well as other Western intelligence agencies, had advance and precise intelligence warnings regarding the terrorist attacks in Belgium on Tuesday, Ha’aretz has learned. The security services knew, with a high degree of certainty, that attacks were planned in the very near future for the airport and, apparently, for the subway as well.” (Haaretz, March 23, 2016)

EU Emergency Response Drill Simulating a Terror Attack in a Metro Station Held Three Weeks Before the Attacks

Three weeks before the Brussels attacks, an EU terror emergency drill was held in the UK, simulating an attack on the London underground tube. Seven countries including Belgium participated in the exercise.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3469066/Dead-bodies-strewn-tube-trains-tower-block-collapses-station-emergency-services-carry-drill-Europe-s-biggest-disaster-response.html#ixzz43lMRQ1Re

Is it relevant?

“Exercise allows workers to practice skills they would need in the event of a major disaster such as terror attack”.

Source Daily Mail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3469066/Dead-bodies-strewn-tube-trains-tower-block-collapses-station-emergency-services-carry-drill-Europe-s-biggest-disaster-response.html#ixzz43lMRQ1Re

Em 13 de março de 2016, a cinco meses das olimpíadas, manifestações monstros foram organizadas no Brasil contra o governo de Dilma Rousseff aproveitando-se então da baixa popularidade da presidenta. Manifestações continuam a ser convocadas pelos partidos da oposição (principalmente pelo PSDB). A maior dessas manifestações reuniu mais de 500 000 pessoas* na metrópole de São Paulo, ultrapassando as concentrações que se fizeram no Brasil para as Eleições Diretas (Diretas-Já) em 16 de abril de 1984 no final do regime militar. 

Essas manifestações também tiveram lugar nas grandes capitais do país (em 121 cidades sendo o Rio de Janeiro uma delas). Os manifestantes vem pedindo a derrubada do governo Dilma (1), que teve sua quota de popularidade caindo de 13%, assim como a prisão do ex-presidente Ignácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) acusado de lavagem de dinheiro e de corrupção.

Uma bomba no escândalo Petrobras: A Camargo Correa uma das empresas acusadas de superfaturação teria dado 4,53 milhões de reais (1,3 milhões de euros) para duas empresas do ex-presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Um périto da Polícia Federal apontou primeiro para o fato de que entre dezembro 2011 a dezembro 2013 o Instituto Lula tinha recebido 3 parcelas de 1 milhão de reais cada e depois para o fato de que uma outra empresa de Lula, a “Palestras Eventos e Publicidade”– LILS, tinha recebido entre setembro 2011 a julho 2013 a quantia de 1,527 milhões de reais.

Fonte : Veja, 9 de junho de 2015 http://veja.abril.com.br

Lula com um uniforme de prisão com a presidenta Dilma Rousseff cercados por manifestantes em São Paulo

Depois de novas revelações, partindo da noite de 16 ao 17 de março, novas manifestações foram aumentando em tamanho. É impressionante quão rápido essas manifestações são organizadas … logo após de ter conhecimento das novas revelações e ao bel-prazer midiático …

Dilma convidou Lula a voltar ao governo como chefe de cabinete (Ministro da Casa Civil), o que lhe poderia assegurar imunidade política frente as acusações. Entretanto, de acordo com o Procurador da República ninguém poderá ser excluido de uma investigação judicial.

Depois tem-se também que todo o barulho midiático foi baseado na divulgação de uma conversa telefônica entre Dilma e Lula e então notadamente numa interpretação dessa conversa.

Aqui está a conversa registrada pela Polícia Federal

• Dilma:Alô
• Lula: Alô
• Dilma: Lula, deixa eu te falar uma coisa
• Lula:  ala, querida. Ahn
• Dilma:  Seguinte, eu tô mandando o ‘Messias’ [Jorge Rodrigo Araújo Messias] junto com o papel pra gente ter elle, e só usa em caso de necessidade, que é o termo de posse, tá?!
• Lula:  Uhum. Tá bom, tá bom
• Dilma:  Só isso, você espera aí que elle tá indo aí
• Lula:  Tá bom, eu tô aqui, fico aguardando
• Dilma: Tá?!
• Lula:  Tá bom
• Dilma: Tchau
• Lula: Tchau, querida

O juiz Moro, Sérgio Moro, o responsável pela investigação “Lava Jato” permitiu a divulgação dessa conversa. Em permitindo a publicação dessa curta conversa telefônica o juiz demonstrou ainda mais claramente sua não imparcialidade, uma vez que ele já tinha se mostrado a favor do impeachment da presidenta. Ele viola aqui a constituição (de acordo com uma declaração da Secretaria de Comunicação Social da Presidência do Brasil).

Revelações incríveis? Essa conversa telefônica não diz absolutamente nada. Ela não fornece qualquer que seja prova de uma cumplicidade entre Dilma e Lula. O fato dela o proteger em nominando-o como ministro não prova nenhuma cumplicidade entre os dois. Trata-se aqui sobretudo de um bom scoop para a mídia.

Uma função de Lula como ministro já foi suspendida duas vezes, em apenas dois dias. O juiz federal de Brasília, Itagiba Catta Preta Neto, tentou bloquer a denominação invocando um obstáculo a justiça (em 17 de março), mas um tribunal do Rio de Janeiro ordenou a anulação dessa suspensão … mas depois o juiz Gilmar Mendes do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), a mais alta jurisdição do país, de novo veio a suspender a entrada de Lula na função de ministro do governo (em 18 de março).

O juiz Gilmar Mendes justifica sua decisão explicando que a presidenta brasileira tinha nomeado Lula ao governo com o fim de protegê-lo contra uma eventual prisão preventiva no quadro do caso Petrobras. Para Mendes a investigação por corrupção no tempo do ex-presidente (2003-2010) deverá ser (être ) expediente da justiça normal, isso quer dizer que deverá ficar nas mãos do juiz Sérgio Moro  que acusa Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva de “corrupção” e “lavagem de dinheiro”. (Le Monde, 18 de março de 2016)  

A saga judicial prossegue apesar das manifestações a favor do governo de Dilma em 18 de março (mais do que três milhões de brasileiros* foram mobilizados) organizados pela Frente Popular do Brasil que reuniu no conjunto sindicatos e movimentos campesinos como o Movimento dos Sem Terra.

Tentativa de “Golpe de Estado” (de acordo com Lula e seus partidários) ou “Revolução Colorida” desencadeada pela mais grave crise econômica da história do Brasil?

Quem são esses manifestantes contra-Lula e contra-Dilma?

Eles não são os pobres das favelas feitos a cair ainda mais pelas políticas neoliberais do governo PT.

De acordo com uma sondagem da Folha de São Paulo,  em sua maioria os manifestantes são de uma classe social privilegiada (com uma educação e um nível de remuneração elevado) (Veja a tabela aqui abaixo). Entre essa elite alguns estão a exigir o retorno dos militares ao poder. Tem-se ainda aqui que o período governamental de Lula (2003-2010) pareceria ter atendido os interesses socio-políticos e econômicos dessas classes privilegiadas do Brasil.

O perfil do manifestante na Avenida Paulista, porcentagem de acordo com a renda 

A maioria dos manifestantes que estão a exigir o linchamento do ex-presidente do Brasil e o e impeachment da presidenta Dilma Rousseff näo escondem sua ideologia neoliberal ou sua decepção em relação a todas as políticas -“-neoliberais com cara humana” — para o conjunto da classe média.

É necessário sublinhar que o governo Dilma Rousseff continua a promover um governo populista de tendência neoliberal. Por sua parte Lula foi um bom amigo de George W. Bush. Até mesmo antes de sua primeira presidência ele se apressou a fazer uma visita ao Pentágono… (dezembro 2002)

Será Dilma suave demais frente a Washington? Qualquer que seja o caso ela ainda está sendo espionada pela NSA. As ameaças contra ela, por suspeita de corrupção, terão provavelmente motivado a presidenta a ignorar as últimas revelações de espionagem (2015). Uma coisa certa entretanto é que a destabilização do governo Dilma vai a favor de Washington

Quem são os “justiceiros do Brasil. Quem financia esses movimentos de protestos?

Os principais movimentos de protestos tem usado muito as redes de comunicação social para chamar os brasileiros a manifestarem-se para o impeachment da presidenta. Os três principais movimentos de oposição são: Movimento Brasil, Estudantes pela Liberdade e Vem pra Rua.

https://blogbresil2014.wordpress.com

 https://blogbresil2014.wordpress.com

O “justiceiro” made in USA : Batman, o símbolo dos manifestantes anti-Dila e anti-Lula

http://www.diariodocentrodomundo.com.br/a-marcha-dos-aloprados-por-paulo-nogueira/

1.O Movimento dos Estudantes pela Liberdade

O movimento dos Estudantes pela Liberdade é um representante da organização americana “Students of Liberty”. Essa organização foi criada nos Estados Unidos. Os jovens participando nela se definem como “libertários”. Eles representam a direita e convidam os líderes do mundo inteiro a unirem-se aos Estados Unidos (estágios para estudantes). Eles referem-se também ao Instituto Cato e ao Senador Rand Paul. (Veja o artigo em inglês : Regime Change in Brazil? Right Wing Protest Movement Funded by US Billionaire Foundations, Training in US). Os Estudantes pela Liberdade estão também envolvidos nas manifestações contra o presidente Maduro da Venezuela, assim também como estiveram presentes na Praça Maidan na Ucrânia, em 2013.

Apesar da organização ter fins não lucrativos ela continua a buscar e a aceitar doações privadas de indivíduos, fundações, e contribuições. No seu primeiro ano a SFL teve 50 000 dólares de rendimentos. Os rendimentos aumentaram chegando a atingir 250 000 dólares no segundo ano, e depois 500 000 dólares no terceiro ano. As despesas foram de 65 % dos rendimentos no primeiro ano, 75 % no segundo ano, e 80 % no terceiro ano.

Ainda mais, o movimento é financiado também por investimentos de banqueiros como Hélio Beltran Filho, que faz parte do Grupo Ultra, um dos maiores conglomerados do país e o qual apoiou o golpe de estado de 1964 no Brasil. (Quem financia os protestos do dia 13?)

