This is a magnificent universe. It is alive by its very nature. And in your bones, you know that. It is your deepest dream and desire.

Everything is alive and conscious. Children know that. Indigenous people know that. Atoms and particles are alive. Where else would life and consciousness come from? Everything around us has life, from the atomic level on up. You are surrounded by friends and allies. You are not alone.

How is it that we turn our backs on such a glorious reality? Why do we cut ourselves off from such knowledge, learning, communication, and friendship?

The secret life of plants

Westerners often wonder how indigenous people know what plants to use for healing. The simple answer is: the plants tell them. Indigenous people cultivate relationships with the creatures around them. All of us can do that.

In 1966, polygraph expert Clive Backster hooked up his house plant to a lie detector machine to see if it would indicate when it needed watering. Instead, he made very different discoveries. He found that plants have profound awareness, they feel pain, they have a range of emotions, they go into shock when overwhelmed with events or emotions, they exhibit compassion and love, they communicate with each other instantaneously across distance without regard to distance, they telegraph threats to each other, they care about the people who care for them, and they connect with those people across distances. These discoveries, as well as those by other people, are detailed in The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird.

Biophilia is the birthright of every human – real fellowship with all living beings. It is no wonder that many humans, particularly in Western society, feel so lost and alone. This level of relationship is what we’re made for.

Nature is reality and wisdom

Trees, plants, and mycelium are chief examples of the highest species on Earth.

They are integrated into existence, into life. They are rooted and Interact and interface with the very elements which are the foundation of life. Think of that.

Their interaction with the earth includes this essential rootedness to a place and to the Earth. Humans, the most mobile species, are the least connected. Mobility comes at a high cost: connection and belonging. When home and rootedness are removed, with its related earth wisdom, humans are lost — uncertain who they are, unhappy, refugees and aliens in their own land, prey to hucksters, reduced to survival, their moral base gone. Look around.

The wise thing to do is to root and land, to learn from trees and plants, to connect to place, and to spend time outside sitting, listening, and seeing.

Children are most connected to rootedness, and they grow deeper, stronger, calmer, wiser, healthier, more compassionate, and more independent the more time they are in nature and with trees. They are our teachers. The most important thing for communities and our world is to free children to spend their time outside so they can show us how to be connected.

In a healthy society, every child would have a connection to trees, would have their own garden, would have special places outdoors, and would be expert in the nuances, the seasons, the species, the sounds, and the wisdom of those places. Those places would be laboratories of learning and study. Each child would be a teacher of his or her discoveries. Children would be leaders in our communities.

The more connected humans are, the more content and capable they are and the less need for material things, for status, or to be placated or soothed. We become free when we are connected.

Freedom is our birthright. Examples surround us — wolves, horses, prairie dogs, coyotes, snakes, streams and rivers, mountains, trees, and children. These are our teachers and mentors.

Happiness and creating the future

Plants and trees harm no one in order to live. Think of that. This is true of bees and butterflies and other species. They are life-positive. They take what they need to live and harm no one. Their lives are a constant and beautiful gift, full of abundance, and they are essential for the rest of us. The oxygen alone from trees and plants makes our lives possible.

What vast wisdom is in these life-nourishing people that use no violence. To create thriving, diverse, happy, and healthy societies, we begin by sitting at their feet and listening and learning.

Universities of life

Skills permeate every bit of life from the atomic level, as well as

• resources
• insights, knowledge, and wisdom
• community
• values, and
• love

They are intrinsic to life, a part of the “is-ness” of reality. They are in cells, molecules, atoms, particles, and light. They are part of all beings.

The highest education is the most connected to nature, the most rooted and local-based, the most integrated, and the least technological, with only the most porous of walls. The true universities are outdoors and integrated with nature. The best universities would be the forests.

Can you talk with trees and plants? Can you hear nature’s wisdom and messages? Are you rooted and connected to a place? What do you know about your home? These are the most important skills and knowledge.

Places of learning would be typified by diversity and teaching flowing back and forth; all would be students and teachers. No degrees or pieces of paper. One’s life is the only reliable proof of learning and wisdom.

This type of education would be free. No college debt. And no SAT, GRE, or ACT tests required.

Real world skills would include creating new healthy systems of food, water, energy, building, and production, eliminating waste, and recycling. Each person would discover for themselves what is good and valuable and important.

These learning places would be characterized by languages, community, healing arts. They would be everywhere — vibrant, pulsating with honest, open dialogue, with life and happiness, authentic, open, heart-based, and earth-based, for all ages and species. Each would learn many skills.

Trees, plants, mycelium, and other species transmute elements by the “technology” of their own beings. Water responds to spoken or written words. What incredible skill sets to include in any curriculum.

Trees

Trees are very special among Earth’s people. Wise and beautiful, their deep, abiding qualities have been honored throughout time, and many regard them as sacred.

As a long-lived people, they acquire a deep wisdom and perspective. Because they are place-based, they embody and create home. They are protectors, strong, often tall, fragrant hiding places for people large and small, with fruits and flowers available to all, and amazing voices. They offer deep and soul-nourishing friendship to all who wish it.

They are our hope for the future. The Ents of J.R.R. Tolkein’s stories were not a huge stretch of the imagination. Trees are wisdom keepers, mentors, teachers, and friends.

Trees are people. They are not fuel or building material or oxygen factory. They are not extra or unimportant.  They are living, breathing, feeling, tremendously wise and good people. When humans cut down a tree, they murder a person. Protecting trees is of the very highest importance.

Trees can help us be at home, wherever we are on Earth. Their friendship can bring us joy, fulfillment, and peace. Trees are willing to be a part of our lives into the future.

Trees are the master teachers living everywhere who can help us create life and peace, prosperity and health beyond the 7^th generation. They stand ready to be partners in creating communities brimming with life and happiness.

Healing life

The only hope for the world is if we realize the reality and goodness that surrounds us, if we start paying attention to all the people, whether they have leaves, bark, fins, wings, horns, fur, scales, feathers, cilia, many legs, or no legs, and understand, in the midst of all the other benefits, that we belong to a community of extraordinary people.

Our partners wait. The future is possible. The rest is up to us.

Nina Beety is a researcher, writer, and public speaker on foreign policy, the environment, and wireless radiation hazards. Her 2012 report for public officials “Smart Meter and Smart Grid Problems: Legislative Solutions” is on her website www.smartmeterharm.org. She lives in Monterey, California.

The Russian warplanes destroyed two long convoys of ISIL’s oil tankers in the Homs province. The first convoy with at least 8 oil tankers and some other military vehicles was targeted by the Russian Air Force near the city of Palmyra. Militants accompanying the convoy were also killed in the air raid. The joint squadron of the Russian and Syrian frontline bombers also destroyed 14 oil tankers and their guards near Sukhnah.

According to the reports, the Russian and Syrian Air Forces have been focusing their efforts in the Homs province. The activity is aimed to support the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) military operations and to cut the oil smuggling routes in the area.

The Syrian Air Force carried out sorties against gatherings and movements of the Jaish al-Fateh terrorist alliance in the area of the Khan Sheikhoun town. Several vehicles equipped with machineguns have been reportedly destroyed. The Syrian forces also exercised a special operation in the western side of town. Six terrorists were killed including Khaled al-Bahri, the leader of a terrorist group affiliated to al-Nusra.

Separately, the Syrian Air Force destroyed dens and fortified sites of Jaish al-Fateh terrorists in Kafar Zeta, Mourek and al-Lattamneh towns in the Hama province.

The SAA is conducting military operations to liberate the Jobar district of Damascus from terrorists. According to the reports, about 16 Jaysh al-Islam militants have been killed since yesterday. Meanwhile, the SAA conducted separate offensives in the Marj al-Sultan and al-Nashabiyeh villages near the capital. 14 members of the Jaysh al-Islam terrorist group were killed during the clashes.

On Monday, at least a dozen civilians were reportedly killed in two air raids by US military aircraft in the beleaguered northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The incident came only 3 days after a US airstrike hit the Iraqi army’s 3rd Division 55th Brigade near Fallujah and killed at least 10 Iraqi soldiers.

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Since April of 2015, the Republic of Burundi has been beset by a violent protest movement organised by NGOs financed by the United States and the European Union. These so-called ‘civil society’ organisations have engaged in mass murder, arson, and sabotage in a concerted attempt to spread anarchy in the country on behalf of neocolonial interests.

Pierre Nkurunziza, the country’s president, is among the most popular leaders in Africa today. The reason for this is quite simple. Since coming to power in 2005, Nkurunziza has built more schools than all the combined rulers since independence. A keen ecologist, Nkurunziza is known to spend weekends working in the fields with peasants. He has initiated a vast tree planting programme to protect the country’s environment. The Burundian government intends to turn the country into a major exporter of fruit and free medical care for pregnant women has been provided in newly constructed healthcare centres throughout the country.

The pretext for escalating the destabilization of the country came when Nkurunziza sought a third term as president.US/EU backed opponents claimed that this was contrary to the constitution. However, the legal authorities of the country judged that it was not contrary to the nation’s constitution. Under international law, each nation state is responsible for the internal affairs of that country. However, when it comes to African countries, this principal is rendered null and void. Brussels and Washington have said Nkurunziza must go and have been fomenting instability in the country since 2006, a process that has accelerated since April of 2015.

Among his many achievements as president of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza has made community work on Saturdays mandatory in order to foster national voluntarism and a sense of civic spirit in a country just recovering from one of the twentieth century’s worse genocides. From 1993 to 2005, up to 4 million people were murdered during the French, Belgian and US-backed military dictatorship of generals Micombero, Bagaza and Boyoya. Nkurunziza’s Community Work Days have helped reconstruct a war-raved nation, creating a sense of self reliance, unity and social hope among his people. The project has already led to the construction of over 5000 schools in the country.

Situated in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, Burundi is of major interest to multi-national corporations due to its rich agricultural land, natural resources and its strategic location near the some of the most mineral-rich lands on earth. Belgian and French neocolonial rule in Burundi involved stoking up ethnic tension between the Tutsi minority, favoured by Belgian colonialism and the majority Hutu population. Although the government has made every effort to reconcile the two communities, ensuring an ethnic balance in the military and state institutions, and notwithstanding the fact that there is no evidence of state-sponsored racial discrimination in the country, the Western corporate press have been attempting to create the impression that the Burundian government is threatening to exterminate the Tutsi minority. They do this by twisting almost every statement the government makes calling for calm and unity among all Burundians into incitment to racial hatred and genocide.The spreading of rumours that promote fear is a integral part of imperial destabilization techniques.

The Western powers never wanted Pierre Nkurunziza to take power. They understand that a leader who would be capable of uniting all the ethnicities in a country would inevitably pursue socially orientated policies inimical to Western corporate and geostratigic interests. Nkurunziza has repeatedly declared his intention to wipe out poverty in the country. Although the Burundian president is no Thomas Sankara, his concern for the livelihood of the poor makes him a danger to Western corporate interests.

In 2012, the French Ministry of Defense published a report in their journal Horizons Strategiques which warned about the dangers for French interests posed by a resurgence of the ‘politics of dignity’ in Africa. National sovereignty and panafricanist movements were cite as  presenting a grave danger to French control over African resources. This is why all African nations are being systematically destablised by mercenaries and pseudo ‘civil society’ movements working to effect regime change on behalf of neocolonialist interests. Most of these movements received generous funding from the US National Endowment for Democracy, a US think tank which works closely with the CIA to overthrow governments who threaten US imperial interests.This is precisely what is happening in Burundi.

Amnesty International is now publishing serious accusations against the Burundian government in the corporate press. This is an organization which claims to be independent yet has counted among its board members former US National Security Advisor Zbiigniew Bzrezinski, who stated to French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 that he couldn’t care less regarding the CIA’s backing of terrorists in Afghanistan, as long as US geopolitical interests were served.

Amnesty International helped spread the racist lies about ‘African mercenaries’ during NATO’s propaganda campaign that preceded the carpet bombing and total destruction of that country in 2011. Amnesty international have been lying and lying  over and over again about Syria since NATO launched its war on the country in 2011, using proxy terrorist gangs. The human rights group have repeatedly blamed the crimes of Al Qaeda linked terrorists in Syria on the Syrian government.