John Templeton Foundation – essa deu mais do que um milhão de dólares ao movimento americano Students for Liberty.

2. O Movimento Brasil Livre

O estudante fundador do Movimento Brasil Livre Kim Kataguiri recebeu apoio de organizações como Atlas e “Students for Liberty”. O MBL também recebeu doações de organizações estrangeiras. O movimento MBL, assim como o MEL (ou Students for Liberty) , é financiado em partes por Koch Brothers, magnatas do petróleo americano, e por formações do grupo Atlas, nos Estados Unidos, as quais são financiadas por homens de negócios. A ligação do MBL com a indústria Koch criou rumores de que o movimento contribui para a destabilização da petroleira brasileira Petrobras, ela mesmo estando agora abaixo de acusações de corrupção. May Vivian líder da época da PML afirmou ter recebido recursos da organização Atlas e dos “Students for Liberty”. Essas duas organizações foram criadas nos Estados Unidos e são apoiadas por fundações dos mesmos.

Kim Kataguiri líder da juventude conservativa do Brasil

 (Foto : Fernando Conrado / Democratize)

Aqui Kim Kataguiri ao lado do brasileiro mega-homem-de-negócios Jorge Gerau, presidente do conselho administrativo do Grupo Gerdo. Ele perdeu seu posto no Conselho de Administração da Petrobras em abril de 2014.

3. Movimento Vem pra Rua

O movimento Vem pra Rua (vemprarua.org.br) é financiado principalmente pela Fundação Estudar de Jorge Paulo Leman, um dos brasileiros mais ricos e proprietário da indústria de cerveja. Ele é também parceiro da brasserie AmBev, assim como também proprietário dos direitos da marca americana de fast food Burger King.

Esse movimento foi criado em setembro de 2013 e passou rapidamente de 20 a 300 000 amigos Facebook.

Esse movimento tenta dar uma imagem de que defende uma ideologia moderna e progressiva mas na realidade esse é um movimento conservativo e neoliberal sendo como são para a privatização da educação e da saúde.

“Another of the leading groups, Students For Liberty (EPL) – working together with the MBL – is the Brazilian associate of an organization with the same name in the U.S., also financed by the Koch Brothers. Furthermore, investment banker Hélio Beltrão Filho, the national head of EPL, inherited shares in Grupo Ultra, one of Brazil’s largest holdings. Grupo Ultra provided logistic and financial support to the right-wing military coup in 1964.

Fabio Ostermann and Juliano Torres, two of MBL leaders, were educated in the Atlas Leadership Academy, linked to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, financed by the notorious U.S. businessmen the Koch Brothers.”

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Are-the-Koch-Brothers-Behind-Brazils-Anti-Dilma-March-20150313-0001.html

Em resumindo pode-se dizer que os líderes dos acima mencionados movimentos são a favor do neoliberalismo, da privatização dos serviços de saúde e educação assim como da privatização das estatais, como por ex. da petroleira brasileira Petrobras.

O grupo Revoltados On Line “Made in Brazil”

Marcello Reis, um dos líderes do Revoltados On Line. / A.B.

Fonte : O Comercio do Impeachment, 10 de Março de 2016

Diz-se aqui que um outro ponto é que não se deseja uma outra Venezuela assim como não se deseja uma “terrorista” como chefe de estado. Marcello Reis, fundador do grupo Revoltados On Line, acha que Dilma detesta o Brasil e que infelizmente ela é uma terrorista que governa o país.(“Dima Rousseff odeia o Brasil, é uma terrorista que infelizmente está no poder nesse país”.) 700 000 pessoas* seguem esse movimento que quer banir o “petismo” ou seja o PT, e o bolivarianismo no Brasil. Esse líder é um exemplo dos que creem que só um golpe de estado militar permitiria por fim a esse governo “corrompido” … e aqui ele dá a posição do militar Jair Bolsonaro, conhecido por suas posições de extrema direita e anti-homosexual, como exemplo.

Brasil – “Que país é esse? …   E a “Revolução Colorida” à brasileira continua … !

 Micheline Ladouceur

Artigo original em francês :

“Révolution de couleur” à la brésilienne. Qui a peur de Dilma?

Traduzido do francês por Anna Malm, artigospoliticos.wordpress.com para Mondialisation.ca 

[*observe-se aqui entretanto que seria bom lembrar-se de que o Brasil tem 200,4 milhões de habitantes – 2013 Wikipedia] 

Featured image: Islamic State documents, including invoices, which militants abandoned while retreating in haste. / RT

An RT Documentary crew filming in northern Syria has seen Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL) documents abandoned by retreating terrorists and found by the Kurds that, along with captured IS recruits, provide a stunning insight into the alleged Turkey-IS oil trade links.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Syrian war, IS became a game-changer in Iraq and, in particular, Syria. Beheadings on camera, mass killings, and enslavement, as well as apparent connections to the Paris and Brussels attacks had become synonymous with the terror group, giving it wide publicity.

Running a viable militant organization with such remarkable capabilities would be impossible without some logistical and financial support from the outside.

Click here to watch this video

Turkey, which has been actively engaged in the Syrian war since the outset, has repeatedly denied claims that it is aiding IS. However, while Ankara insists that it is the jihadist group’s sworn enemy, facts on the ground often tell a different story.

RT has spoken to several witnesses who were involved in Islamic State’s trade activities and accessed the terror group’s documents, which provide insight into how and where foreign militants enter Syria to join the terrorist “state.”

Abandoned buildings used by ISIS militants in northern Syria. / RT

Detailed oil invoices

The RT Documentary team did most of its filming in the town of Shaddadi, located in the Syrian province Hasakah, which has been partly overrun by IS jihadists. Following the liberation of Shaddadi, which is home to some 10,000 people, RT filmed Kurdish soldiers walking around what used to be the homes of IS fighters and examining piles documents that had been left behind.

Some of the files seized at the scene turned out to be detailed invoices used by IS to calculate daily revenues from their oil fields and refineries, as well as the amount of oil extracted there. All the documents had Islamic State’s symbol at the top.

Example of an Islamic State invoice specifying the quantity of oil sold. / RT

The files showed that “IS has kept very professional records of their oil business,” said the author of the new RT Documentary on Islamic State filmed in northern Syria, who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons.

Every invoice included the name of the driver, the vehicle type driven, and the weight of the truck, both full and empty, as well as the agreed upon price and invoice number.

One of the discovered invoices dated 11 January, 2016, says that IS had extracted some 1,925 barrels of oil from Kabibah oil field and sold it for $38,342.

IS oil goes to Turkey – IS fighters come via Turkey

RT spoke to local residents who had been forced to work in the IS oil industry about what it was like working at the terrorist-controlled oil refinery and where the extracted oil was sold.

The locals attested that “the extracted oil was delivered to an oil refinery, where it was converted into gasoline, gas and other petroleum products. Then the refined product was sold,” the RT documentary’s author said. “Then intermediaries from Raqqa and Allepo arrived to pick up the oil and often mentioned Turkey.”

Important information revealing the connection between IS and Turkey was provided by a Turkish militant previously captured by the Kurds. The IS recruit said on camera that the terrorist group does, in fact, sell oil to Turkey.

“Without even us asking the fighter directly, he admitted that the reason why it was so easy for him to cross the Turkish border and join IS was, in part, due to the fact that Turkey also benefited. When asked how, he said that Turkey gets something out of it – something such as oil.”

RT was also able to speak with a Kurdish soldier in the area, who displayed a collection of passports he had gathered from the dead bodies of IS fighters. The documentary crew’s exclusive footage shows the documents of several jihadists who had come from all over the world, including countries such as Bahrain, Libya, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Passports belonging to Islamic State fighters bearing stamps from Istanbul, Turkey. / RT

Most of these foreign fighters seemed to have come via Turkey, as all of their passports contained entry stamps issued at Turkish border checkpoints.

A YPG member also provided some photos that were retrieved from a USB drive allegedly belonging to future IS militants. One photo showed three men standing in front of the Obelisk of Theodosius, known today as Sultanahmet Meydani, a famous landmark in Istanbul. The next photo showed the three among other fellow militants somewhere in Syria – all armed and equipped.

One of the IS fighters that RT interviewed revealed that there had been no border guards waiting for them when they crossed from Turkey into Syria.

Islamist propaganda printed in Istanbul

Turkey’s logistical support for extremist fighters trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, or at least its non-interference with their cross-border movements, has been widely reported, but little has been said about the ideological support coming from Turkish soil.

Among the documents left behind by the terrorists at an IS-run hospital, RT’s crew discovered an Islamist propaganda leaflet printed in Arabic titled “How to wage a perfect battle against the criminal Assad’s regime,” which described ways to combat the Syrian government.

Curiously, the brochure was printed in Turkey, with the cover openly displaying the postal address and phone number of an Istanbul printing house, supplemented by Facebook contacts.

Cover of an Islamist, anti-Assad propaganda leaflet printed in Istanbul, Turkey. / RT

“Many of the people spoke about the connection with Turkey. Turkey is the direct neighbor of IS. If it was willing to close the ‘connection’ between Turkey and IS, the terrorist organization could no longer survive,” the author of the RT documentary said, recalling interviews with Kurds and captured IS recruits. “If IS would stop receiving weapons, new recruits, food, and other help from Turkey, then IS would lose a big sponsor.”

Turkey benefits from Islamic State because the terrorist group provides it with cheap oil and is fighting both Syria’s government and Kurdish population. This is an opinion shared by both Kurds and their mortal enemies from the jihadist organization. The IS documents obtained by RT may provide additional evidence revealing the dirty game being played by the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Syria.

The defense budget of the United States stands at roughly ten times the amount of its closest rival in real terms. With more than seven hundred military facilities around the globe, and direct and indirect armed interventions in a number of countries in the Middle East and Africa the armed forces of the United States are consuming vast amounts of money. When one adds in the significant amounts of waste inherent in the military industrial complex, the grand scale of the Department of Defense budget for 2016 in the amount of $521.7 billion has still left military planners and defense industry lobbyists bemoaning it as insufficient.