Now the terrorist human rights organisation is sharpening its knives in preparation for the mutilation of another African nation resisting globalisation, resisting the Pentagon’s Africom, resisting neocolonial enslavement. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are the avant garde of contemporary imperialism. They are, ipso facto, deeply complicit in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

These organisations provide moral justification for devastating wars of aggression that murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, rendering mullions more homeless and destitute. They are nothing less than evil doers and should be tried for their crimes by the Kuala Lumper War Crimes Tribunal, the only credible legal entity in the world today for the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Amnesty’s mendacious report on the ‘crackdown’ on ‘peaceful protesters’ and ‘human rights’ activists in Burundi has now been released in order to provide justification for the invasion and occupation of Burundi by international ‘peace-keeping’ forces under the spurious UN doctrine of ‘responsibility to protect’, which translates as the responsibility of the global corporate polyarchy and its puppet governments to ensure that no nation, no matter how small or insignificant, dares challenge the self-proclaimed authority of their ‘global governance’.

On December 18, 2015 the International Syria support Group, consisting of seventeen concerned countries, most significantly including Russia, the United States, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, met at 9:30AM at the New York Palace Hotel.  As the group was not yet an official United Nations entity, it met in a “private” venue.  Entering the Palace Hotel, at 8:30AM, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that a political resolution of the Syria crisis is imperative, and the only solution, and this political agreement should not permit any retreat  from this decision, only forward action.

Throughout the next four hours, rumors circulated among the many reporters gathered at the hotel, most significantly, and predictably, it was rumored that there was still serious conflict and disagreement among the major countries gathered there, who were still bitterly arguing about the final wording of the resolution they hoped to have adopted at the UN Security Council at the scheduled 3PM meeting. 

One of the more intriguing rumors implied that the US Delegation, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, had attempted, at the conference beginning, to insert a paragraph in the resolution that violated the agreement between Secretary Kerry and President Putin at their Moscow meeting earlier in the week, and that the Russian delegation, led by Sergei Lavrov was hotly contesting the insertion of this unauthorized paragraph in the final resolution. 

If this rumor is accurate, it implies that the US delegation attempted a last minute “double-cross.”  It was impossible  to determine what the new insertion contained, (if, in fact, it actually existed)  beyond wild (or not so wild) conjecture.  Another rumor contended that a resolution would be finally agreed upon, but a resolution that would not address anything of substance, or any of the contentious issues, and would amount to merely a cosmetic device to suggest action,  disguising the fact that the drastic divide between the opposing sides of the Syrian conflict had not been narrowed.  In particular, Saudi Arabia demanded President Assad’s immediate ouster, and  Iran supports the Syrian President.

I had the privilege of a brief discussion with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, one of the world’s great diplomats, and I mentioned to him that the new coalition of Russia, China and Iran in this International Syria Support Group process is a formidable “game changer,” in many respects, and potentially even beyond Syria, which may be alarming to NATO.  And I added that it is significant that the foreign ministers involved, were the best possible choice of diplomats, including Lavrov, himself, Wang Yi and Li Baodong of China, and Javad  Zarif of Iran,  all men of brilliance, and quintessential decency, representative of great civilizations and cultures. 

Lavrov replied, emphatically, that their “ three countries are seeking peace, and an end to terrorism.”  We did not have time to discuss the obstacles presented by the fact that war is profitable, and that there are those who have an interest in obstructing this peace process, which would reduce their profits.  Of course, Lavrov is well aware of this.

After an hour’s delay, the Security Council met at 4PM, at which point there was unanimous consent to adopt Resolution S/RES/2254 (2015) which was, as the earlier rumor implied, too general to have a substantial impact in defusing the crisis in Syria.  The only paragraph which actually addressed the “situation on the ground” is OP 13, which states: 

“Demands that all parties immediately cease any attacks against civilians and civilian objects as such, including attacks against medical facilities and personnel, and any indiscriminate use of weapons, including through shelling and aerial bombardment, welcomes the commitment by the International Syria Support Group to press the parties in this regard, and further demands that all parties immediately comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law as applicable.”

Significantly, the Resolution “Demanded cessation of  any indiscriminate use of weapons,” but did not specifically mention barrel bombs, use of which the U.S. repeatedly identifies with Syrian government forces.

The Resolution at no point explicitly mentions regime change, nor does it specifically mention President Assad.  It calls for “elections to be held within 18 months,” and it fails to address the possibility that in free and fair elections Bashir Assad might actually be elected president. The catch is “free and fair,” since the manipulation of election results is notorious, both within the USA itself, and through its overt and covert interference in elections or election results historically, including Iran, in 1952, through Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia, 1965, Chile, 1973, through the present instigation of “color revolutions,” most recently in Ukraine in 2014, which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected President Yanukovich, replaced by a man more agreeable to Western corporate interests – in plainspeak, a proxy.

Although there was no mention of President Assad in the Resolution, Secretary Kerry, during his speech at the Security Council stated: 

“President Assad, in our judgment – and not everybody shares this- but the majority of the people in the ISSG believe that President Assad has lost the ability, the credibility, to be able to unite the country and to provide the moral credibility to be able to govern it into the future.”

Foreign Minister Lavrov stated: 

“The Vienna format was the only one that brought together all influential players to find a sustainable and fair settlement through talks with the Government and the ‘whole span’ of the opposition.    Only Syrian-led inclusive dialogue can put an end to the untold suffering of the Syrian people.”

Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated: 

“International efforts to find a political solution have been relentless, and the need now is to build on experience and lessons learned to make the process irreversible.  Since there can be no military solution, a political settlement is the only way.  All parties must stop fighting immediately.”

Following the Security Council meeting, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, together with UN Special Envoy Stefan Di Mistura held a press conference at which Kerry tempered his blaming of President Assad for instigating this crisis, and Foreign Minister Lavrov repeated that the international community should have by now learned that the demonization and removal of an individual leader and destruction of his government had not led to “democracy,” but has led to disaster in Iraq and Libya, and it should by now be recognized that the removal of Assad will not only fail to improve the situation in Syria, but will lead to a more deadly outcome in Syria, spreading throughout the region and elsewhere, exacerbating the refugee crisis. 

“The last thing I wanted to say:  We often hear it said that without solving the Assad issue, it is impossible to achieve full-fledged coordination in counterterrorism.  But this logic is very dangerous because it brings to naught all the principles enshrined and endorsed by the Security Council.  These principles say that there is no justification whatsoever for terrorism and in counterterrorism there should be no preconditions.  We should set our priorities straight.  ISIS terrorists are our common threat and our civilizational challenge to the whole humankind, so sacrificing it in the name of political ambitions would be a terrible mistake.”

Particularly disturbing, and revealing at this joint press conference was the heckling of John Kerry for backing off  his earlier call to remove President Assad.  At least two journalists, one representing a Saudi sponsored publication, aggressively berated Kerry for relinquishing his earlier demand for Assad’s immediate removal,  as a precondition, and his earlier identification of Assad as the root cause of Syria’s disastrous war.  The hawkish position of these journalists give voice to those who have an interest in disrupting this peace process, a peace process being elaborated with excruciating difficulty.  After all, profits are at risk if war is averted.

Both Kerry’s  and  Lavrov’s positions are still so diametrically opposed that it will clearly be exorbitantly difficult to reach sufficient common ground to end the crisis in Syria, but it does appear that there is at least some political will to work toward that goal, if only for the sake of appearances.  And it is difficult to ignore the fact that the refugee crisis holds the potential to destabilize Europe, and beyond.  It is impossible to predict what future developments or obstacles may expedite or impede this peace process.

Following the conference, as Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, himself a miracle of sanity in the midst of a decomposing world, left the building a Turkish journalist called out to him:  “Are you happy with the outcome?”  Zarif, with his characteristic contempt for bureaucratic obfuscation replied:  “What outcome?,” and left the building.

Carla Stea is Global Research’s Correspondent at United Nations headquarters, New York

MEMORANDUM FOR: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Lavrov

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Sarin Attack at Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013

In a Memorandum of Oct. 1, 2013, we asked each of you to make public the intelligence upon which you based your differing conclusions on who was responsible for the sarin chemical attack at Ghouta, outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. On Dec. 10, 2015, Eren Erdem, a member of parliament in Turkey, citing official documents, blamed Turkey for facilitating the delivery of sarin to rebels in Syria.

Mr. Kerry, you had blamed the Syrian government. Mr. Lavrov, you had described the sarin as “homemade” and suggested anti-government rebels were responsible. Each of you claimed to have persuasive evidence to support your conclusion.

Neither of you responded directly to our appeal to make such evidence available to the public, although, Mr. Lavrov, you came close to doing so. In a speech at the UN on Sept. 26, 2013, you made reference to the views we presented in our VIPS Memorandum, Is Syria a Trap?, sent to President Obama three weeks earlier.

Pointing to strong doubt among chemical weapons experts regarding the evidence adduced to blame the government of Syria for the sarin attack, you also referred to the “open letter sent to President Obama by former operatives of the CIA and the Pentagon,” in which we expressed similar doubt.

Mr. Kerry, on Aug. 30, 2013, you blamed the Syrian government, publicly and repeatedly, for the sarin attack. But you failed to produce the kind of “Intelligence Assessment” customarily used to back up such claims.

We believe that this odd lack of a formal “Intelligence Assessment” is explained by the fact that our former colleagues did not believe the evidence justified your charges and that, accordingly, they resisted pressure to “fix the intelligence around the policy,” as was done to “justify” the attack on Iraq.

Intelligence analysts were telling us privately (and we told the President in our Memorandum of Sept. 6, 2013) that, contrary to what you claimed, “the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21.”

This principled dissent from these analysts apparently led the White House to create a new art form, a “Government Assessment,” to convey claims that the government in Damascus was behind the sarin attack. It was equally odd that the newly minted genre of report offered not one item of verifiable evidence.

(We note that you used this new art form “Government (not Intelligence) Assessment” a second time – again apparently to circumvent intelligence analysts’ objections. On July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, after the media asked you to come up with evidence supporting the charges you leveled against “pro-Russian separatists” on the July 20 Sunday talk shows, you came up with the second, of only two, “Government Assessment.” Like the one on the chemical attack in Syria, the assessment provided meager fare when it comes to verifiable evidence.)

Claims and Counterclaims

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, President Obama asserted: “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the [Syrian] regime carried out this attack [at Ghouta].”

Mr. Lavrov, that same day you publicly complained that U.S. officials kept claiming “’the Syrian regime,’ as they call it, is guilty of the use of chemical weapons, without providing comprehensive proof.” Two days later you told the U.N. General Assembly you had given Mr. Kerry “the latest compilation of evidence, which was an analysis of publicly available information.” You also told the Washington Post, “This evidence is not something revolutionary. It’s available on the Internet.”

On the Internet? Mr. Kerry, if your staff avoided calling your attention to Internet reports about Turkish complicity in the sarin attack of Aug. 21, 2013, because they lacked confirmation, we believe you can now consider them largely confirmed.

Documentary Evidence

Addressing fellow members of parliament on Dec. 10, 2015, Turkish MP Eren Erdem from the Republican People’s Party (a reasonably responsible opposition group) confronted the Turkish government on this key issue. Waving a copy of “Criminal Case Number 2013/120,” Erdem referred to official reports and electronic evidence documenting a smuggling operation with Turkish government complicity.

In an interview with RT four days later, Erdem said Turkish authorities had acquired evidence of sarin gas shipments to anti-government rebels in Syria, and did nothing to stop them.

The General Prosecutor in the Turkish city of Adana opened a criminal case, and an indictment stated “chemical weapons components” from Europe “were to be seamlessly shipped via a designated route through Turkey to militant labs in Syria.” Erdem cited evidence implicating the Turkish Minister of Justice and the Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation in the smuggling of sarin.

The Operation

According to Erdem, the 13 suspects arrested in raids carried out against the plotters were released just a week after they were indicted, and the case was closed — shut down by higher authority. Erdem told RT that the sarin attack at Ghouta took place shortly after the criminal case was closed and that the attack probably was carried out by jihadists with sarin gas smuggled through Turkey.

Small wonder President Erdogan has accused Erdem of “treason.” It was not Erdem’s first “offense.” Earlier, he exposed corruption by Erdogan family members, for which a government newspaper branded him an “American puppet, Israeli agent, a supporter of the terrorist PKK and the instigator of a coup.”

In our Sept. 6, 2013 Memorandum for the President, we reported that coordination meetings had taken place just weeks before the sarin attack at a Turkish military garrison in Antakya – just 15 miles from the Syrian border with Syria and 55 miles from its largest city, Aleppo.

In Antakya, senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials were said to be coordinating plans with Western-sponsored rebels, who were told to expect an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development.” This, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria, and rebel commanders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Assad government.

A year before, the New York Times reported that the Antakya area had become a “magnet for foreign jihadis, who are flocking into Turkey to fight holy war in Syria.” The Times quoted a Syrian opposition member based in Antakya, saying the Turkish police were patrolling this border area “with their eyes closed.”

And, Mr. Lavrov, while the account given by Eren Erdem before the Turkish Parliament puts his charges on the official record, a simple Google search including “Antakya” shows that you were correct in stating the Internet contains a wealth of contemporaneous detail supporting Erdem’s disclosures.

Mr. Kerry, while in Moscow on Dec. 15, you said to a Russian interviewer that Syrian President Assad “has gassed his people – I mean, gas hasn’t been used in warfare formally for years – for – and gas is outlawed, but Assad used it.”

Three days later The Washington Post dutifully repeated the charge about Assad’s supposed killing “his own people with chemical weapons.” U.S. media have made this the conventional wisdom. The American people are not fully informed. There has been no mainstream media reporting on Turkish MP Erdem’s disclosures.

Renewed Appeal

We ask you again, Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov, to set the record straight on this important issue. The two of you have demonstrated an ability to work together on important matters – the Iran nuclear deal, for example – and have acknowledged a shared interest in defeating ISIS, which clearly is not Turkish President Erdogan’s highest priority. Indeed, his aims are at cross-purposes to those wishing to tamp down the violence in Syria.

After the shoot-down of Russia’s bomber on Nov. 24, President Vladimir Putin put Russian forces in position to retaliate the next time, and told top defense officials, “Any targets threatening our [military] group or land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed.” We believe that warning should be taken seriously. What matters, though, is what Erdogan believes.

There is a good chance Erdogan will be dismissive of Putin’s warning, as long as the Turkish president believes he can depend on NATO always to react in the supportive way it did after the shoot-down.

One concrete way to disabuse him of the notion that he has carte blanche to create incidents that could put not only Turkey, but also the U.S., on the verge of armed conflict with Russia, would be for the U.S. Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister to coordinate a statement on what we believe was a classic false-flag chemical attack on Aug. 21, 2013, facilitated by the Turks and aimed at mousetrapping President Obama into a major attack on Syria.

One of our colleagues, a seasoned analyst of Turkish affairs, put it this way: “Erdogan is even more dangerous if he thinks that he now has NATO license to bait Russia — as he did with the shoot-down. I don’t think NATO is willing to give him that broader license, but he is a loose cannon.”

FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer

Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)

David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)

Scott Ritter, former Maj., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Robert David Steele, former CIA Operations Officer

Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)

This short, incisive article was originally published on Washington’s Blog in 2014. It deals with the “criminality” and “blatant manipulation” of Wall Street and gives us a better idea as to why the global economy is in such a catastrophic state.

Runaway derivatives – especially credit default swaps (CDS) – were one of the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis. Congress never fixed the problem, and actually made it worse.

The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.

Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are being manipulated in the exact same same way that interest rates are fixed (see below) … through gamed self-reporting.

Reuters noted last week:

A Manhattan federal judge said on Thursday that investors may pursue a lawsuit accusing 12 major banks of violating antitrust law by fixing prices and restraining competition in the roughly $21 trillion market for credit default swaps.

***

“The complaint provides a chronology of behavior that would probably not result from chance, coincidence, independent responses to common stimuli, or mere interdependence,” [Judge] Cote said.

The defendants include Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc , Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG , Goldman Sachs Group Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc , JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and UBS AG.

Other defendants are the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and Markit Ltd, which provides credit derivative pricing services.

***

U.S. and European regulators have probed potential anticompetitive activity in CDS. In July 2013, the European Commission accused many of the defendants of colluding to block new CDS exchanges from entering the market.

***

“The financial crisis hardly explains the alleged secret meetings and coordinated actions,” the judge wrote. “Nor does it explain why ISDA and Markit simultaneously reversed course.”

In other words, the big banks are continuing to fix prices for CDS in secret meetings … and have torpedoed the more open and transparent CDS exchanges that Congress mandated.

As shown below, Wall Street has manipulated virtually every other market as well – both in the financial sector and the real economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.

Interest Rates Are Manipulated

Bloomberg reported in January:

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was ordered to pay $50 million by a federal judge in Connecticut over claims that it rigged the London interbank offered rate.

RBS Securities Japan Ltd. in April pleaded guilty to wire frauda s part of a settlement of more than $600 million with U.S and U.K. regulators over Libor manipulation, according to court filings. U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea in New Haventoday sentenced the Tokyo-based unit of RBS, Britain’s biggest publicly owned lender, to pay the agreed-upon fine, according to a Justice Department Justice Department.

Global investigations into banks’ attempts to manipulate the benchmarks for profit have led to fines and settlements for lenders including RBS, Barclays Plc, UBS AG and Rabobank Groep.

RBS was among six companies fined a record 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) by the European Union last month for rigging interest rates linked to Libor. The combined fines for manipulating yen Libor and Euribor, the benchmark money-market rate for the euro, are the largest-ever EU cartel penalties.

Global fines for rate-rigging have reached $6 billion since June 2012 as authorities around the world probe whether traders worked together to fix Libor, meant to reflect the interest rate at which banks lend to each other, to benefit their own trading positions.

To put the Libor interest rate scandal in perspective:

• The big banks have conspired for years to rig interest rates … upon which $800 trillion in assets are pegged

• This was the largest insider trading scandal ever … and the largest financial scam in world history

• Local governments got ripped off bigtime by the Libor manipulation

• Even though RBS and a handful of other banks have been fined for interest rate manipulation, Libor is still being manipulated. No wonder … the fines are pocket change – the cost of doing business – for the big banks

Currency Markets Are Rigged

Currency markets are massively rigged. And see this and this.

Energy Prices Manipulated

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.

Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston noted in May that Wall Street is trying to launch Enron 2.0.

Oil Prices Are Manipulated

Oil prices are manipulated as well.

Gold and Silver Are Manipulated

Gold and silver prices are “fixed” in the same way as interest rates and derivatives – in daily conference calls by the powers-that-be.

Bloomberg reports:

It is the participating banks themselves that administer the gold and silver benchmarks.

So are prices being manipulated? Let’s take a look at the evidence. In his book “The Gold Cartel,” commodity analyst Dimitri Speck combines minute-by-minute data from most of 1993 through 2012 to show how gold prices move on an average day (see attached charts). He finds that the spot price of gold tends to drop sharply around the London evening fixing (10 a.m. New York time). A similar, if less pronounced, drop in price occurs around the London morning fixing. The same daily declines can be seen in silver prices from 1998 through 2012.

For both commodities there were, on average, no comparable price changes at any other time of the day. These patterns are consistent with manipulation in both markets.

Commodities Are Manipulated

The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to manipulate commodities prices for decades.

The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical economy, including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity.

And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each year. More from Matt Taibbi, FDL and Elizabeth Warren.

Everything Can Be Manipulated through High-Frequency Trading

Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocks, bonds, options, currencies and commodities. And see this.

Manipulating Numerous Markets In Myriad Ways

The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:

• Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this

• Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here

• Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

• Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)

• Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car

• Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure

• Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this

• Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this

• Participating in various Ponzi schemes

• Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees

• Cooking their books (and see this)

• Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

The Big Picture

The experts say that big banks will keep manipulating markets unless and until their executives are thrown in jail for fraud.

Why? Because the system is rigged to allow the big banks to commit continuous and massive fraud, and then to pay small fines as the “cost of doing business”. As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted years ago:

“The system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.

The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.”

Experts also say that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t ever really stabilize.

But the government is doing the exact opposite. Indeed, the Justice Department has announced it will go easy on big banks, and always settles prosecutions for pennies on the dollar (a form of stealth bailout. It is also arguably one of the main causes of the double dip in housing.)

Indeed, the government doesn’t even force the banks to admit any guilt as part of their settlements.

Again Wall Street has manipulated virtually every other market as well – both in the financial sector and the real economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.

And they will keep on doing so until the Department of Justice grows a pair.

The criminality and blatant manipulation will grow and spread and metastasize – taking over and killing off more and more of the economy – until Wall Street executives are finally thrown in jail.

It’s that simple …

Featured image: Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh gestures during a panel discussion on “The Challenges of Reporting About Iraq” at the Associated Press Managing Editors annual conference in San Jose, Calif., Friday, Oct. 28, 2005. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

The latest Seymour Hersh piece alleges that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) under General Dempsey undermined the official White House policy on Syria. Their impetus to do so came after a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis found in 2012 that there were hardly any “moderate rebels” in Syria but only Islamists fighting against the Syrian state.

Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War By Seymour M. Hersh, December 23, 2015

The CIA was at least since early 2012 delivering weapons from Libya to Turkey as well as through other routes. The U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed on September 11 2012 in Benghazi over some issues with the weapon transfers. Once in Turkey those weapons, as well as plane loads of others purchased by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, were given to “moderate rebels” who took them into Syria. There they sold off at least part of every weapon and ammunition haul to the Islamists terror gangs which were, and still are, financed by the Wahhabi Gulf states. A new BBCRadio4 report by Peter Oborne explains in detail how that scheme works.

The JCS under Dempsey was quite disturbed that weapons transferred by the CIA were going to exactly those people they had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan just a few years ago. They decided, according to Hersh’s source, to undermine the White House’s and CIA’s regime-change program. They provided intelligence to Syria via Germany, Russia and Israel. They also convinced the CIA that it was preferable to give away very old weapons that could be sourced in Turkey instead of newer but more difficult to transport weapons from Libya. As Hersh writes:

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

And Hersh on the weapon dealing:

By the late summer of 2013, the DIA’s assessment had been circulated widely, but although many in the American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming, presenting a continuing problem for Assad’s army. Gaddafi’s stockpile had created an international arms bazaar, though prices were high. ‘There was no way to stop the arms shipments that had been authorised by the president,’ the JCS adviser said. ‘The solution involved an appeal to the pocketbook. The CIA was approached by a representative from the Joint Chiefs with a suggestion: there were far less costly weapons available in Turkish arsenals that could reach the Syrian rebels within days, and without a boat ride.’ But it wasn’t only the CIA that benefited. ‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdoğan,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: “We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.”’

The JCS, according to Hersh, was undermining its Commander in Chief. That is, arguably, treason but U.S. history is full of examples where the military chiefs were pushing into a very different direction than their civil commanders. Trueman versus Douglas MacArthur is just one example. Think of the closing of the Guantanamo prison which the military is actively preventing for seven years now despite Obama’s promise, demand and orders to shut Gitmo down.

Max Fisher, a critic of Hersh not known for factual quality journalism, claims that the Hersh account must be false because Dempsey was not against weaponizing the insurgents but even publicly asked to give them weapons:

Hersh alleges that the mastermind of this entire conspiracy was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey, whom Hersh says was horrified by Obama’s plan to arm Syrian rebels and sought to aid Assad. This claim is difficult to believe: While in office, Dempsey famously and publicly clashed with Obama over Syria because Dempsey wanted to do moreto arm Syrian rebels. Contemporaneous accounts of arguments within the White House support this, with Dempsey arguing the US should more robustly arm Syrian rebels, and Obama arguing for less.Yet Hersh claims, with no evidence, that Dempsey was so opposed to arming Syrian rebels that he would commit an apparent act of treason to subvert those plans. Hersh makes no effort to reconcile this seemingly fatal contradiction, and indeed it is not clear Hersh is even aware that Dempsey is known for supporting rather than opposing efforts to arm the Syrian rebels.

Hersh is of course perfectly aware what Dempsey said and thought in early 2013. The one not aware is the critic.

Dempsey argued in early 2013 that the Pentagon should give weapons to a few carefully vetted rebels:

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, had supported a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels.
…
[D]id the Pentagon, Mr. McCain continued, support the recommendation by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus “that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria? Did you support that?”“We did,” Mr. Panetta said.

“You did support that,” Mr. McCain said.

“We did,” General Dempsey added.

The Pentagon plan was killed by the White House in favor of the ongoing CIA operation. This exchange then does not contradict but even supports the Hersh reporting. Let me explain the context.