It has recently been argued that the advancements and achievements by both Russia and China in modernizing their military capabilities over the past decade have caught the U.S. military establishment off guard. This is up to debate; however, the fact remains that the only real potential adversaries of the U.S. have exponentially improved their military forces, mainly in the area of missile and aircraft capabilities, but also in the area of naval power projection and nuclear submarine deterrence over the past decade. The conventional military forces of both nations have been greatly improved in all respects.

In light of the United States losing its edge conventionally, many would assume that the U.S. could always fall back on its nuclear deterrence capability. This is also proving; however, not to be a suitable strategy as the U.S. has invested very little in this area of defense over the past half century. China has fielded indigenously designed and manufactured SSBNs to add a viable third leg to its nuclear triad in only the past five years, while Russia has greatly modernized its silo and mobile ICBMs, as well as fielding advanced electronic warfare systems over the past decade. The United States has apparently decided to utterly neglect its own nuclear capabilities since the dissolving of the Soviet Union. The U.S. defense establishment is now faced with not only the  major challenge of modernizing its nuclear deterrence capabilities, but also where to find the vast sums of money required to accomplish this feat.

Budgeting for a Revitalized Nuclear Deterrent

At the beginning of 2015, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would cost approximately $348 billion (USD) to upgrade and maintain all components of the nuclear triad. Eight months later in August 2015, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimated that it would cost $700 billion to maintain the current nuclear deterrence posture with necessary modernization and improvement over the next 25 years. In order to catch up on all the necessary upgrades and improvements/replacements of nuclear weapons, both air and sea based delivery systems and the command and control elements that manage them all, costs will hit annual levels of $30 – $35 billion starting in 2025 and lasting to at least 2036 according to the best estimates.

The above estimates assume that spending on the nuclear triad will remain between 3% and 5% of total defense spending, or in other words at traditional levels. A figure of $30 billion annually on the nuclear arsenal would thus yield a total annual defense budget of $600 billion. The 2017 proposed budget already stands at $582.7 billion, including an overseas operation contingency of $58.8 billion. As defense budgets have ballooned since 2001, the defense establishment has become accustomed to having large budgets. This has led to a culture of want, waste and the misguided allocation of funds to weapons programs that have been long on spending and short on performance. The Joint Strike Fighter and Littoral Combat Ship programs are prime examples.

An Outdated Nuclear Force

At a glance, the U.S. nuclear triad seems quite robust, but upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that most of the weapons and delivery systems that comprise it are in desperate need of modernization. From the weapons themselves, both ICBMs and cruise missiles, to the aircraft and naval vessels meant to deliver them, most have been in service for over 30 years, some more than 60 years. Although these systems have been constantly updated, they are still based on designs that originated between the 1950s and the 1970s.

ICBMs, Bombs and Cruise Missiles

The only ICBMs land-based in silos within the United States are the 450 units of LGM-30G Minuteman IIIs. The Minuteman class of ICBMs was designed and manufactured between 1962 and 1970. The Minuteman III has a 170 kiloton yield, which is not high by ICBM standards, but it was significantly the first ICBM to utilize Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) making interception more difficult. The Minuteman III is slated to remain in service through 2030.

Minuteman III test launch

The submarine based deterrent utilizes the Trident II submarine-launched ICBM. The original Trident I (C4) was first deployed in 1979, with the Trident II (D5) following it into service in 1990. The Trident II is carried aboard the fourteen Ohio Class SSBNs is service with the U.S. Navy, and were designed with a 30 year life span to match the vessels. This means that they have a planned deployment until 2027; however, a life extension program was deemed necessary and Lockheed Martin was awarded the D5LEP contract in 2007, with the first upgraded Trident II being test fired from the USS Tennessee SSBN-734, in 2012.

The aircraft launched bombs and cruise missiles of the U.S. nuclear arsenal date from the 1950s and 1970s. The B61 bomb was originally designed in 1961, and has gone through an upgrade as recently as 2012. The B61-Mod12 was tested in 2015 and will increase the life of this free fall bomb by 20 years. The B83, which was designed in 1983 is also still in service. While designed in the 1970s, the AGM-86B nuclear cruise missile went into service in 1980 with over 1,700 units produced. The AGM-86B is an Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) that was designed to be launched by the B-52 Stratofortress, which can carry a total of 20 of them. The ALCM gave the bombers some stand-off capability, and the high number of missiles per aircraft increased the probability of the missiles overwhelming the Soviet air defense capability of the era. Both the AGM-86B and the B-52 Stratofortress are still the backbone of the airborne leg of the U.S. nuclear triad.

Strategic Bombers

The United States relies heavily on the venerable B-52 Stratofortress as the main component of its strategic bomber force capable of delivering nuclear bomb and cruise missile attacks in the event of a nuclear confrontation. The B-52 has been utilized as a nuclear deterrent and as a conventional bomber since it first entered service in 1955. It is the longest serving strategic bomber in the world today, with the Russian Tu-95 Bear following closely behind by only one year. The B-52 has gone through a number of life extension programs over the course of its 61 years of service; however, it is still an aircraft that was designed in the 1950s. With no viable replacement, it is expected to serve well into the 2040s.

B-52 Stratofortess with available payload options. Still impressive after 61 years of viligant service.

The Boeing/Rockwell B-1 Lancer supersonic bomber was designed to penetrate Soviet air defenses at high speed to deliver both nuclear bombs and cruise missiles. A total of 66 of these aircraft are currently in service, having been converted to a conventional bombing role after the Soviet Union dissolved in the early 1990s. The B-1B was designed in the 1970s and largely produced in the early 1980s. It has been upgraded and modernized numerous times over the intervening decades and is currently undergoing a $1 billion plus upgrade to its communications and radar capabilities.

B1-B “The Bone” at cruising speed with variable swept wings extended

The Northrop-Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth capable bomber rounds out the U.S. strategic bomber arsenal. Developed in the late 1980s and first entering service in 1997, the B-2 was quite controversial at the time due to the high cost of the program. A total of 21 aircraft were built, with a total cost of approximately $45 billion. This seems almost laughable today, considering the $1.3 trillion that has been dumped into the B-35 Joint Strike Fighter program that still has yet to yield significant results.

Although quite capable when it was initially utilized, the stealth capabilities of the B-2 have been compromised over time, with the advent of much more capable air defense radars by the Russian and Chinese militaries. The B-2 would have a negligible effect in any conventional role against either of these potential adversaries due to their limited payload of 40,000 lbs. compared to the 70,000 lbs. payload of the B-52, and would thus most likely only be effective in a nuclear role today; however, the ability to deliver smart bombs against command and control and air defense installations must still be seen as a potential mission for this aircraft.

B2 Spirit stealth bomber seen from dead ahead

It has long been acknowledged that the venerable B-52, although stout and reliable, needs a modern strategic bomber to help it shoulder the load. The Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) program, already awarded to Northrop-Grumman, envisions a totally new aircraft that is capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear payloads over unlimited distances (with in-air refueling) while remaining undetected with next generation stealth technologies. The Pentagon’s estimate of a total budget of $55 billion, with an initial operational date beginning in 2025 seems very optimistic compared to other high profile aircraft procurement efforts in recent years. The Joint Strike Fighter program has already racked up $1.3 trillion and has produced very little. Especially considering that the U.S. Airforce wants 80 to 100 aircraft, the initially estimate seems woefully inadequate.

Nuclear Submarines (SSBNs)

There are fourteen Ohio Class SSBNs in the U.S. Navy, designed with a thirty year life span. That life span is coming to an end starting in 2029 with the earliest commissioned boat the USS Ohio. The last four Ohio Class submarines were converted into guided missile submarines (SSGNs) and carry approximately 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles and a number of Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

The Ohio class SSBNs are highly capable vessels and have been conducting nuclear deterrent patrols since their introduction starting in the early 1980s. They carry a total of 24 Trident II ICBMs each, with the fourteen subs in class accounting for half of the active thermonuclear warheads in the U.S. active inventory. They were designed to provide the majority of deterrence in the nuclear triad, having the greatest ability to move undetected across the globe and to be able to remain submerged for years on end due to their nuclear power source. They are extremely quiet and carry a formidable nuclear and defensive conventional armament.

Ohio Class SSBN in the process of opening the Trident II missile launch bays

The procurement program to replace the fourteen Ohio Class SSBNs is known as the SSBN(X) program. Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding were both awarded contracts to develop the next generation SSBN in 2007 and it is hoped that advanced levels of design and development of a viable replacement vessel will be a reality starting in 2017. Due to the required secrecy it is still yet to be announced whether the new SSBN will be based on the Virginia Class SSN, a revamping of the original Ohio Class or a whole new design. Only twelve units are planned to replace the existing fourteen boats. Interestingly, while each Ohio Class SSBN cost approximately $2 billion when originally procured, the first SSBN(X) will cost the U.S. tax payers $12.4 billion. It is estimated that once the initial investment in design and development in the first sub has been made, unit cost should drop to $5 billion per submarine, still 2.5 times the cost of the Ohio Class.

Misallocation of Funds: Military Indusrial Complex Boondoggles

In considering the overwhelming importance of maintaining a viable and secure nuclear deterrent capability, and the significant costs associated, one has to wonder how the U.S. defense establishment has decided to spend the trillions that it has been allocated over the past decade. If the $700 billion figure put forth by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments listed earlier is taken at face value, could the U.S. government have allocated these funds years earlier, if it had been a priority, and catastrophic failures of foreign military adventurism had been avoided? The answer must be an unequivocal yes.

If the United States ruling establishment had truly been devoted to national defense and not misguided imperial adventures in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, there were ample funds available, considerable technical expertise and a surplus of ability within the defense industry to modernize and improve the U.S. nuclear deterrence triad. Additionally, if only two misguided and failed military procurement programs are considered, the Joint Strike Fighter and the Littoral Combat Ship respectfully, it becomes readily apparent that the funds were available.

The Misguided Wars of Empire

Between 2001 and the current year, the United States Armed Forces have been engaged in combat operations of varying degrees in the nations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. Covert operations are ongoing in various other nations of the world, as well as the current military patrols by the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea and the broader “Pivot to Asia” engaged upon by the Obama administration. When discussing the viability of military expenditures required to accomplish a modern and robust nuclear deterrent, past and current military operations must be taken into account.