By early 2013 Dempsey knew perfectly well that the CIA was supplying -directly or indirectly- everyone in Syria who asked for arms and ammunition. These weapons were going to the Jihadis who were simply the best financed groups. Because the CIA program was secret Dempsey of course could not say so in a public Congress hearing. But Dempsey wanted to give arms to “carefully vetted Syrian rebels” to replace the CIA program with a Pentagon program under his command. He would then have been able to direct the weapon flow and to prevent a further arming of the Islamist terrorists. Dempsey supported a Pentagon program arming the rebels so he could control the arming of the rebels that was already happening under a CIA program but was creating long term trouble.

When the hostile takeover of the CIA arming program failed, Dempsey and the JCS tried to sabotage it by providing old Turkish weapons to the CIA.

Only much later was the Pentagon allowed to run its own training program and to arm its own groups of Syrian rebels. But that program was running in parallel to the ongoing CIA program and was thereby useless for the purpose Dempsey had originally intended. It did not replace the dangerous CIA program. The Pentagon then sabotaged its own program by training only a few rebels and sending them into a Jihadi infested area where they promptly gave their arms up to Jabhat al-Nusra. This publicly proved Dempsey’s main critic point of the long running CIA program: any arms going into Syria ended up in the hands of long term U.S. enemies.

I understand that Hersh’s sourcing is rather weak. His main and sole direct source for the JCS story is a “former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs”. That could be a military or a civilian source. Colonel Pat Lang, one of Hersh’s named sources for other points in the piece, thinks the main source is real and the story true. Lang, who sometimes still consults the military, surely has enough insider connections to have a quite clear picture of this issue.

It is fine to criticize Hersh. His reporting often relies on anonymous sources. But throughout his career Hersh’s reporting was proven right more often than his critics criticism of it. Here the criticism of Hersh relies on a small tunnel vision of what Dempsey claimed he wanted in a public hearing without regard of the context of Dempsey’s claim. Dempsey wanted to replace the then still secret CIA arming program that the DIA and other parts of the military had rightly found to be on a very dangerous path.

The Pentagon under Dempsey, fearing the CIA was repeating old errors, was turf fighting against the CIA under neocon Petraeus and later under the great friend of Saudi Arabia John Brennan. Unfortunately the White House backed the CIA and thereby, more or less willfully, allied with the Islamic State and the other assorted Jihadi organizations (pdf) in Syria.

Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.

First published in August 2015

In the context of the 14th anniversary of 9/11, it’s important to remind people that we still don’t know what happened that day.

What is known about 9/11 is that there are many incredible facts that continue to be ignored by the government and the mainstream media. Here are fourteen.

1. An outline of what was to become the 9/11 Commission Report was produced before the investigation began. The outline was kept secret from the
   Commission’s staff and appears to have determined the outcome of the investigation.
2. The 9/11 Commission claimed sixty-three (63) times in its Report that itcould find “no evidence” related to important aspects of the crimes.
3. One person, Shayna Steiger, issued 12 visas to the alleged hijackers in Saudi Arabia. Steiger issued some of the visas without interviewing the applicants and fought with another employee at the embassy who tried to prevent her lax approach.
4. Before 9/11, the nation’s leading counter-terrorism expert repeatedly notified his friends in the United Arab Emirates of top-secret U.S. plans to capture Osama bin Laden. These treasonous leaks prevented Bin Laden’s capture on at least two separate occasions.
5. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was caught stealing documents from the National Archives that had been requested by the 9/11 Commission. The Commission had previously been denied access to the documents but the White House reluctantly agreed to turn them over just as Berger was trying to steal them..
6. The official story of the failed air defenses on 9/11 was changed several times and, in the end, paradoxically exonerated the military by saying that the military had lied many times about its response. The man who was behind several of the changing accounts was a specialist in political warfare (i.e. propaganda).
7. Military exercises being conducted on the day of 9/11 mimicked the attacks as they were occurring and obstructed the response to the attacks. NORAD commander Ralph Eberhart sponsored those exercises, failed to do his job that day, and later lied to Congress about it (if the 9/11 Commission account is true).
8. A third skyscraper collapsed late in the afternoon on 9/11. This was WTC 7, a 47-story building that the government’s final report says fell into its own footprint due to office fires. The building’s tenants included U.S. intelligence agencies and a company led in part by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.Meetings were scheduled there to discuss terrorism and explosives on the morning of 9/11.
9. News agencies, including BBC and CNN, announced the destruction of WTC 7 long before it happened. One BBC reporter announced the collapse while viewers could see the still-standing building right behind her in the video. Years later, after claiming that it had lost the tapes and then found them again, BBC’s answer to this astonishing report was that everything was just “confusing and chaotic” that day. Of course, one problem with this is that the news agencies predicted the exact building, of the many damaged in the area, that would collapse. Another big problem is that no one could have possibly predicted the collapse of WTC 7 given the unprecedented and unbelievable official account for how that happened.
10. Construction of the new, 52-story WTC 7 was completed two years before the government knew what happened to the first WTC 7. In fact, when the new building was completed in 2006, the spokesman for the government investigation said, “We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.” The construction of the new building, without regard for how the first one was destroyed, indicates that building construction professionals in New York City did not believe it could ever happen again.
11. Ultimately, building construction codes were not changed as a result of the root causes cited by the National Institute for Standards and Technology for destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings. This fact shows that the international building construction community does not believe that the WTC buildings were destroyed as stated in the official account.
12. AMEC, the company that just finished rebuilding the exact spot where Flight 77 was said to hit, was put in charge of cleanup at the WTC and the Pentagon. The man who ran the company, Peter Janson, was a long-time business associate of Donald Rumsfeld.
13. The response of the U.S. Secret Service to the 9/11 attacks suggests foreknowledge of the events in that the agency failed to protect the presidentfrom the obvious danger posed by terrorists.
14. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission notified the FBI of suspected 9/11 insider trading transactions. That evidence was ignored and the suspects were not even questioned by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission.

There are, of course, many more incredible facts about 9/11 that continue to be ignored by the authorities and much of the media.

Kevin Ryan blogs at Dig Within.

El pasado 16 de diciembre, la Corte Internacional de Justicia (CIJ) dio lectura al fallo entre Costa Rica y Nicaragua relacionado a dos demandas (a las que nos referimos en una  nota  anterior publicada en estas mismas páginas de Research): una demanda presentada por Costa Rica contra Nicaragua en noviembre del 2010 debido a los efectos negativos del dragado y a la ocupación ilegal del territorio de Costa Rica; y una demanda presentada por Nicaragua contra Costa Rica en diciembre del 2011 por la construcción de una ruta de 160 kilómetros bordeando la frontera fluvial y un sector de la frontera terrestre. Como se recordará, las audiencias orales, que constituyeron la última etapa procesal entre Costa Rica y Nicaragua antes de la lectura del fallo, se celebraron entre el 14 de abril y el 1ero de mayo del 2015 (ver nota al respecto publicada en el sitio de la Maestría en Derecho Ambiental de la Facultad de Derecho de la UCR con un juego de mapas).

Con relación a la primera demanda, las pretensiones finales de Costa Rica se pueden encontrar en las páginas 64 y subsiguientes de esta  acta  del 28/04/2015, mientras que las de Nicaragua se encuentran en las páginas 59 y subsiguientes de esta  acta  de las audiencias orales celebradas el 29/04/2015. Con relación a la segunda demanda, las pretensiones finales Nicaragua figuran en las páginas 64 y siguientes del  acta  del 30/04/2915 y las de Costa Rica figuran en páginas 47 y subsiguientes del  acta  de la audiencia celebrada el 1/05/2015.

Si contabilizamos los puntos solicitados a la CIJ en sus conclusiones finales en ambas demandas, fueron un total de 31 peticiones hechas al juez internacional por parte de Costa Rica, y fueron 9 las presentadas por parte de Nicaragua.

Si hacemos memoria, el 13 de julio del 2009, ambos Estados vivieron una jornada muy similar con respecto al fallo de la CIJ sobre los derechos de navegación y derechos conexos en el San Juan, como resultado de una demanda interpuesta por Costa Rica contra Nicaragua en el 2005. Se trata de una decisión de la CIJ sobre la cual existen pocos análisis: uno de ellos afirma que se trata de la peor sentencia jamás redactada por la CIJ en toda su historia (Nota 1). En aquella oportunidad, de 9 puntos solicitados, la CIJ le concedió 7 puntos a Costa Rica, reconociendo derechos de navegación para sus embarcaciones turísticas, derechos de pesca  de subsistencia y otros derechos conexos, y negándole a Costa Rica el derecho de vigilar con sus policías su territorio desde el Río San Juan: un derecho reconocido en el tratado de 1858 a ambos ribereños bajo el término de competencias en materia de “guarda” y de “protección” del San Juan (Nota 2). Desde aquella fecha, Costa Rica quedó impedida de navegar con policías en el río San Juan, fueran estos armados, o desarmados, o en simples tareas de abastecimiento de puestos fronterizos. Un año más tarde, en el 2010, la ocupación ilegal en Isla Portillos revelaría las enormes dificultades de Costa Rica para vigilar su frontera fluvial (y lo que ocurre en su extremidad Noreste), dando lugar a un fuego cruzado (de intensidad no tan moderada) entre los dos responsables de la seguridad pública en Costa Rica durante la administración (2006-2010) (Nota 3).

En su decisión dictaminada el pasado 16 de diciembre, cada uno de los distintos requerimientos hechos por ambos Estados en sus conclusiones finales encontró algún tipo de respuesta por parte de la CIJ (a menos que esta no los considero pertinentes por alguna razón, debiendo el juez explicar porque los descartó).

A diferencia de los tribunales nacionales de algunos países, la CIJ pone a disposición del público el texto completo de sus sentencias casi en tiempo real. El texto del fallo está disponible desde el 16 de diciembre en los dos únicos idiomas oficiales de la CIJ, en  francés  y en  inglés . No existe versión en otro idioma y se recomienda la mayor cautela con traducciones de algunas partes del texto, en la medida en que cada término usado por la CIJ es el resultado de meses de un laborioso trabajo de redacción, fruto de una larga reflexión colegial entre sus integrantes realizada en la tranquilidad y la majestuosidad del Peace Palace en La Haya. La lenta reflexión de la CIJ durante la “fabrication” de un fallo fue descrita por el juez argelino Mohamed Bedjaoui (ex Presidente de la CIJ) en un artículo publicado en 1991, y que sigue siendo, en nuestra modesta opinión,  un verdadero referente en esa materia (Nota 4). Se puede también referir al lector al comunicado de prensa oficial elaborado por el servicio de prensa de la CIJ (en  inglés  y en  francés ) divulgado al concluir la lectura del fallo por parte del Presidente de la CIJ: su comparación con los comunicados oficiales elaborados de cada lado del San Juan permite evidenciar algunas (discretas) omisiones.

Contenido del fallo de la CIJ

Si bien algunos análisis, notas de prensa, cables de agencias de noticias y hasta artículos de opinión publicados en días recientes en ambos lados del San Juan tomaron como base los comunicados de prensa de la CIJ, muchos se basaron directamente en los comunicados emitidos en las primeras horas por cada uno de los dos aparatos diplomáticos. Es una opción informativa que evidentemente se arriesga a cierta parcialidad, y difícilmente permite ofrecer un análisis integral del texto de la sentencia. La puesta a disposición del texto completo de la sentencia de la CIJ (casi en tiempo real) en ambos idiomas oficiales por parte del servicio informático de la CIJ, constituye una moderna herramienta que debe ser mejor aprovechada: ello en aras de ofrecer una lectura más balanceada con relación al alcance del texto elaborado por los jueces en La Haya.