The all-encompassing “War on Terror” has conservatively cost the citizens of the U.S. almost $2 trillion dollars since 2001. The Mercatus Center citing the Congressional Research Service has concluded that the “War on Terror” cost the U.S. approximately $1.68 trillion between the years of 2001 and 2014. As the graph below shows, most of this cost was directly attributable to the Department of Defense. A bare fraction of the total went to Veterans Administration efforts to manage the medical and psychological needs of the veterans of the conflict(s).

A mere tertiary review of the economic costs of the misguided and mismanaged wars of the United States on global “Terrorism”, which that same government created, funded and supported in so many of its varied forms over a period of 37 years mostly in the Middle East and Central Asia, reveals that the U.S. government squandered the blood and treasure of its citizenry on a grand scale. The wars of “Pax Americana” in the words of former Vice President Dick Cheney, wars of imperial hegemony cloaked in the legitimacy of combating global terrorists of every stripe, ideology and creed have in very real terms materially robbed the United States of a very sensible and credible nuclear deterrent defense.

The JSF and the LCS Failures

The two highest profile examples of defense establishment waste in U.S. history, are undoubtedly the Joint Strike Fighter and Littoral Combat Ship programs. At the most basic of levels the military practicality of both programs was questionable from the start, with both programs being controversial from their inception for a number of reasons. Many members of the Armed Forces, the U.S. Congress and military industry experts questioned their feasibility early on, and as the price tag mounts and the results continue to disappoint, their warnings and objections serve as stark warnings of the waste inherent in any fascist (merger of corporate and government) system. National defense suffers while the military industry, lobbyists, insiders and members of Congress reap economic benefits totally divorced from a viable national defense posture.

The Joint Strike Fighter program was arguably a failure from its conceptual origins. Never in the history of air warfare, has one aircraft design ever been able to meet the needs of all intended uses. This holds true over the century of air warfare experience and historically established doctrine, and yet the JSF was conceived with the very notion that one aircraft could perform all tasks. The JSF was intended to provide the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Airforce with one platform that could meet all of their specific needs with minimal alteration and maximum rationalization of main airframe and parts. A rate of 70% commonality was called for, yet now it is estimated that there is roughly only 15% commonality of parts between each version of the aircraft. The cost of the program has ballooned to an estimated $1.3 trillion over the past decade, and the aircraft has yet to reach initial operational capacity (IOC). IOC requires at least one squadron of aircraft is fielded with the requisite trained pilots that can carry out the tasks assigned to the aircraft in question.

F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter

The JSF F-35 Lightning II is a failure in many respects. It has been out fought by an F-16 in dogfighting trials, its software glitches render its target acquisition radar and flight controls non-operable intermittently, its cockpit glass inhibits proper pilot visibility, not to mention it’s per unit cost has increased to the point that the Airforce will have to cut its operational squadrons by 20% in order to afford to field the fighter. The JSF program price tag continues to increase with no end in sight.

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program is the U.S. Navy’s big debacle of the past decade. Designed to provide both the littoral capabilities of traditional small naval combatants such as the frigate and corvette with the fire support power of the battleship in support of landing forces and land forces operating close to littoral waters, the LCS was perhaps as doomed to failure as a naval concept as the JSF was in air warfare. Over the course of development, two competing LCS designs were approved by the U.S. Navy, the Austral USA Independence Class and Lockheed Martin Freedom Class designs being accepted, with an initial order of ten vessels per class.

Both vessel designs have failed to meet their design parameters and capabilities. They lack the surface combatant capabilities of a frigate as far as speed and maneuverability, lack the fire support capability of battleships for certain, and have fallen woefully short of promised AWS or ASW capabilities as well. In addition, the Lockheed Martin battle management system and phased array radars do not mesh with the AEGIS standard of all other U.S. Navy vessels and aircraft. The LCS vessels cannot speak the same language so to speak, as all other U.S. Navy assets. This problem, seven years after the first vessel was launched has yet to be rectified. Neither design has even been able to meet the operation range requirement set out by the Navy of 3,500 nautical miles at 14 knots, achieving only 2,000 nautical miles at this speed. The cost per unit of both designs stands at $1.8 billion today, up from an official 2010 U.S. Navy budgeted amount of $490 million.

LSC USS Freedom and USS Independence at sea

Conclusion

As the preeminent power in the world, though waning in influence in all respects, it would seem logical that the United States government would hold its nuclear deterrent capabilities as the quintessential aspect of any viable national defense strategy. Yet it is obvious that this is not the case, that the defense establishment has woefully allowed this defense capability to erode and age to a level that is unacceptable. A strong nuclear deterrence is perhaps more in need now than at any time since the height of the Cold War.

Although the costs of modernizing and revitalizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent triad are significant, they are not outside the realm of feasibility, if a number of wasteful military programs and harmful overseas endeavors are halted in short order. The JSF and LCS programs were doomed to failure from the start, and have proven to be bottomless pits of military industrial complex waste at a grand scale. The U.S. tax payers deserve better. The U.S. warfighter tasked with defending his/her homeland deserves better.

If national defense is truly the aim of the Department of Defense, as it should be, then a major effort must be made to modernize and revamp the U.S. nuclear defense capability. This will require the abandonment of the current wasteful and harmful international defense posture that has U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen stationed all over the globe, engaged in a contrived and unwinnable war against “international terrorism” , the ending of wasteful defense industry weapons procurement programs, and the adoption of a rational and logical national defense strategy. Profit, politics and imperial ambition must once again yield to classical liberal ideals of a republican nation-state living in an open and yet vigilant harmony with the rest of the world. These United States of America can and must regain their rightful place amongst the nations of the world, inspiring the world with its ideals of liberty, conspiring against no one and yet maintaining a vigorous and robust defense against any transgressors that aim to harm her.

Brian Kalman is a management professional in the marine transportation industry. He was an officer in the US Navy for eleven years. He currently resides and works in the Caribbean.

Within days of the 28th anniversary of the chemical weapons attack on the residents of Halabja in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region – which a 1991 Human Rights Watch investigation called “the single largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in the world” – we are monitoring reports of chemical weapons once again being used against a civilian population in Iraq.

The Islamic State or Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) – against the predominantly Iraqi Shia Turkmen residents of Taza Khurmato (also known as Taza), a farming village just south of the city of Kirkuk.

This week, I talked with Mustafa al-Obeidi, head of an Iraqi humanitarian organization who visited the village of Taza just a week after the March 8, 2016 chemical weapons attack by ISIS. He claims that as many as 6,000 inhabitants have been made violently ill by the mustard gas and chlorine-containing rockets used in the attack. This far outstrips media reports, which estimate 500 to 800 casualties.

Al-Obeidi claims that the public health center in Taza could confirm the high number of those affected, however Iraq’s Ministry of Health has asked the center’s medical staff to stay quiet. He believes that the Iraqi government might be downplaying the severity of the attack in order to avoid panic.

Taza is located near Kirkuk in Northern Iraq and its estimated population of 35,000 are mostly Iraqi Shia Turkmen – one of the many groups targeted by ISIS militants. It is close to the village of al-Bashir, which has been held by ISIS since June 2014, and Taza has been subjected to repeated attacks ever since (read more about these attacks on our Iraq Security and Humanitarian Monitor timeline).

Most of Taza’s residents lack the resources necessary to seek treatment anywhere other than the village’s small health center, which is poorly equipped to respond to the crisis. Al-Obeidi emphasized his belief that the Iraqi government’s response has been inadequate and called for a militarized decontamination plan to evacuate the areas affected, allow experts to conduct necessary tests, and provide immediate treatment to those suffering.

Children affected by ISIS’s chemical weapons attack on Taza. Photo by Mustafa al-Obeidi

Al-Obeidi told me that over 40 Katyusha rockets landed on Taza when the attack happened, striking 12 homes. He added that the neighbors of these damaged houses were the most affected by these chemical attacks because the gas turned into dust and continues to contaminate  surrounding areas.

On March 12, Popular Mobilization (PMU) General Abu Radha al-Najar said that an Iranian medical team specialized in chemical gases arrived in Taza to provide treatment for those injured. On March 13, Taza’s District Director Hussein Adil announced the arrival of American and German medical experts to run tests on areas affected by the mustard gas.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has confirmed through laboratory testing that ISIS has indeed used chemical weapons containing mustard gas in Iraq. Mustard gas is a chemical agent absorbed through inhalation, consumption, or direct contact. Symptoms include severe itching and burning of the skin, eyes, and respiratory tract, skin discoloration, painful blisters, shortness of breath and, in many cases, death. Unlike other chemical agents, symptoms of mustard gas exposure do not appear for 12 to 24 hours, making it more difficult to detect and treat.

At least one woman and three children, Fatima (3 years old), Masuma (10 years old) and Ali Mousa (6 months old) have died from mustard gas exposure in Taza.

For more on ISIS’s use of chemical weapons in Taza and elsewhere in Iraq, visit our blog post.

Subscribe to ISHM for ongoing monitoring of this and other crises in Iraq.

Something was amiss in Arizona on Tuesday. As Hillary Clinton claimed victory in the state’s Democratic primary, thousands of voters were left out to dry, with shuttered polling places, endless lines, and widespread reports of disenfranchisement.

In Maricopa County, which includes the capital Phoenix, voters waited up to five hours to cast a ballot after the County Elections Office slashed the number of polling sites from 200 in 2012 to just 60 this year. As the state’s most populous county, this amounted to more than 20,000 voters for every available polling location.

Notably, many Latino areas were left with either just one or no polling places. Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell defended that decision, saying, “we looked at an area, and factored into that how many early ballots we usually get in that area and how many people normally vote at the polls. We didn’t look at it as legislative districts. We looked at the overall picture of our voters.”

In response, Arizona Central columnist Elvia Diaz wrote,

“So, it is no coincidence many poor and predominantly Latino areas didn’t get a polling place. Purcell and her staff figured few of them vote anyway. She just decided to discount them. Really.”

And despite the sizable turnout, major news networks, including CNN, called the race just minutes after polls closed while many voters would still wait hours before even casting a ballot.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, expressed frustration over the early call. “I’m not predicting victory, but I’m not predicting defeat, either,” he told CNN. “I mean, we have to wait and see ’til the votes are counted.”