Con relación a la primera demanda:

En su sentencia,  la CIJ atribuyo a Costa Rica la “zona en disputa” (declarada como tal en marzo del 2011 por ella misma), tal y como se consignaba en los mapas oficiales cartográficos de ambos Estados desde el año 1900 (año en que se adoptaron las actas de una comisión binacional de demarcación que inició sus labores en 1897). La plena coincidencia de los mapas oficiales  entre Costa Rica y Nicaragua sobre la frontera terrestre, y ello desde 1900, descartaba (al menos en buena teoría) cualquier duda con relación a la soberanía ejercida por Costa Rica en el sector de Isla Portillos. A este respecto vale la pena recordar que en octubre del 2010, Nicaragua procedió a retirar sus mapas en formato digital y a editarlos con un cambio en Isla Portillos al iniciar el mes de febrero del 2011. Mientras tanto, a partir de octubre del 2010,  los encargados del dragado del río San Juan refirieron insistentemente a un mapa de Google Earth para justificar su localización en Isla Portillos: la empresa Google Earth reconoció de forma inmediata el error contenido en sus mapas, haciendo no obstante ver que nunca recibió una solicitud formal de parte de Costa Rica antes del 2010 para proceder a rectificarlo. Este  artículo  de prensa publicado en España contiene, a la izquierda, el mapa usado que contiene un error y a la derecha, el mapa rectificado por Google Earth a inicios de noviembre del 2010 (ver también al respecto esta nota de prensa).

Este 16 de diciembre, en su fallo el juez internacional ordenó a Nicaragua compensar a Costa Rica por los daños causados en Isla Portillos (tanto en el 2010 con el caño “Google” o caño “Pastora” como en el 2013 con dos nuevos “caños” detectados gracias a las imágenes satelitales proporcionadas por  un satélite de Colombia a Costa Rica), y fijó un plazo de 12 meses para que ambos Estados acuerden el monto indemnizatorio de forma conjunta (párrafo 142 de la sentencia).

Con relación a esta primera demanda presentada por Costa Rica contra Nicaragua en noviembre del 2010, varias de las peticiones hechas por Costa Rica no fueron aceptadas por parte del juez internacional.

Es el caso de la petición tendiente a obtener que la CIJ declarara que Nicaragua había violado las obligaciones del Artículo IX del tratado Cañas-Jerez de 1858 que se lee así. “Por ningún motivo, ni en caso y estado de guerra, en que por desgracia llegasen á encontrarse las Repúblicas de Nicaragua y Costa Rica, les será permitido ejercer ningún acto de hostilidad entre ellas en el puerto de San Juan del Norte, ni en el río de este nombre y Lago de Nicaragua de no usar el río ejercer ningún acto de hostilidad entre ellas para realizar hostilidades”. El rechazo a esta petición obedece, según la CIJ, a la ausencia de elementos probatorios demostrando que el Río San Juan fuera escenario de algún tipo de hostilidades (párrafo 96 de la sentencia de la CIJ). Una petición similar de Costa Rica a la CIJ, esta vez con relación a la prohibición del uso de la fuerza plasmada en el Artículo 2, párrafo 4 la Carta de Naciones Unidas, y a la prohibición de ocupar un territorio militarmente – aunque sea de manera temporal – consagrada en el Artículo 21 de la Carta de la OEA, también fueron rechazadas por la CIJ (párrafos 96-99).

Otras peticiones hechas por Costa Rica tendientes a acreditar la idea que el dragado realizado por Nicaragua conlleva el riesgo de provocar un daño transfronterizo al río Colorado y  a otros cuerpos de agua situados en Costa Rica fueron rechazadas por la CIJ. En el párrafo 105 se lee que. “Après examen des éléments de preuve versés au dossier, y compris les rapports et exposés des experts que les deux Parties ont fait entendre, la Cour conclut que le programme de dragage envisagé en 2006 n’était pas de nature à créer un risque de dommage transfrontière important, que ce soit à l’égard du débit du fleuve Colorado ou de la zone humide du Costa Rica. En l’absence de risque de dommage transfrontière important, le Nicaragua n’avait pas l’obligation d’effectuer une évaluation de l’impact sur l’environnement ». Esta conclusión permitió a la CIJ descartar el examen de una eventual obligación de notificación y de consulta basada en el tratado de 1858,  solicitada por Costa Rica. El juez internacional lo hizo en los siguientes términos en el párrafo 108  de su fallo: « La Cour observe que le fait que le traité de 1858 énonce, en matière de notification et de consultation, des obligations limitées visant certaines situations précises n’a pas pour effet d’écarter d’autres obligations de nature procédurale relatives aux dommages transfrontières, qui pourraient exister en droit international conventionnel ou coutumier. En tout état de cause, la Cour estime que, puisque le droit international n’imposait au Nicaragua aucune obligation d’effectuer une évaluation de l’impact sur l’environnement en l’absence de risque de dommage transfrontière important (voir paragraphe 105 ci-dessus), il n’était pas tenu d’informer ou de consulter le Costa Rica ».  De igual forma, se rechazó una violación a lo dispuesto en materia de notificación y consulta que derivaría de la Convención Ramsar (párrafos  109 y 110).

Con relación a otras obligaciones relacionadas con la protección del ambiente, la CIJ rechazó varios puntos formulados por Costa Rica en sus conclusiones finales para que se declarara que Nicaragua violó obligaciones procedimentales  de carácter convencional o consuetudinario (párrafo 112).  En el párrafo 120, la CIJ declaró que Nicaragua no ha violado ninguna obligación al proceder al dragado del San Juan en su curso inferior. En cambio, dictaminó que Nicaragua violó las obligaciones impuestas en las ordenanzas del 2011 al proceder a construir dos nuevos “caños” detectados en setiembre del 2013 (párrafo 129): notemos que dicha detección se dio gracias a tomas satelitales proporcionadas por Colombia a Costa Rica.

En el párrafo 136 de su sentencia, el juez internacional estimó que los derechos de navegación de Costa Rica que resultan del tratado de 1858 fueron violados en dos incidentes (de cinco reportados por Costa Rica), y se abstuvo de examinar la conformidad del reglamento 079-2009 adoptado por Nicaragua en octubre del 2009 para regular la navegación en el San Juan (párrafo 134). Recordemos que Costa Rica había solicitado a la CIJ abrogar el decreto 079-2009, por considerar que limitaba los derechos de navegación de Costa Rica en el San Juan,  provocando una pregunta un tanto airada del juez marroquí Mohamed Bennouna durante las últimas audiencias orales celebradas en abril del 2015 (Nota 5): esta petición fue denegada por la CIJ en su fallo dado a conocer el 16 de diciembre (párrafo 138).

En el párrafo 144, el juez internacional consideró que  “sería inapropiada” aceptar una petición de Costa Rica para que Nicaragua cubriera los gastos en los que incurrió Costa Rica relativos a la etapa que inició con la detección de dos nuevos caños en septiembre del 2013 y culminó con la adopción en noviembre del 2013 de una ordenanza de la CIJ. Se trata de un interesante intento realizado por Costa Rica tendiente a obtener algo similar a la figura (que existe en el ordenamiento jurídico costarricense y en otros sistemas jurídicos) de una condenatoria en costas con relación a este preciso episodio del 2013. El juez internacional  la rechaza al considerar que una condenatoria de este tipo  “sería inapropiada”,  sin dar mayores explicaciones al respecto.

Con relación a la segunda demanda:

La CIJ condenó a Costa Rica por no proceder a realizar una Evaluación de Impacto Ambiental (EIA) al ordenar la construcción de la “Ruta 1856”. En el párrafo 162, leemos que esta obligación deriva del derecho internacional general. Al igual que en el caso anterior, la CIJ procede luego a rechazar varias peticiones hechas por Nicaragua al juez internacional.

La primera, tendiente a ordenar que Costa Rica violó obligaciones de tipo convencional  que también exigen la realización de un evaluación de impacto ambiental, y derivadas de la Convención sobre la Biodiversidad (párrafo  164); la segunda, derivada del tratado de 1858 que, según Nicaragua, obligaba a Costa Rica a notificarle y consultarle sobre los trabajos realizados con la construcción de la ruta 1856: en este caso, la CIJ consideró que la constatación de una violación de Costa Rica a la obligación derivada del derecho internacional general de proceder a una EIA la eximió de analizar la primera petición (párrafo  169) y que no existe, según ella,  obligación de notificación que se pueda establecer  enel tratado de 1858 para una ruta paralela al San Juan (párrafo 171).

En sus conclusiones finales, Nicaragua solicitaba a la CIJ una indemnización por daños al Río San Juan: para la CIJ, Nicaragua no logro aportar datos que demuestren un impacto significativo con relación a la carga sedimentaria adicional causada y sus efectos en la morfología del San Juan (párrafos 196, 207), como tampoco a los ecosistemas y a la calidad del agua (párrafo 213), o con impactos en materia de la salud y de turismo (párrafo 216).

Como se puede apreciar, la CIJ,  fiel a su tradición, se mostró particularmente balanceada en el texto que dio a conocer el pasado 16 de diciembre, permitiendo a ambos Estados hacer ver ante sus respectivas opiniones públicas que sus peticiones fueron aceptadas, mientras que las del adversario fueron rechazadas. Es usual que en esos casos, el primer comunicado de prensa elaborado por cada uno de los dos Estados ponga el acento en lo que mejor imagen le proporcione  (pasando por alto las peticiones que le fueron rechazadas y las peticiones del contrincante que si fueron aceptadas por la CIJ). Este ejercicio es inevitable, y responde a una clara intención del juez internacional, que posee una particularidad con relación a otros jueces: la de buscar siempre una formulación equilibrada en sus sentencias que permita ser positivamente recibidas por ambos contendores, contribuyendo así a apaciguar  los ánimos usualmente enardecidos,  en particular cuando se trata de Estados vecinos.

La necesidad de trabajar de forma conjunta

En varias partes de la sentencia, la CIJ llamó a ambos Estados a cooperar de manera conjunta en asuntos que se relacionen con el Río San Juan, tal y como por ejemplo en el párrafo 228 que se lee así: “Elle tient par ailleurs à rappeler l’importance d’une coopération continue entre les Parties dans l’exécution des obligations qui leur incombent respectivement en ce qui concerne le fleuve San Juan». Este llamado a cooperar en asuntos técnicos relacionados con aspectos ligados a la gestión ambiental de una cuenca compartida como la del San Juan nos recuerda el llamado en un sentido similar hecho desde la primera ordenanza dictaminada en marzo del 2011 con relación a la demanda relacionada a Isla Portillos, y que fue desaprovechada por uno de los contrincantes con base en información a la fecha no revelada (Nota 6).

Con relación a actividades futuras de Costa Rica en la zona aledaña al Río San Juan, la CIJ indicó que Costa Rica deberá consultar a Nicaragua cuando los trabajos relacionados con la ruta 1856 supongan un riesgo de daño transfronterizo importante.  Lo hizo en los siguientes términos que procedemos a reproducir, del párrafo 173: “En conclusion, la Cour constate que le Costa Rica a manqué à son obligation d’évaluer l’impact environnemental de la construction de la route. Il demeure tenu de procéder à une évaluation appropriée relativement à tous nouveaux travaux qu’il envisagerait d’exécuter sur la route ou dans la zone adjacente au fleuve San Juan et qui présenteraient un risque de dommage transfrontière important. Le Costa Rica admet lui-même être tenu à pareille obligation. Il n’y a pas lieu de supposer que, lorsqu’il entreprendra de nouveaux travaux dans ce secteur, notamment dans le cadre de la construction de la route, il ne tiendra pas compte des motifs et des conclusions énoncés dans le présent arrêt. La Cour relève par ailleurs que le Nicaragua s’est, à l’audience, engagé à coopérer avec le Costa Rica pour l’évaluation de l’impact de tels travaux sur le fleuve. Elle considère à cet égard que, si les circonstances l’exigent, le Costa Rica devra consulter de bonne foi le Nicaragua, qui a souveraineté sur le fleuve San Juan, en vue de définir les mesures propres à prévenir la survenance de dommages transfrontières importants ou à en réduire le risque ». En el párrafo 227 precisa nuevamente lo señalado en el párrafo 173, haciendo énfasis en  que la obligación de Costa Rica de proceder a una EIA aplica únicamente para actividades que supongan un riesgo de daño transfronterizo importante : « Comme elle l’a dit au paragraphe 173 ci-dessus, l’obligation du Costa Rica d’effectuer une évaluation de l’impact sur l’environnement ne vaut que pour les activités comportant un risque de dommage transfrontière important, et il n’y a pas lieu de supposer que le Costa Rica ne se conformera pas aux obligations lui incombant en vertu du droit international, telles qu’énoncées dans le présent arrêt, dans le cadre des activités qu’il pourrait mener à l’avenir dans la région, y compris de nouveaux travaux routiers ».