The Arizona Democratic Party is also investigating reports that numerous Democratic voters were mistakenly identified as “independent” in the voter database, which would exclude them from the closed primary. Many of the misidentified voters were given provisional ballots, which may not have even been counted.

As the Phoenix New Times reports,

“the day was so hectic, that as it became clear Clinton won, Sanders supporter Sheila Ryan said she just couldn’t believe it: ‘What about all the provisional ballots? What about all the ballots from [people still in line]? Are those getting counted?'”

What’s more, just days before the vote, the state’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey signed a law making “felony for anyone but a family member, roommate, caregiver, postal worker or elections official to collect early ballots,” the Associated Press reported. The new law made it “nearly impossible for voter-outreach groups to collect and drop off early ballots.”

As University of Florida professor Michael McDonald pointed out, Arizona is one of the states that would have required federal approval to alter its voting laws until the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Stood in line a long time to vote? Perhaps you now better understand significance of #SCOTUS nomination battle https://t.co/Lp1Fo4DhuJ

— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) March 23, 2016

As Sanders supporter Patti Serrano told the Phoenix New Times, “I think there’s voter suppression going on, and it is obviously targeting particular Democrats. Many working -class people don’t have the privilege to be able to stand in line for three hours.”

There were other issues too. A number of polling places reportedly ran out of ballots while four locations in Tucson received bomb threats forcing at least one to evacuate.

The disenfranchisement did not escape the attention of others, either, including Sanders himself.

It’s a national disgrace that people have to wait hours to cast a vote in any election.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 23, 2016

Arizona officials manufactured an election mess. They reduced the # of polling places & were entirely unprepared for a high-turnout primary.

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) March 23, 2016

Ultimately, Clinton was credited with winning 57.8 percent of the vote to Sanders’ 39.8 percent. But more than have 36,000 people signed a White House petition calling on the Obama administration to investigate the voter fraud and suppression in Arizona.

Nowadays, a variety of means are being used in order to implement and extend the “controlled chaos” in the national economies and societies in the geopolitical struggle. The actor, who is using the tool, is maintaining the “controlled chaos” within the opposing country.

Steven Mann, the US foreign policy expert, who took part in the developing of many of the current “controlled chaos” hotspots in various parts of the world, speaks openly of the need to use “increased level strongly-worded criticism”, and causing “controlled chaos” to secure and promote the US national interests.

Steven Mann is a key figure behind the development of the “controlled chaos” theory as a means of furthering US national interests. Mann was born in 1951 and graduated from Oberlin College in 1973 with a B.A. in German. In 1974 he obtained an M.A. in German Literature from the Cornell University and has been a member of the Foreign Service since 1976. He received a Harriman Institute for Advanced Soviet Studies scholarship to obtain an M.A. in Political Science from the Columbia University in 1985-1986. He graduated from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

He began his career as a US embassy staffer in Jamaica. Later he worked in Moscow, at the USSR desk in the State Department, and at the State Department Operations Center (a 24-hour crisis center). He served as the acting chief of mission in Micronesia (1986-1988, Mongolia (1988), and Armenia (1992). Between 1991 and 1992 he worked at the US Department of Defense dealing with Russia and Eastern Europe, and in 1992-1994 he was assigned to Sri Lanka as deputy ambassador. Between 1995 and 1998, he was employed as the head of the India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka desk at the State Department. Since 2001, Mann has been a presidential special representative to the Caspian Sea countries acting as the main spokesman for US energy interests in that region and a lobbyist for the Aktau-Baku-Tbilisi-Jeikhan oil pipeline.

Upon graduating from the NDU in 1992, Mann wrote an article titled Chaos Theory and Strategic Thought // Parameters (US Army War College Quarterly, Vol. XXII, Autumn 1992, pp. 54-68).  In this article, he lays out the following theses: “We can learn a lot if we view chaos and reorganization as opportunities, and not pursue stability as an illusory goal…” “The international environment is an excellent example of a chaotic system, with “self-organizing criticality” being a useful analytical tool. The world is doomed to be chaotic, because the many human actors in politics have different objectives and values.” “Each actor in politically critical systems creates conflict energy, …which provokes a change in status quo thus participating in creating a critical situation…and any course of action brings the state of affairs into an unavoidable cataclysmic reorganization.”

The main thought which flows from Mann’s thoughts is to bring the system into a state of “political criticality.” Then the system, given certain conditions, will unavoidably enter chaos and “transformation.” Mann also writes that “Give the US advantage in communications and growing global mobility capabilities, the virus (in the sense of an ideological infection) will be self-replicating and will expand chaotically. Therefore our national security will be preserved.” And further: “This is the only way to establish a long-term world order. If we cannot accomplish such an ideological change in the whole world, we will have only sporadic periods of calm between catastrophic transformations.” Mann’s words about “world order” are there for the sake of political correctness. Because his article speaks only of chaos which, judging by Mann’s words, will be the “best guarantee of US national security,” with only the US able to preserve itself as an “island of order” in an ocean of “controlled criticality” or global chaos.

According to the “theory”, dismantling of the already existing nation-states, traditional cultures, and civilizations can be accomplished by:

• De-ideologizing the population
• Dumping the “ballast” of the already existing values, and replacing them with one’s own set
• Increasing material expectations, especially among the elite
• Loss of control over the economy and its ultimate destruction
• Unlawful actions by supposedly spontaneous movements which often have ethnic or religious character

Once implemented, these key policies lead to “color revolutions.”

“Controlled chaos” theory is based on reforming the mass consciousness, worldviews, and the spiritual sphere by subjecting individuals to modern means of manipulation. It amounts to a global psychological operation that is part of globalization and which destroys the culture of solidarity and replaces it with a cult of money and of Social-Darwinist stereotypes concerning the role of an individual in society. The masses’ ability to offer resistance through self-organization is thus diminished.

Given the effects of such technologies, the “controlled chaos” actors are pursuing two objectives:

1. Reducing the size of the population by eliminating those who are not of use to the architects of the new world order. Neoliberal reforms bring about a demographic catastrophe by reducing birth rates and increasing death rates. The sexual revolution, propaganda of hedonism, individualism, and consumerism reduce birth rates. Social-Darwinism and indifference to the suffering of close ones deprive people of their will to live and increase death rates. The large number of poor and homeless people amounts to a de-facto euthanasia mechanism, as people in these categories die quickly. Though more people are pulled down to replace them.
2. The objective of destroying a nation states that imposing control over them is intercepted by transnational corporations, crime syndicates, supranational organizations and institutions, which answer to those who employ controlled chaos technologies. This task combines “soft power” with barbaric military aggression (Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya). This process facilitates the aggressors’ control over the global financial, military, and information resources.

We should note that the US and the EU economies grow not by increasing their output but by reapportioning wealth between the strong and weak states. This is accomplished by weakening the nation-state (usually by drawing it into a debt trap), privatization, and buying up all manner of national assets, including natural ones.

Under the pressure of the financial institutions, the nation-state becomes a tool of this type of globalization by privatizing and reducing expenditures on social needs or on maintaining science and culture. States also organize mass illegal labor migrations which render individual workers much cheaper which deprives them of rights. In combination, the two tasks deprive the target state of its ability to function as an international actor. It is a covert way of eliminating economic competitors. The main symptoms of the loss of one’s sovereignty include the inability to perceive and interpret the situation, rise above it, assert one’s identity, and the ability to implement bold, breakthrough ideas.

As a result:

1. The state is no longer self-governing, it does not have a development strategy, and it cannot ensure decent living conditions for its citizens and guarantee constitutional rights.
2. Corrupt officials play a key role in controlling the economy and society.
3. The middle class is disappearing, it is being disorganized, and alienated.
4. Political parties and movements are mere facades.
5. Societal movements have no actual effect on politics.
6. Citizens are passive and have major identity problems (state, ethnic, family).

Let’s look at a few examples of controlled chaos implementation aimed at depriving foundations of national independence.

1. Neutralizing the drive to develop.

– Destruction of state policy apparatus by seeding it with agents of influence.

– Infection through corruption, promoting a cult of money.

– Government bureaucratization.

– Removing the scientific community from influencing the country’s policies.

– Mythmaking: “the market will fix everything.”

2. Blocking the reaction reflex

– Mass export of cult organizations.

– Use of political technologies in election campaigns.

– Transforming the media into market actors.

– Promoting a primitive mass culture.

3. Destroying communications links

– Individualization through neoliberalism, the atomization of society.

– Destroying community ties.

– Destroying transport networks.

– Promoting ethnic and religious conflicts.

– Class fragmentation into rich and poor class.

– Generational conflict.

4. Reducing the ability to influence events

– Use of manipulative techniques in election campaigns.

– Promoting neoliberal ideologies, such as individualism and atomization.

– Promoting the cult of money and a system of primitive values.

– Shutting down independent media.

– Promoting corruption and criminalization.

5. Reducing the ability to pursue development:

– Destroying domestic science and educational progress.

– Promoting deindustrialization through privatization, bankruptcy, and destruction of professional training system.

– Elimination of capital controls.

– Credit dependence on international financial systems.

– Inability to resist import dependence.

– Preventing the society’s active participation in the country’s development.

In conclusion:

1. The US is currently the main actor using “controlled chaos” tools with the aim of seizing control over a country or region and preventing it from pursuing its own development. Controlled chaos is de-facto neo-colonialism which transforms countries into resource suppliers to the First World. It entails predatory relations in trade and property acquisition.
2. Using controlled chaos technologies runs against international norms of non-interference in domestic affairs. It means there is a basis for banning and international monitoring over controlled chaos technologies. Over the last several decades, several countries were in favor of ensuring international information security through legal agreements, now they could also initiate similar actions in regard to controlled chaos technologies.

“Hagop Tchouroukian, an Armenian shopkeeper, lost his home when a homemade bomb struck two years ago, killing a woman and two children in his building in the Midan neighborhood. He has moved elsewhere but returns to the area every day to work in his shop.

His 4-year-old twins play in the street, something that would not have been possible before the cease-fire, he said. Before the truce, two or three mortar shells fell every day. Now there have just been one or two in the past two weeks, he said.” ~ Washington Post

Perhaps more than any other region in Syria, Aleppo has been the hub of the NATO/US/Gulf media and NGO propaganda, intent on demonization of the Syrian Government and Syrian Arab Army.  White Helmet central, Aleppo has been the concealed nest of Al Nusra operatives, overt or covert, disguised as the ‘Syria Civil Defence’, white helmeted “saviours of all Humanity” provided the Humanity has no associations with the Syrian Government, Shia, Kurdish or Christian factions in or surrounding Aleppo.

Since the Syrian Arab Army has advanced deeper into Al Nusra and ISIS territory uprooting the terrorist cells, the truth has revealed itself by degrees.

Probably first to break mainstream media ranks, was Stephen Kinzer of the Boston Globe:

“COVERAGE OF the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why.

For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: “Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.”

This was followed by Peter Oborne of the Daily Mail:

“The Syrian army is approaching her town [Aleppo teacher] as it regains ground from Islamic State across eastern Aleppo: “The fighters are preparing ambushes with explosives. They are moving their wives and families out. They are keeping us as human shields for them.”

The heroism of some of the people I met is beyond computation.

One headmaster told me how he has tried to keep his school open in an Islamic State area. He was held in solitary confinement for 30 days in a cell with no toilet. Occasionally, he was beaten with an electric cable. Once a box full of scorpions was put into his cell. He was told that “this was the fate of every Shabiha [government worker]. You will be an example to everyone who works for the government.”

More recently, even the Washington Post has reluctantly joined the small band of truth-sayers disseminating the reality of terrorist besieged and occupied Aleppo.  Finally it is being revealed that the streets claimed to be furrowed by Syrian Government barrel bombs were in fact scarred by terrorist Hell Cannon missiles ranging from crude cooking gas canisters filled with nails, glass and a variety of projectiles to mortars & shells fired indiscriminately into Government held civilian areas.

This information comes as no surprise to 21st Century Wire, we have been reporting the reality on the ground in Aleppo for some time now thanks to updates received from residents living inside the Government held areas, which offer some refuge from terrorist atrocities being committed elsewhere in the City.

We have also mentioned how the City of Aleppo has been reduced to one fifth of its original size, residents being driven from their homes by terrorist factions into the relative safety of the Government held pockets.

One particular resident has been particularly outspoken regarding the “moderate rebels” and the unstoppable tide of Rami Jarrah, Syria Campaign, White Helmet propaganda.  All names are withheld for their security as there is an ever present risk of reprisals from the now pressurized terrorist gangs and brigands who remain trapped by the SAA, Hezbollah advances.

“President Assad is not exterminating his people. I’m still alive, and no one said a word to me. If something bad happened to me in the near future, it would be because of the terrorists’ policy of extermination. I’m living happily because there are Syrian soldiers who are defending us in hot summers and cold winters. The UN is lying as usual in their reports about Aleppo and Syria in general.” ~ Voice From Aleppo: Stop the Lies

For all previous reports from this individual who has lived through the daily terrorist incursions and shelling in Aleppo,  for the last 9 months please go to The Wall Will Fall.

We are publishing their latest report in full [with minimal edits] as it contains valuable insights not reported by the Western media even with their new found counter-propaganda zeal.

Voice From Aleppo:

“The best thing outside powers can do in the interest of peace is to include civil society groups in future negotiations, listen to what they have to say, and refrain from imposing top-down solutions that ignore the Syrian people”.

The above paragraph is mentioned at the end of an article in the Boston Review,  “Syria after the Ceasefire”, by Stephen Zunes.

However, if the Syrian people dared to say that they want Assad, the western powers will either punish the Syrian people more and more till they are all well tamed; or the western media will explain what is happening as follows: “Syrian people are not free, they are terrified from regime repression and punishment. They are forced to vote for Assad”.

Therefore, let’s go and free those people by killing their leader and destroying their army!

How to Fix a Country That’s Broken Beyond Repair?

Although the Boston Review article is talking about how complex the Syrian crisis is, they persist with mentioning all the stereotypes and clichés, as if they are tying themselves with ropes and asking stupidly:

“What a mess! What shall we do now?”

Imposing democracy on countries and societies that have different ruling types, is like imposing Apple Macintosh operating system upon a Microsoft Windows one.  Result is a failed and damaged PC. The usual next argument that comes after that mess would be:

“Now that we have a damaged PC, what shall we do to clean the mess?”.

The PC could be useful only for junk markets, where people can buy its dismantled contents by piece. Dismantling war-torn countries and societies have the same result and future.

“Corruption!”: Everyone Has It

After years of 24/7 brainwashing of the world with tons of lies, on all type of media, in focusing on ‘spreading democracy’ by force on other nations, or changing regimes that don’t obey them, and after all these evil strategies were in vain… perhaps they could solve the problem by removing the “democracy glasses” they forced the globe to wear in the first place. Apart from anything else, no one believes that they really wanted to spread real democracy and freedom in the world. It’s all phony and fake versions of democracy that destroy nations.

Syrians were living peacefully for decades, happily and independent. We had corruption? And who doesn’t have it [Organized crime, and white collar crime? Who doesn’t have it? An ever increasing wealth gap? Who doesn’t have it?]?

They need serious reforms in politics and government? Many reforms actually took place between 2000-2010, and many of the old corrupted figures left Syria before 2005 to live abroad – with their stolen fortunes. These same corrupt figures went on to become the “moderate rebels” greatest supporters.

Yes, a new layer of corrupted figures started to pop up, and it’s just a continuous work, just like cleaning houses. There will be new dust covering the surface every week.  You deal with new dust by cleaning it again, not by burning the house or tearing it down around its inhabitants.

I always asked normal people over here, such as taxi drivers, how their lives were before the crisis. They always say that they were so happy. Everything was cheap. The poor and rich were working, and happy.

On weekends you would see the poor people parking their mini pick-up vehicles or bicycles on the highway outside Aleppo in front of a green zone [we call that area al-Mohallaq].  They would gather with their families for picnics, BBQs, smoking sheisha or eating corn in the Summer. Those were the poor ones’ weekly entertainment, where they might stay from midday till midnight. It was peaceful. Today, it’s the other way around.

What I always used to say is that before the crisis, Syria had almost 80-95% of what any nation seeks to have – a 75-80% legal and straightforward progress.  15-20% corruption at worst.  A society where the progress is possible after paying bribes, something no one is proud of but we can’t do much about it unfortunately. We only lacked 3-5% of political reforms and freedom.

This whole crisis, destruction, cleansing, uprooting people from their homes, poverty, refugees problem, infrastructure systematic destruction, raping women, beheading innocents, looting, erasing priceless heritage and historical and sacred buildings and architecture, creating all zombie-like trash criminals that invaded us from all over the world…..

All that and a lot more, was created in the name of gaining those missing 3% of rights. As result, Syrians lost 80% of what they had before, and didn’t gain the 3% that was promised to them.

Today we might still have 20% of our original rights and order, however corruption is controlling more than 75% of it. In the past, bribes were somehow like taxes in the west, we pay it to one party [corrupted employee] and guarantee that our problem is going to be solved, or the paperwork going to be submitted.

Today, people might pay hundreds and thousands – if not millions, as bribes, ransoms, taxes, looting and theft. The payment is forced out of too many of us and there is no guarantee whatsoever that we will survive even once we have paid.

Still, the same lame mentality, of searching for solutions, by concentrating on their first big fat lie of toppling leaders and replacing them with puppets, in the name of freedom and democracy. Some misled Syrians are still pursuing those rosy lies, like thirsty travellers in the desert running after a mirage. They just don’t want to or simply can’t wake up and smell the coffee.

Updates [9/3/2016]:

The road to Aleppo is still under daily attacks, and the SAA is protecting it. Sometimes the terrorists are occupying little part of the road for couple of hours before being defeated or fleeing the scene. People are travelling on it safely, yet it’s still a worrying subject for every traveller.

As for the city, and as I mentioned in my last email, the terrorists of al-Nusra in Aleppo city are targeting the Kurds sector of the city so badly. The SAA is defending them from time to time by air-strikes and artillery.

Naturally the mainstream media is reporting that the SAA is violating the ceasefire, which is not true. Civilians are dying in their dozens in the Kurdish sector [Sheikh Maqsoud] after heavy mortar shelling, yet writers are saying that its the “regime” that is breaking the ceasefire! I’m attaching photos that came on the media from Sheikh Maqsoud.

Syria became another Palestine, where the blames always goes on Palestinians reactions, never on Israeli provocations. That is the Israeli flavour in conflicts.

Everything that has been blamed on the Syrian Government for the last five years has actually been carried out by those who are portrayed as blameless, the “moderate rebels” and their associates.

They [US NATO GCC Israeli coalition proxy terrorists] used chemical weapons against civilians. They besieged villages and towns and cut all food and water supply of reaching them, the hunger strategy in wars. They forced people to leave their homes and to become refugees. They forced people to vote for them and didn’t give them their freedom. They occupied entire cities and tortured masses of people because they don’t share the same religion, sect, or political opinion. They brought multinational fighters [from 80+ different nationalities] to fight with them, years before Syria asked for help from Hezbollah, Iran, Russia.

They committed all kinds of atrocities and yet dare to blame it on the Syrian government. That is typical of the Israeli flavour in wars. Who targeted hospitals, schools, and markets in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Afghanistan; claiming that the enemy is launching rockets from them?

Yet they dare to talk about Russian or Syrian jets attacking terrorist hospitals!

Going back to what the Syrian people want, I’m afraid there won’t be much of them left any more in the next presidential elections. The refugees in Europe and other countries can’t vote. They have been replaced with multinational fighters. They are the new Syrians now, and they could change the voting results in their favour. Maybe that is one of the reasons of emptying the country of its real people and scattering them in the world as refugees?”

Children going to School in Aleppo. Photo: Peter Oborne

A glance at the comment section of Stephen Zunes Boston Review article “Syria after the Ceasefire” demonstrates that people are no longer swallowing the propaganda pill, this from Judith Bello:

“Zunes’ stance that ISIS control 1/3 of Syria is inaccurate and was never true.  They control large areas of uninhabited desert while the Syrian government controls all the populated regions with the exception of Deir Ezzor and Raqqa.  Even there, though ISIS occupies, the Syrian government continues to provide resources to the population.