Con relación a las futuras operaciones de dragado a ser emprendidas por Nicaragua, en el párrafo 122 de la sentencia leemos que la CIJ “tomó nota” de aseveraciones hechas por Nicaragua durante su defensa con relación a cualquier ampliación de sus operaciones de dragado futuras y el compromiso de proceder a un nuevo estudio de impacto ambiental: “Elle prend acte de l’engagement du Nicaragua, formulé au cours de la procédure orale, de procéder à une nouvelle étude de l’impact sur l’environnement avant toute expansion d’ampleur de son programme de dragage actuel. Elle remarque par ailleurs que le Nicaragua a déclaré qu’il veillerait à ce que pareille étude comporte une analyse des risques de dommage transfrontière et ferait en sorte d’informer et de consulter le Costa Rica dans le cadre de ce processus ».

Para llegar a estas y muchas otras conclusiones, el debate interno en la CIJ parece haber sido álgido, en la medida en que 10 jueces titulares de los 15 externaron algún desacuerdo con alguna parte del texto acordado por la CIJ: ver sobre este aspecto el  listado  y el acceso al texto de cada una de las declaraciones individuales y conjuntas. A estas últimas hay que añadir la disonancia tradicional que externan usualmente los dos jueces ad hoc designados por cada parte: en este caso la opinión individual de 16 páginas (ver texto   en inglés) del juez  John Dugard (sudafricano, juez ad hoc de Costa Rica) y la declaración de ocho páginas del juez Gilbert Guillaume (francés, juez ad hoc de Nicaragua) (ver texto en francés).

Breves observaciones con relación a la Ruta 1856 o “trocha fronteriza”:

Como bien se sabe, se trata de lo que la CIJ denomina como una ruta paralela al río,  y que ha sido presentada por las autoridades de Costa Rica durante la administración (2010-2014) como una “obra prioritara” de 160 kilómetros que bordea el río San Juan y  parte de la frontera terrestre entre Puesto Delta y Los Chiles, iniciada en diciembre del 2010. De manera a apreciar la relación existente entre esos 160 kilómetros y la ubicación geográfica de Isla Portillos, remitimos al lector al tercer mapa de esta modesta  nota  publicada por el Observatoire pour l´Amérique Latine et les Caraïbes (OPALC) en mayo del 2015.

En Costa Rica, es más conocida popularmente como la  “trocha fronteriza”, que analizamos desde la perspectiva internacional en una publicación de la UCR (Nota 7). Fue también denominada por el ingeniero René Castro Salazar (Canciller y luego Ministro de Ambiente de Costa Rica) como un “camino rústico” en un artículo publicado en enero del 2012 (ver artículo). “Ruta”, “camino rústico”, “trocha” son términos distintos, pero refieren a la misma iniciativa. Esta “obra” fue objeto de un interesante  informe  en junio del 2012 por parte de un ente que puede ayudar a entender mejor la diferencia entre estos términos, el Colegio Federado de Ingenieros y Arquitectos de Costa Rica (CFIA). Dejamos al lector revisar las conclusiones del CFIA. Al finalizar el 2012, la antes mencionada “obra” fue calificada como el escándalo del año (ver  nota  de CRHoy). Las comillas usadas por el autor en las dos frases precedentes se deben al hecho que una obra presupone un diseño y estudios previos: tenemos sobre este punto preciso la firme convicción que las obras, como entidades, también merecen respeto.

Sobre este último punto cabe señalar que los responsables de sugerir tan peculiar iniciativa se han mostrado extremadamente evasivos (ver   nota  del Semanario Universidad de abril del 2013 titulada “Todos alabaron la trocha, pero nadie asumió la paternidad”). En agosto del 2012, un reportaje de La Nación dio píe para una acción penal por presunta difamación contra una periodista por parte de dos figuras públicas de Costa Rica al ver su nombre aparecer en un reportaje sobre la trocha fronteriza, acción finalmente desestimada por los tribunales de justicia en enero del 2013 (ver  nota  de prensa titulada “Tribunal vio innecesario juicio contra periodista”). En declaraciones ante diputados se oyó que se “trato de coordinación de esfuerzos de órganos diversos /…/ en aras de afrontar la emergencia que se vivía” (escuchar parte de audio de declaraciones del Ex Ministro de Seguridad José María Tijerino Pacheco). En agosto del 2012, declaraciones ante una Comisión Parlamentaria arrojó algunos nombres, sin que se tenga claridad de cómo operó la cadena de mando que permita remontar a lo que podríamos denominar el “punto de ignición” (ver  nota  de CRHoy). Se indicó sobre una de estas comparecencias en Cuesta de Mora (sede de la Asamblea Legislativa) que hubo intentos de acallar a los comparecientes por parte de algunas bancadas parlamentarias (ver  nota   del Semanario Universidad de junio del 2012 titulada “CONAVI paga a contratistas de trocha mientras se investiga corrupción”): “Sería muy lamentable que con esas bravuconadas pretendan acallar gente o sepultar el trabajo de esta comisión, solo por las críticas que se lancen a la cuestionada vía”, dijo el diputado socialcristiano Luis Fishman, quien con su compañero de bancada Walter Céspedes y Manrique Oviedo, del Partido Acción Ciudadana, ofrecieron disculpas al representante del CFIA”. En febrero del 2013 se leyó  en el Semanario Universidad (ver  nota  titulada “Comisión legislativa sobre trocha llamará a los actores políticos”) que para José María Tijerino Pacheco, ex Ministro de Seguridad de Costa Rica: “es una idea tan buena, que no quiero ser inmodesto y arrogarme la paternidad de ella”. En un artículo anterior publicado en La Nación al finalizar enero del 2013 el mismo funcionario había hecho ver dos graves imprecisiones con relación a una cadena de mando publicada dos días antes en La Nación sobre la construcción de una vía paralela al San Juan (ver  artículo   titulado “Dos graves inexactitudes”): se lee que “La primera de ellas es la de que la presidenta de la República, Laura Chinchilla, delegó en mí la tarea de construir dicha carretera, aseveración errónea puesto que la construcción de caminos o carreteras no es atribución del Ministerio de Seguridad Pública”. También se lee que  “La segunda inexactitud consiste en que se me vincula con dicha ruta en setiembre de 2011, mes en el que yo ya tenía cinco meses de haber cesado en el cargo de ministro de Seguridad Pública y ya estaba nombrado como embajador ante el Gobierno de la República Oriental del Uruguay”.

En marzo del 2013, diputados de oposición, quiénes sí benefician de inmunidad – a diferencia de una periodista – insistieron nuevamente sobre el tema (ver  nota  de prensa titulada “Diputados insisten en participación de Adrián Chinchilla y Carlos Espinach en decisiones sobre trocha”). Las diversas comparecencias ante una comisión legislativa no lograron identificar con precisión a los responsables de sugerir la construcción de la hoy famosa trocha fronteriza costarricense.

A la fecha, la trocha fronteriza es objeto de 31 informes relativos a “posibles anomalías” (según  nota  reciente de La Nación del 18/12/2015). Las “posibles anomalías”  deben ahora ser dilucidadas de manera a explicar el destino exacto de una cifra de cientos de millones de dólares: el Fiscal Adjunto Anti Corrupción recientemente, en declaraciones a la radio,  dio el dato de unos 16.000 millones de colones (unos 300 millones de US$), reportados también por la prensa en marzo del año en curso (ver nota de CRHoy): si bien la suma avanzada ya es cuantiosa,  refiere únicamente a los fondos recibidos por una sola institución, el Consejo Nacional de Vialidad (CONAVI). En la nota precitada del Semanario Universidad, se indica que: “Entre las cosas que los diputados buscan aclarar,  a cuánto asciende lo gastado en la trocha; lo que no está claro, ya que el CONAVI había dicho que el gasto era de ¢19.500 millones, y la CNE reportó a la Contraloría General de la República un presupuesto de ¢9.000 y otro de ¢10.000 millones en fondos destinados a la trocha, lo que sumaría más de ¢38.000 millones. Pero el ejecutivo había autorizado además gastos por miles de millones de colones del Ministerio de Seguridad, MOPT, MINAET, y no se ha aclarado cuánto del dinero se ha gastado”.

Más allá de los números y de los intentos de unos y otros de maquillar o minimizar el monto (o emprenderla contra expertos) para evitar saber cuál es la magnitud exacta del daño causado al erario público costarricense, es de recordar que esta trocha fronteriza siempre se justificó oficialmente como una “respuesta” a la “invasión” y a la “agresión” sufridas por Costa Rica en Isla Portillos.  Las comillas usadas nuevamente por el autor en la frase anterior obedecen al hecho que lo ocurrido en Isla Portillos nunca calificó, desde la perspectiva del derecho internacional, como una “invasión” o una “agresión”, sino como una incursión y ocupación ilegal del territorio costarricense. Sobre este preciso punto (de carácter estrictamente semántico para algunos, y como tal de relevancia relativa), un funcionario de la cancillería de Costa Rica admitió en una de las primeras preguntas realizadas por la periodista Natalia Rodríguez Mata la diferencia existente entre estos diversos términos  y reconoció que desde el punto de vista jurídico “agresión “ e “invasión “ no aplicaban  a la situación acaecida en Isla Portillos (ver el  video  disponible en You Tube del programa Sobre la Mesa de agosto 2013, Canal 15 UCR). El funcionario justificó no obstante ante las cámaras del canal universitario el uso de la palabra “invasión”, según sus propios términos “para que la gente entienda” (Minuto 7:23).

En una de las pocas  notas de prensa  (titulada “Asesor jurídico tico admite que lo ocurrido en Portillos no es invasión ni agresión”) sobre esta interesante aseveración hecha pública tan sólo en el mes de agosto del 2013, se leyó que: “existió un engaño para el pueblo” y que: “sin proponérselo, viene ahora a revelar la existencia de una conducta cínica e irresponsable del gobierno de Costa Rica, que exagera y deforma los hechos con fines patrioteros y demagógicos“. En recientes declaraciones, el Fiscal Adjunto Anti Corrupción acotó precisamente, en el marco de la investigación realizada por la Fiscalía, que parte del “ardid” – según sus propios términos – consistió “en  aumentar la situación de emergencia para distraer el uso de los fondos públicos” (ver segundo audio en esta  nota  del programa Radial Amelia Rueda del 17/12/2015).

Un detalle en el fallo de la CIJ pasado casi desapercibido

Notemos que en junio del 2012, la Sala Constitucional de Costa Rica rechazó “ad portas” un recurso de inconstitucionalidad contra el Decreto de emergencia  (ver  texto  del voto 8420-2012) que consagró jurídicamente una situación de “emergencia” en Costa Rica. La CIJ en su fallo llegó a una conclusión totalmente opuesta sobre este punto. En efecto, en el párrafo 158 de la sentencia leída en La Haya el pasado 16 de diciembre del 2015, se lee que para la CIJ:. “.. la Cour estime que, dans les circonstances de l’espèce, le Costa Rica n’a pas démontré l’existence d’une urgence justifiant de construire la route sans entreprendre d’évaluation de l’impact sur l’environnement. En effet, l’exécution des travaux était prévue dès le départ pour durer plusieurs années, ce qui s’est confirmé par la suite. De plus, lorsque le Costa Rica a entrepris la construction de la route, la situation dont le territoire litigieux était le théâtre avait déjà été portée devant la Cour, laquelle a, peu de temps après, indiqué des mesures conservatoires. Si le Costa Rica soutient que la route était destinée à faciliter l’évacuation de la portion de territoire costa-ricien adjacente au fleuve San Juan, la Cour constate que la route ne donne accès qu’à une partie de cette région et ne pouvait donc constituer une réponse à l’urgence alléguée que dans une mesure limitée. Par ailleurs, le Costa Rica n’a pas démontré l’existence d’une menace imminente d’affrontement militaire dans les régions traversées par la route. Enfin, il est rappelé que le décret proclamant l’état d’urgence a été pris par le Costa Rica le 21 février 2011, soit après le début des travaux routiers “.  En caso de alguna duda de nuestros lectores, reproducimos la versión en inglés del mismo extracto del párrafo 158 de la sentencia de la CIJ leída el pasado 16 de diciembre del 2015:  “the Court considers that, in the circumstances of this case, Costa Rica has not shown the existence of an emergency that justified constructing the road without undertaking an environmental impact assessment. In fact, completion of the project was going to take, and is indeed taking, several years. In addition, when Costa Rica embarked upon the construction of the road, the situation in the disputed territory was before the Court, which shortly thereafter issued provisional measures. Although Costa Rica maintains that the construction of the road was meant to facilitate the evacuation of the area of Costa Rican territory adjoining the San Juan River, the Court notes that the road provides access to only part of that area and thus could constitute a response to the alleged emergency only to a limited extent. Moreover, Costa Rica has not shown an imminent threat of military confrontation in the regions crossed by the road. Finally, the Court notes that the Executive Decree proclaiming an emergency was issued by Costa Rica on 21 February 2011, after the works on the road had begun”.