The statement that the supporters of Assad are a [substantial] minority is not true.  The majority of the people in Syria choose the government over any available alternative. Furthermore, Assad’ s popularity derives from real initiatives on his part to open up the government to popular participation. Under his leadership, the Syrian government has provided amnesties to fighters who want to return and to political prisoners.  They have been open to talking to any opposition not wielding guns and presided over a substantial revision of the constitution.    Prior to the war Assad invested in improving the free education and social welfare projects. He negotiated with the west in an effort to have the onerous sanctions eased.”

Or Rick Sterling: 

“If the west or reactionary neighbouring countries do not intervene, the Syrian Arab Army and allies may well be able to completely oust the terrorist factions.  That will be a good thing for anyone who cares about peace, justice and respect for international law.”

The liberation of Aleppo from the terrorist hordes has been a game changer for the Syrian Army and its allies.  The re-taking of the main highways used by Turkey to supply terrorist arms and equipment has sliced through the umbilical cord tying the terror gangs to their Turkish handlers and supporters.  It has also driven a stake into the heart of Turkey’s stolen oil revenue, while preventing any further Turkish plundering of the huge industrial resources, once Aleppo’s pride and joy.  It has liberated Syrian people, who from the outset, resisted any calls to arms by the phoney revolutionary gangs who employed all manner of coercion against Aleppo to drag them into the conflict being manufactured by NATO, US and their Gulf sidekicks.

For the duration, media outlets with integrity have been reporting the reality from Aleppo despite the ceaseless propaganda storms being whipped up by the Purpose cabal, Syria Campaign, White Helmets, Rami Jarrah and their ilk.  The people of Aleppo have withstood incursions, shelling, desecrating of their homes, terrorization, rape, abuse, electrical outages, diseased water supplies, food shortages, in order to protect their right to decide their future in their country.  It appears that the West has failed to impose its will upon the Syrian people, as it has, with disastrous consequences, elsewhere in the region.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to these courageous people inside Aleppo who risked all to report what was actually happening on the ground.  These people have lived a life of a prisoner in their own homes for over 4 years and finally they can see an end to their prison term.  Yes, there are western media outlets who are suddenly confronted by a truth they can no longer avoid reporting, but they should surely be prosecuted for having propagated the lies and propaganda for so long, that served to increase the suffering endured by the Syrian people.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ~ George Orwell

The Syrian people have overpowered the all- powerful US NATO propaganda apparatus.  The war is not over yet, but for many of us, our geopolitical perceptions have been irreversibly altered thanks to the Syrian resistance, and this alone, is one huge victory for mankind and one giant nail in the coffin of US global hegemony.

Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her personal blog The Wall Will Fall.

The day after the mass bombings in Brussels that killed 34 people and wounded another 230, it emerged that Belgian authorities had specific forewarnings of the attack and had already last year identified the men who carried out the assault as Islamist terrorists.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported Wednesday that Zavantem Airport and the Maelbeek metro station were known to be targets for planned terror attacks. It wrote,

“The Belgian security services, as well as other Western intelligence agencies, had advance and precise intelligence warnings regarding the terrorist attacks in Belgium on Tuesday, Ha’aretz has learned. The security services knew, with a high degree of certainty, that attacks were planned in the very near future for the airport and, apparently, for the subway as well.”

The suspected attackers were well known to police authorities. Two of the suicide bombers, Khalid El Bakraoui, who attacked the metro station, and his brother Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who exploded a bomb at the airport, had been convicted of armed robbery and were known to have connections to the November 13 attacks in Paris carried out by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Both were identified post-mortem by their fingerprints.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been detained in Turkey and identified as an Islamist fighter, then deported to the Netherlands last year.

“One of the perpetrators of the Brussels attack is a person whom we detained in June 2015 in [the southeastern province of] Gaziantep and deported… We informed the Brussels Embassy of the deportation process of the attacker with a note on July 14, 2015. However, the Belgians released the attacker despite his deportation,”

Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan added that Belgian authorities were unable to establish any ties between El Bakraoui and terrorist activity despite the Turkish warnings, which were “ignored.”

Another bomber who blew himself up at the airport has still to be identified, and the third airport attacker, identified as Najim Laachraoui, remains on the run. Belgian authorities said they were looking for a man of Turkish origin, 22 years old, driving an old, dark Audi A4 car.

These reports raise the most serious questions as to how and why Belgian and allied intelligence agencies allowed the Brussels bombings to occur. In the fifteenth year of the “war on terror” declared by Washington and its European allies after the September 11, 2001 bombings, intelligence agencies have at their disposal sophisticated spying techniques capable of tracking virtually all cell phone and Internet activity. Claims that the attack occurred because Belgian and allied intelligence agencies somehow failed to “connect the dots” are simply not believable.

Belgium has been on high alert. Large numbers of soldiers and police were deployed in Brussels when the city was placed on lockdown following the November 13 attacks in Paris, and again after last week’s capture of November 13 attacker Salah Abdeslam. Belgian forces had advance notice of the targets of an attack and the identity of the attackers. Nonetheless, the ISIS team was able to amass a large stock of bomb-making equipment undisturbed and plan, prepare and execute devastating and coordinated terror bombings.

During the first lockdown, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, 16 people were arrested and 22 searches were made, which produced nothing. All the while, Abdeslam was living a few kilometers from his parents’ home.

Abdeslam’s capture in last week’s police raid apparently pushed the ISIS terrorists to put their plans into action. Ibrahim El Bakraoui’s laptop was found in a dustbin in the street. On it police found a recording of Bakraoui saying he was “acting in a rush” and “did not [know] what to do anymore,” as he was being “searched for everywhere and was no longer safe.” If “he stuck around” he was likely “to end up in a prison cell.”

Police located El Bakraoui’s apartment by speaking to the taxi driver who dropped off the attackers at Zavantem airport. He told police he picked them up from 4 rue Max Roos in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels. Police searched the apartment and found 15 kilos of explosives, 150 litres of acetone, 30 litres of hydrogen peroxide, detonators, a case full of nails and screws and other bomb-making materials.

There are as yet no calls for mass sackings in Belgian and European intelligence circles after this stunning breakdown of security. The reason is that powerful factions within the ruling elite and the state, far from being genuinely revolted by these attacks, view them as a political godsend, allowing them to press for policies on which there is broad agreement in ruling circles: stepped-up military intervention in the Middle East, police-state surveillance measures in Europe and incitement of anti-Muslim racism.

New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen published articles yesterday that in virtually identical terms argued for an escalation of the war in Syria, ostensibly to fight ISIS. Cohen declared that “the West’s ponderous wait-them-out approach to the murderous fanatics of the caliphate looks like capitulation,” while Friedman asked whether “Obama hasn’t gotten so obsessed with defending his hands-off approach to Syria that he underestimates both the dangers of his passivity and the opportunity for US power to tilt the region our way.”

European officials are holding a conference today to coordinate a broad expansion of police operations across Europe, while Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s neo-fascist National Front, is calling for large-scale raids against Muslim neighborhoods in France. “We must immediately launch a vast police operation to invest all these districts that are outside our Republic,” she declared.

Under these conditions, it is increasingly clear that ISIS serves US and European imperialism not only as a proxy force fighting for regime-change in Syria, but also as an instrument to press for anti-democratic and unpopular policies at home.

The ISIS attacks in Paris last January and again in November, and in Brussels this week, were all carried out by the same terror network. This network is well known to French intelligence and to its US and European counterparts. All of these forces are linked to the original Al Qaeda network that emerged from the collaboration between the CIA and Saudi and Pakistani intelligence to mobilize Islamist fighters against the USSR and the Soviet-backed Afghan regime in the 1980s.

Khalid El Bakraoui rented, under an assumed identity, an apartment in the Belgian town of Charleroi for the authors of the November 13 attacks as a stop-over on their way to Paris. He also rented the apartment in the Forest area of Brussels, where on March 15 police first encountered Salah Abdeslam, and where Mohamed Belkaïd was killed in a gun battle that allowed Abdeslam to escape the initial police raid.

The French news site Médiapart reported that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the organizer of the November 13 attacks, and Chérif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, both knew Farid Melouk, a top figure in French Islamist circles. Melouk was a leading member of the Algerian Islamic Armed Group (GIA), a terror organization linked to Al Qaeda that fought the military junta during the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s.

Chérif Kouachi’s meeting with Melouk on April 11, 2010 was photographed, using telephoto lenses, by investigators of the French Anti-Terrorism Sub-Division (SDAT).

Arrested with other Al Qaida members in Belgium in 1998 for attempted murder, possession of arms and explosives and falsifying government documents, Melouk was in prison until 2004, when he was extradited to serve a second term in France until 2009. When released, he stayed in France, quietly establishing closer ties to ISIS. He managed to flee to Syria the day after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Speaking to the Investigative Commission on Jihadist Networks of the French National Assembly last year, anti-terrorist investigating Judge Marc Trévidic declared,

“The older ones are returning to activity. Farid Melouk, of whose presence in Syria I have now learned… I met him in 2000 when I was dealing with the first ‘Afghan’ network. He was at the head of a very big network that provided passage for jihadists… These older ones have a phenomenal number of contacts in Belgium and France.”

Such reports underscore that, over the course of decades, the jihadist networks have been investigated and mapped out in the greatest of detail by the European secret services, judiciary and police agencies.

The former top domestic adviser to President Richard Nixon admitted years ago that the so-called “War on Drugs” was crafted to target black people and anti-war leftists, according to new reporting.

“By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” —John Ehrlichmann, former aide to Richard Nixon

The April feature of Harper’s, an investigation by journalist Dan Baum into the widespread failures of drug prohibition, includes an excerpt from a 1994 interview between Baum and Nixon’s adviser, John Ehrlichman, who died in 1999.One passage in particular went viral on Tuesday:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

John Ehrlichman, left, with President Richard Nixon in 1972. (Photo: AP)

The quote comes early in the feature, framing Baum’s central thesis—that to win the war on drugs, prohibition must end. He notes that legalization of medical and recreational marijuana has caught on throughout the U.S., and that many countries are decriminalizing stronger drugs such as cocaine and heroin as part of a new, more humane effort to address addiction and gang violence.