Estamos por lo tanto en presencia de un fallo de la CIJ que contradice lo dispuesto en una decisión de la Sala Constitucional de Costa Rica: sobre esta última, compuesta por siete integrantes, cabe señalar que su Presidenta en aquel momento Ana Virginia Calzada Miranda y el Magistrado Fernando Cruz Castro salvaron ambos su voto, optando por admitir el recurso de inconstitucionalidad presentado contra el decreto de emergencia, en junio del 2012. No se ha tenido acceso a las razones expuestas por ambos magistrados para separarse de la posición de sus colegas en la Sala Constitucional, y sería tal vez de gran interés conocerlas.

Independientemente del debate interno en el seno del máximo órgano de la justicia constitucional de Costa Rica sobre lo qué se debe entender por una “emergencia nacional” (que dicho sea de paso no provocó ruptura alguna de las relaciones diplomáticas ni comerciales entre Costa Rica y Nicaragua), los medios de prensa, los analistas y observadores, así como los órganos de control y fiscalización del Estado costarricense tienen ante sí un interesante desafío que ahora se abre posterior al fallo de la CIJ:  en efecto, sin proponérselo,  los jueces de La Haya han puesto en entredicho gran parte de la retórica discursiva usada por parte de las autoridades  de Costa Rica para justificar la denominada “trocha fronteriza” entre el 2010 y el 2012. Parte de esta retórica, que refiere a la “urgencia” y a la “emergencia” para justificarla, se dejó nuevamente entrever durante un debate reciente que tuvimos, previo a la lectura del fallo de la CIJ, con el periodista Carlos Roverssi Rojas (quien durante la administración (2010-2014) fuera en un primer momento designado como Vice Canciller en el período mayo 2010- junio 2013 y a partir de junio del 2013 Ministro de Comunicación): el debate matutino fue realizado en el programa RTNoticias, 24 horas antes de leerse el fallo de la CIJ (ver  video  en You Tube de emisión matutina realizada el 15/12/2015). Al insistir sobre el punto de saber quién sugirió la trocha, y pedir, por parte de la periodista Denise Mora López que se confirmara si se puede considerar al Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transporte (MOPT) como responsable de la trocha, se oyó por parte de nuestro distinguido contrincante  que “No, los responsables de la trocha somos todos, y Costa Rica en general” (Minuto 24:18).

Dado a conocer el fallo de la CIJ, el jurista Alvaro Sagot Rodríguez, renombrado especialista en derecho ambiental en Costa Rica, quien interpuso el recurso ante la Sala contra la “emergencia” decretada como tal el 7 de marzo del 2011 hizo ver que ahora la Sala Constitucional debería también explicarse: ver al respecto  nota con audio  del 17/12/2015 en el Programa radial Nuestra Voz, de Amelia Rueda titulada “Abogado ambientalista: Quienes criticamos daños por trocha no somos “malos costarricenses”.  En ese mismo programa radial oído 24 horas después del fallo de la CIJ, el Fiscal Adjunto Anti Corrupción  precisó que el fallo de la CIJ “nos viene a dar la razón en una de las hipótesis que nosotros tenemos planteadas”  (ver el segundo audio disponible en la  nota  del programa Nuestra Voz de Amelia Rueda titulado “Llegan a 44 los imputados por peculado en construcción de trocha fronteriza, confirma Fiscalía” ). La diferencia entre los “buenos” y los “malos” costarricenses a los que alude el profesor Alvaro Sagot Rodriguez proviene de declaraciones (a nuestro modesto entender sumamente cuestionables)  de la Presidenta Laura Chinchilla Miranda contra los ciudadanos costarricenses que se opusieron desde un inicio a la construcción de la trocha sin ningún estudio sobre su posible impacto ambiental (ver  nota  de CRHoy titulada “Decreto de emergencia por trocha violenta principios de la Sala IV”).   Es menester recordar que fue un puñado de pequeñas organizaciones sociales en Costa Rica las que en diciembre del 2011 externaron su oposición a la ausencia de  una EIA para construir la vía paralela al San Juan y  que señalaron de manera categórica que: “7. Solicitamos que se investigue de manera exhaustiva la existencia de daños ambientales causados por la construcción de la carretera y se aclare de una vez por todas si existen estudios previos de impacto ambiental para su construcción. 8. Solicitamos al Poder Ejecutivo de la República de Costa Rica que proceda a corregir, con la mayor brevedad posible, con el afán de proteger nuestro ambiente, por el bien de las comunidades fronterizas y por el correcto uso de los fondos públicos de todas y todos los costarricenses, las omisiones que en materia de protección ambiental y legal existan en relación con esa carretera. 9. Solicitamos al Poder Ejecutivo costarricense que de manera transparente se aplique la vía ordinaria (no de emergencia) para contratar y planificar la mejor carretera que podamos tener los costarricenses, con apego irrestricto a la legislación en materia ambiental y de construcción de obra pública”. Se trata de las siguientes entidades, que merecen ser mencionadas y conocidas: Arte por la Paz, Asociación Ambiental del Norte de San Rafael de Heredia (Conceverde), Asociación Conservacionista Yiski, Comité Bandera Azul Ecológica de San Miguel de Santo Domingo, Comité Cívico de Cañas, Confraternidad Guanacasteca, Movimiento Patriótico Juanito Mora, Palabra Cero y la Unión Norte por la Vida (UNOVIDA) (ver texto de comunicado conjunto publicado en Tribuna Democrática).

La dureza de los términos usados por la Presidenta Chinchilla sobre los “malos” y los “buenos” costarricenses recuerda un discurso pronunciado en octubre del 2010 por la misma Presidenta Laura Chinchilla en San Carlos ante la Cámara de Ganaderos, llamando al auditorio a ayudarla a “levantar la voz contra algunos grupos radicales … que quieren convertir a Costa Rica en un museo de historia natural” (escuchar  audio ).

En la precitada nota de CRHoy se lee que para la Defensora de los Habitantes de la época (Ombdusman), una duda se debió de imponer desde un inicio al tratarse de una extensa línea de 160 kilómetros en la geografía norteña Costa Rica: “Va a haber una frontera de 166 kilómetros abierta, lo que era fango y selva quedó abierta. ¿Está Costa Rica en la capacidad de vigilar 166 km de frontera abierta? Esta es una pregunta interesante”.

Conclusión

Si bien de ambos lados del Río San Juan, se oyeron mañaneros cantos de sirena este 16 de diciembre, consecuencia casi “natural” de los fallos de la CIJ, las sirenas se hicieron un poco más insistentes de este lado del Río San Juan, debido a la soberanía recobrada por Costa Rica en Isla Portillos: ello es entendible en la medida en que se trata de un ámbito en el que la opinión pública y los decisores políticos se muestran siempre mucho más sensibles. No obstante, y conforme a su práctica, el fallo de la CIJ equilibra de manera muy sutil las obligaciones de ambos Estados con relación a proyectos susceptibles de generar un daño transfronterizo, invita en varias partes del texto a ambos Estados a coordinar esfuerzos y a retomar iniciativas conjuntas; y, como era previsible, recrimina a los dos Estados por justificar y defender dos proyectos verdaderamente originales:

1-     Una operación de dragado en el delta del San Juan ubicada de manera equivocada a partir de un mapa de Google Earth erróneo, y liderada por el popularmente conocido “Comandate 0”, llevando este último a ubicarse en un territorio considerado como costarricense desde el acta de demarcación conjunta adoptada en 1900 por Costa Rica y Nicaragua, y;

2-     la “respuesta” (también original, y, a diferencia de la anterior, sin paternidad asumida a la fecha) larga de 160 kilómetros que bordea el río San Juan y parte de la frontera terrestre. Si bien se denomina popularmente “trocha”, el ancho en algunos de sus segmentos (ver foto usada para ilustrar el  número  especial de la Revista Ambientico) indica que tampoco entra en la definición dada de este término por la Real Academia Española.  Ni es una obra, ni tampoco una trocha: obtener la identidad de sus escurridizos autores intelectuales permitirá, estamos seguros, conocer  qué es lo que tenían en mente desde un inicio.

Conforme vayan perdiendo intensidad los cantos de victoria, es posible asistamos a un acercamiento entre ambos ribereños del San Juan, siempre y cuando ambos aparatos diplomáticos deseen aprovechar esta ocasión que les brinda la justicia internacional. Este espacio de tiempo para intentar relanzar una relación bilateral venida a menos responde precisamente a la intención del juez internacional, que siempre se deja entrever en sus decisiones. Ello podría explicar (al menos en parte) la mesura externada en las primeras declaraciones del mandatario Luis Guillermo Solis Rivera y de la vocera del Gobierno de Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo Zambrana horas después de oído el fallo de la CIJ.

Las comunidades fronterizas en ambos Estados son las más afectadas por estas repetitivas, recurrentes y largas justas en sede judicial internacional, así como la comunidad nicaragüense en Costa Rica y la comunidad costarricense en Nicaragua: estas, y muchas familias con miembros pertenecientes a ambos Estados, esperan ansiosas desde muchos años que sus respectivas capitales inviertan su valioso tiempo y sus escasos recursos en iniciativas conjuntas que permitan mejorar sustancialmente las relaciones entre ambos Estados, y por ende, relanzar la agenda binacional y la cooperación entre las regiones fronterizas.

Desde el punto de vista internacional, el fallo leído viene a resolver dos de las tres demandas pendientes de resolución en La Haya. Como se recordará el período (2010-2014) fue el escenario de una recurrencia nunca vista en la historia mundial de la diplomacia: Costa Rica y Nicaragua acumularon  tres demandas distintas en tres año y medio, habiendo Costa Rica presentado la última en febrero del 2014 sobre la delimitación en ambos océanos, la cual constituye un ejercicio sumamente riesgoso para Costa Rica (Nota 8). A diferencia de un acuerdo mutuo para someter de manera conjunta una controversia a la CIJ, estas tres demandas fueron presentadas de forma unilateral: bien se sabe que la demanda unilateral siempre es percibida por el demandado como un gesto poco amistoso. Según las palabras del ex juez de la CIJ (1987-2003) y ex Presidente de la misma (2000-2003), el jurista francés Gilbert Guillaume (y que nos permitimos citar en razón de su larga experiencia como juez): “C´est que là le recours unilatéral à la justice internationale est trop souvent vécu par les Etats comme une détérioration de leurs relations. Il est fréquemment ressenti comme un ultime appel ou comme un atout supplémentaire dans une négociation parallèle difficile. Dans l´une ou l´autre perspective, il est une nécessité difficilement acceptée plus qu´une solution aisément consentie » (Nota 9).

Del lado de Costa Rica, conforme los cantos de sirenas embriagantes y sus ecos en algunas repetidoras locales se vayan dispersando, es posible que muchas dudas empiecen a aflorar y que se retomen muchas investigaciones en curso, las cuales, en su mayoría, fueron “suspendidas” en aras de evitar que pudieran ser usadas por Nicaragua contra Costa Rica en La Haya. El retomar sin excusa ni reserva estas líneas de investigación constituye, a nuestro modesto entender, una consecuencia que deriva del fallo de la CIJ. Ello en aras de explicar al país cómo fue que una ocupación ilegal en un territorio de 2,8 kilómetros cuadrados denominado Isla Portillos en el extremo Noreste de la frontera sirviera de base para crear una atmósfera de “emergencia nacional”, de “país invadido”,  de “amenaza inminente”, dando pié para algo calificado por uno de los funcionarios de la época a cargo de su ejecución, como un verdadero “proyecto de guerra”  (Nota 10).