“[T]he growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction,” Baum writes. “Now, for the first time, we have an opportunity to change course.”

“Legalize it all,” he writes.

Next month, the United Nations will dedicate a General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) to discuss global drug policy. In the run-up to the meeting, Human Rights Watch will highlight the range of human rights abuses that the War on Drugs has caused.

At the annual AIPAC convention, the Democratic and Republican front-runners engaged in what might be called a “pander-off” as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tried to outdo the other in declaring their love and devotion to Israel.

Yet, what was perhaps most troubling about the two dueling speeches was the absence of any significant sympathy for the Palestinian people or any substantive criticism of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By contrast, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who did not attend the AIPAC convention, delivered a foreign policy speech in Salt Lake City, Utah, that struck a more balanced tone and placed part of the blame for the Mideast problems on the policies of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.

However, in Washington before thousands of cheering attendees at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention on Monday, Clinton, Trump and two other Republican candidates, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, were in full pander mode.

Image: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressing the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)

For instance, former Secretary of State Clinton depicted Israel as entirely an innocent victim in the Mideast conflicts.

“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,”

she declared.

“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. … This is especially true at a time when Israel faces brutal terrorist stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks at home. Parents worry about letting their children walk down the street. Families live in fear.”

Yet, Clinton made no reference to Palestinian parents who worry about their children walking down the street or playing on a beach and facing the possibility of sudden death from an Israeli drone or warplane. Instead, she scolded Palestinian adults. “Palestinian leaders need to stop inciting violence, stop celebrating terrorists as martyrs and stop paying rewards to their families,” she said.

Then, Clinton promised to put her future administration at the service of the Israeli government, asking: “The first choice is this: are we prepared to take the U.S./Israel alliance to the next level?”

Clinton said, “One of the first things I’ll do in office is invite the Israeli prime minister to visit the White House. And I will send a delegation from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs to Israel for early consultations. Let’s also expand our collaboration beyond security.”

Clinton lashed out at the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement which has sought to convince Israel to respect the human and political rights of Palestinians by applying economic and moral pressure on Israeli businesses. Yet, instead of a non-violent movement to achieve change in the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic, Clinton saw anti-Semitism.

“Particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world, especially in Europe, we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people,” she said, adding: “we have to be united in fighting back against BDS.”

Clinton also indirectly criticized Trump for having said earlier in the campaign that the United States should be “neutral” in its handling of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Yes, we need steady hands, not a president who says he’s neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who knows what on Wednesday, because everything’s negotiable,” Clinton declared.

Trump’s No-Pander Pander

Speaking after Clinton’s appearance, Trump asserted that “I didn’t come here tonight to pander to you about Israel. That’s what politicians do: all talk, no action. Believe me.”

Image: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking to the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)

Trump then took on the challenge of out-pandering Clinton. Trump pandered to Israel’s hatred of Iran, vowing “to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran” restraining its nuclear program. He also pandered about Iran’s role in terrorism.

“They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the Western Hemisphere, very close to home,” Trump said. “Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world. And we will work to dismantle that reach, believe me, believe me.”

However, in the real world, Iran has actually assisted the governments of Iraq and Syria in battling the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, while Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and – to a lesser degree – Israel have provided help to Sunni jihadists, especially in Syria, to counter what the Sunni-led states and Israel see as excessive Shiite influence in the Middle East.

In his pandering, Trump also exposed his ignorance about Israeli-Palestinian history. He asserted, “There is no moral equivalency [between the Israelis and the Palestinians]. Israel does not name public squares after terrorists.”

But that’s not exactly true. The most revered Israeli leader, in terms of having his name attached to streets, squares and parks, is Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder and leader of the Irgun, a terror group that fought for the founding of Israel. Jabotinsky has some 57 sites named for him.

One of his Irgun followers, Menachem Begin, has his name commemorated in at least 43 communities. Similarly, Yitzhak Shamir, a leader of Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), a terror group that joined with the Irgun in carrying out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians including the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, has his name attached to a Jerusalem highway.

Image: Bodies of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra camp in Lebanon, 1982. (Photo credit: U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees)

But more significant than the honorific naming of public sites is the fact that Begin and Shamir were elected as Israeli prime ministers. In other words, Israel doesn’t just honor its terrorists by naming public squares after them; it gave them the power to direct military actions against Palestinians and other people in the region, including Begin’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which led to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians.

But Trump’s pandering even extended to mentioning his and his family’s longtime devotion to Israel, including a reference to his daughter marrying an Orthodox Jew, converting to Judaism and now pregnant: “I love the people in this room. I love Israel. I love Israel. I’ve been with Israel so long in terms of I’ve received some of my greatest honors from Israel, my father before me, incredible. My daughter, Ivanka, is about to have a beautiful Jewish baby.”

Respecting the Palestinians

By contrast, Sanders, the only Jewish candidate and someone who lived on an Israeli kibbutz as a young man, did not attend the AIPAC conference, citing a scheduling conflict for his campaign which was hoping to close Clinton’s formidable delegate lead with strong showings in Utah, Idaho and Arizona.

Instead, Sanders gave a foreign policy speech that he claimed he would have given if he had addressed the AIPAC convention. While critical of Iranian and Palestinian leaders, Sanders offered a much more evenhanded assessment of the reasons for the troubled Middle East.

Sanders stressed that his overall approach to the region would be to emphasize diplomacy among the Mideast countries instead of concentrating on threats and the use of force. He also called for a recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.

“To be successful, we have also got to be a friend not only to Israel, but to the Palestinian people, where in Gaza unemployment today is 44 percent and we have there a poverty rate which is almost as high,” the Vermont senator said. “You can’t have good policy that results in peace if you ignore one side.”

While insisting on security for Israel, Sanders said,

“peace also means security for every Palestinian. It means achieving self-determination, civil rights, and economic well-being for the Palestinian people. Peace will mean ending what amounts to the occupation of Palestinian territory, establishing mutually agreed upon borders, and pulling back settlements in the West Bank. … It is absurd for elements within the Netanyahu government to suggest that building more settlements in the West Bank is the appropriate response to the most recent violence.”

Image: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders also touched on other sensitive issues that Clinton and Trump avoided. Sanders said,

“Peace will also mean ending the economic blockade of Gaza. And it will mean a sustainable and equitable distribution of precious water resources so that Israel and Palestine can both thrive as neighbors.

“Right now, Israel controls 80 percent of the water reserves in the West Bank. Inadequate water supply has contributed to the degradation and desertification of Palestinian land. A lasting peace will have to recognize Palestinians are entitled to control their own lives and there is nothing human life needs more than water.”

Sanders continued, “Peace will require strict adherence by both sides to the tenets of international humanitarian law. This includes Israel ending disproportionate responses to being attacked – even though any attack on Israel is unacceptable.”

While condemning rocket fire from Gaza into Israel in 2014, Sanders added,

“let me also be very clear: I – along with many supporters of Israel – spoke out strongly against the Israeli counter attacks that killed nearly 1,500 civilians and wounded thousands more. I condemned the bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps. Today, Gaza is still largely in ruins. The international community must come together to help Gaza recover.”

Regarding his earlier comments about wealthy Sunni-led oil states taking on a greater regional role in fighting jihadist extremism, such as Islamic State terrorists, Sanders clarified,

“Now, I am not suggesting that Saudi Arabia or any other states in the region invade other countries, nor unilaterally intervene in conflicts driven in part by sectarian tensions.

“What I am saying is that the major powers in the region – especially the Gulf States – have to take greater responsibility for the future of the Middle East and the defeat of ISIS. … What I am also saying is that other countries in the region – like Saudi Arabia, which has the fourth largest defense budget in the world – has to dedicate itself more fully to the destruction of ISIS, instead of other military adventures like the one it is pursuing right now in Yemen.”

Sanders also distanced himself from Hillary Clinton who has urged a U.S. military bombing campaign against the Syrian government, or as she tries to sell the idea as a “safe zone” or a “no-fly zone” though U.S. military officials say either idea would require a major aerial assault on Syria’s air force and air defenses.

In contrast, Sanders said,

“After five years of brutal conflict, the only solution in Syria will be, in my view, a negotiated political settlement. Those who advocate for stronger military involvement by the U.S. to oust Assad from power have not paid close enough attention to history. That would simply prolong the war and increase the chaos in Syria, not end it.”

Sanders even envisioned working with Russia and Iran to stabilize Syria, defeat ISIS and arrange a transitional government, adding:

“I applaud Secretary Kerry and the Obama administration for negotiating a partial ceasefire between the Assad regime and most opposition forces. The ceasefire shows the value of American-led diplomacy, rather than escalating violence. It may not seem like a lot, but it is. Diplomacy in this instance has had some real success.”

Overall, Sanders advocated less reliance on “regime change” strategies that require military force, saying:

“In my view, the military option for a powerful nation like ours – the most powerful nation in the world – should always be on the table. That’s why we have the most powerful military in the world. But it should always be the last resort not the first resort. …

“You know it is very easy for politicians to go before the people and talk about how tough we are, and we want to wipe out everybody else. But I think if we have learned anything from history is that we pursue every diplomatic option before we resort to military intervention. And interestingly enough, more often than not, diplomacy can achieve goals that military intervention cannot achieve.”

Sanders may have waited too long to give a detailed foreign policy speech, letting Clinton mostly off the hook for her neoconservative tendencies and her support for “regime change” wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Most political analysts say he is too far behind in the delegate count to catch up even if his campaign catches on fire in the later primary states, such as California and New York.

Only now has Sanders explained in detail his more nuanced approach toward the Israel-Palestine conflict and his more dovish attitude toward using American military force, in contrast to Clinton’s one-sided attitude toward Israel and her hawkish talk about exerting U.S. power.

Indeed, Clinton’s neocon-style speech to AIPAC could be the first sign of her long-awaited “pivot to the center,” now that she has amassed such a strong lead that she feels she no longer has to worry about the Democratic Party’s liberal base.

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 andbarnesandnoble.com).

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