Nicolas Boeglin 

Nicolas Boeglin : Profesor de Derecho Internacional Público, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Costa Rica, (UCR)

Notas

Nota 1: El Profesor Philippe Weckel (Francia), a cargo durante muchos años de la sección “Jurisprudence Internationale” en la prestigiosa Revue Générale de Droit International Public (RGDIP) calificó esta decisión del 13 de julio de la CIJ como una verdadera “tarea de vacaciones mal hecha »  (traducción de« devoir de vacances bâclé »). Sin mayor complacencia por esta tarea encomendada por Costa Rica al juez de La Haya en el 2005, escribió:  « on n’a jamais vu décision aussi mal rédigée ! Le constat est totalement inattendu et, à vrai dire, proprement incroyable. A la lecture des motifs on découvre que certaines conclusions ne sont même pas étayées ou alors qu’elles le sont d’une manière si sommaire ou elliptique qu’elles apparaissent fausses ». El profesor Weckel continua con una pregunta a la que el mismo contesta: « Que penser, que dire de ce devoir de vacances bâclé ? L’arrêt du 13 juillet 2009 ne mérite pas un commentaire » (Véase WECKEL Ph., Note, Sentinelle, SFDI, Bulletin Numéro 196 (Juillet 2009). Disponible  aquí . En un comentario crítico sobre esta decisión, también publicado en Francia, la autora advertía en el 2010 que, debido a la falta de motivación en varias partes del texto,  era poco probable que esta decisión de la CIJ resolviera definitivamente el tema de la navegación en el río San Juan entre sus dos ribereños. Véase CASSELLA S., « Rééquilibrer les effets inéquitables d’une délimitation territoriale : l’arrêt de la Cour internationale de Justice du 13 juillet 2009 dans l’affaire du Différend relatif à des droits de navigation et des droits connexes (Costa Rica c. Nicaragua) », Volume 55 AFDI (2009), pp. 253-277, p. 254 y conclusiones en p. 277. Artículo disponible aquí.

Nota 2: Cabe recordar que en 1998 Costa Rica y Nicaragua intentaron resolver mediante negociaciones diplomáticas el delicado tema de la portación de armas de policías de Costa Rica en tareas de operaciones de vigilancia y de abastecimiento de puestos fronterizos en las aguas del río San Juan. Costa Rica basaba este uso en las disposiciones del tratado de 1858 que refieren a competencias en materia de “guarda” del San Juan (artículo IV), mientras que Nicaragua, si bien no objetaba el ejercicio de este derecho como tal, se mostraba indispuesta con el uso de armas de cierto calibre para estas tareas y cuestionaba que los policías de Costa Rica pudieran navegar con estas sin pedir autorización alguna. El acuerdo alcanzado conocido como el acuerdo Cuadra-Lizano suscrito en julio de 1998, en tan solo cuatro artículos (ver texto del acuerdo), logró plasmar una solución técnica a un problema técnico, en lo que pareciera ser el último ejercicio de negociación bilateral exitoso entre ambos Estados. Lamentablemente, Nicaragua desconocería días después este acuerdo debido a cuestionamientos en Nicaragua (ver nota de La Nación de agosto de 1998). Leemos en esta misma nota un detalle de cierto interés, redactado por quién hoy es Ministro de Comunicación en Costa Rica: “ /…/ el director de la Policía de Fronteras, coronel Max Cayetano Vega, circuló una nota entre los guardias civiles donde les notifica que podrán transitar el río siempre y cuando informen a los soldados nicaragüenses. La nota advirtió a los policías que “deberán observar una conducta adecuada, sin hacer alardes de prepotencia o exhibicionismo” /…/”. La denuncia posterior del acuerdo Cuadra-Lizano por parte de Nicaragua iniciaría una fase de incertidumbre y de turbulencia entre ambos Estados. Posteriormente, las buenas relaciones personales entre los mandatarios de ambos Estados llevarían a negociar un acuerdo para que Costa Rica no presentara demanda alguna durante 3 años (acuerdo Tovar-Caldera suscrito el 26 de septiembre del 2002). Vencido el plazo establecido, y sin que hayan trascendido datos sobre reuniones o negociaciones entre ambos, Costa Rica anunció que acudiría a la CIJ en el 2005 (ver nota de La Nación) para defender este y otros derechos de navegación. Pese a que se presentó como favorable para Costa Rica dado que la CIJ ordenó a Nicaragua no exigir visados para embarcaciones turísticas de Costa Rica, obtuvo un fallo adverso sobre el uso de las aguas del San Juan por parte de sus policías (ver texto de la sentencia del 13 de julio del 2009 de la CIJ, y en particular el párrafo 156 inciso h, adoptado por unanimidad por los jueces de la CIJ): se trata de un interesante ejercicio ante la CIJ en el que un derecho de un Estado estipulado en un tratado de 1858 (cuyo ejercicio es aceptado de manera reticente por el otro Estado más no ignorado) finaliza ante los jueces de La Haya (a solicitud de su titular) con su negación.

Nota 3 : En un artículo de opinión (ver texto) publicado en febrero del 2011, la Ministra de Seguridad de Costa Rica a partir del 14 de abril  2008 hasta abril del 2010  explicó que  el desmantelamiento de la Policía de Fronteras, cuerpo especializado de la Policía de Costa Rica, se debió a una decisión de la Oficina de Planificación del 2008 y que (advertimos al lector que se trata de una sola frase que no lleva un solo punto): “Miente quien diga que durante mi gestión se “eliminó la Policía de Fronteras” y que hubo un “error estratégico”, afirmaciones de tipo mediático y propagandístico, sin asidero operativo ni legal, pues antes de que asumiera como ministra, ya la Oficina de Planificación, ante un dictamen de la Asesoría Jurídica del Ministerio, había concluido que no se podía conformar una Dirección de Policía de Fronteras dejando de lado la vigilancia aérea de esta zona, que ya existía el Servicio Nacional de Guardacostas para el resguardo de las fronteras marítimas, de las aguas marítimas jurisdiccionales e interiores, y que al existir organizacionalmente una Dirección de Vigilancia Aérea, esta no podía estar contenida dentro de la Policía de Fronteras” (sic). En enero del 2011, el Ministro de Seguridad de Costa Rica entre mayo del 2006 y su “no renuncia” el 30 de marzo del 2008 (ver  nota  de Aldia) afirmó en esta mismo espacio de opinión que (ver artículo) que: “En materia de seguridad nacional y seguridad ciudadana, se cometió el gran error, entre muchos otros, de eliminar la Policía de Fronteras, en el segundo semestre del 2008. Un error estratégico y geopolítico, cuyas consecuencias negativas llegan hasta los hechos de la isla Calero y la ocupación sandinista”. De este intercambio cruzado de recriminaciones, no queda claro cuáles fueron las decisiones que se tomaron en Costa Rica posterior al fallo del 13 de julio del 2009 de la CIJ para reforzar la vigilancia de la frontera fluvial  y superar la limitante que le significó la prohibición hecha a Costa Rica de usar el San Juan para fines policiales: se trata de un interrogante que, a la hora de redactar estas líneas, se mantiene como tal.

Nota 4: Sobre el lento proceso de « fabricación » de un fallo de la CIJ, remitimos a unos de los mejores textos jamás escritos sobre el particular, obra del juez argelino Mohamed Bedjaoui : BEDJAOUI M., “La “fabrication” des arrêts de la Cour Internationale de Justice“, in Mélanges Michel Virally, Le droit international au service de la paix, de la justice et du développement, Paris, Pedone, 1991, pp. 86-107.

Nota 5: Al terminar las audiencias del día 15 de abril, (ver acta disponible  aquí ), se lee que el juez marroquí Mohamed Bennouna hizo la siguiente pregunta a la delegación de Costa Rica: “Ma question est la suivante : est-ce que le Costa Rica attend de la Cour qu’elle se prononce sur la compatibilité avec l’arrêt de la Cour de 2009 sur le droit de navigation des réglementations édictées par le Nicaragua pour la mise en œuvre de cet arrêt ? Et si c’était le cas, le Costa Rica peut-il préciser le lien de cette question avec l’objet du différend ? Je vous remercie, Monsieur le président” (p. 45).

Nota 6:  En aquella ocasión de marzo del 2011, la oportunidad brindada por el juez internacional fue desaprovechada por Costa Rica: a pocas horas de dictaminada la ordenanza de la CIJ del 8 de marzo del 2011, el Ministro de Seguridad  de Costa Rica refirió a “informes de inteligencia” (a la fecha no divulgados) sobre un posible minado en Isla Portillos por parte de Nicaragua (ver  nota  de prensa). Los analistas y observadores descubrirían días después que el 7 de marzo del 2011 (es decir, 24 horas antes de leerse la ordenanza por parte de la CIJ) se había publicado en el Alcance de la Gaceta Oficial de Costa Rica el “Decreto de Emergencia”, base legal para lo que se denominaría con posterioridad la “trocha fronteriza”. 

Nota 7: Véase BOEGLIN N., “La denominada “trocha fronteriza” desde la perspectiva del derecho internacional”,  Revista Estudios UCR, 2013, Ver texto disponible   aquí  .

Nota 8: Esta demanda no es exenta de riesgos para Costa Rica: en un fallo del 2007 entre Nicaragua y Honduras, la CIJ rechazo la pretensión hondureña de una línea horizontal para delimitar el Océano Atlántico, mientras que en el Pacífico, a diferencia de Costa Rica (que gracias a la isla del Coco, beneficia de una de las mayores Zonas Económicas Exclusivas (ZEE) en América Latina), Nicaragua no cuenta con ninguna isla.  La CIJ se ha inclinado en algunos fallos a favorecer a un Estado geográficamente desventajado. Sobre el particular, remitimos al lector a nuestra breve  nota  publicada en su momento, en la que señalamos que: “En razón de la configuración distinta en ambas costas, ambos Estados recurren a criterios un tanto disímiles: mientras que en el Caribe Nicaragua pareciera proceder a una delimitación de tipo horizontal, como la intentada recientemente por Chile contra Perú ante la CIJ, la misma Nicaragua recurre a la dirección del último trayecto de la línea fronteriza terrestre para delimitar las aguas en el Océano Pacífico. Recordemos que en el Pacífico se da un fenómeno único muy importante para la pesca, de forma permanente o casi, el “domo térmico”. Estos criterios de delimitación son muy distintos al de la dirección general de la frontera terrestre usado por la CIJ para fijar las dos fronteras marítimas de Nicaragua con Honduras en ambos mares. Este último criterio aplicado a la frontera marítima entre Costa Rica y Nicaragua en el Caribe podría dar lugar a una línea más inclinada hacia el sur que la línea horizontal que pareciera querer respetar Nicaragua. Ese mismo criterio técnico daría un resultado más favorable a Costa Rica en el Pacífico que la línea actualmente trazada por Nicaragua. Cada costa siendo distinta desde el punto de vista de su configuración geográfica, y desde el punto de vista de los recursos pesqueros y los identificados en su subsuelo, los argumentos deberán necesariamente variar en función de cada costa. Ello coloca a ambos Estados, en particular a la parte demandante, en una delicada posición desde el punto de vista de la solidez de la consistencia jurídica que deberá defender ante el juez internacional”.

Nota 9: Véase GUILLAUME G.,  La Cour International de Justice à l´aube du XXI ème siècle. Le regard d´un juge, Paris Pedone, 2003, p. 7.

Nota 10: Referimos al lector a la  nota  de prensa publicada en La Nación en diciembre del 2012 titulada “Carlos Acosta: ‘Este (la trocha) fue un proyecto de guerra’.

“Reason with this: Who is carrying out senseless killings in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon? They are the same people carrying out attacks here, and we know them. We cannot be cowed” – Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky

According to the Nigerian Government forces, a traffic infringement justifies the massacre of over 1000 Muslims who were performing the religious ceremony of ushering in the new month of Maulud, honouring  the birth of the Prophet Mohammed of Islam [pbuh].

In a statement on Sunday the army said: “The Nigerian Constitution guarantees the rights of any group of persons and Sheikh El Zakzaky’s followers to hold a peaceful march or procession unhindered, but it also guarantees other people’s rights of way on public highways.”

Claims of an attempted assassination of the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Tukur Buratai or even of the alleged attacks by the Islamic sect on the military convoy are rendered questionable by the sheer lack of reported casualties on the military side and the shockingly disproportionate loss of life and bloodshed among the Islamic Sect supporters and leaders.

If indeed, this were a simple fracas over “right of way on a public highway” which resulted in the shooting of unarmed Muslims, why then did the same Nigerian government armed forces attack Hussainiyah, the sect’s headquarters later the same evening, hours after the initial clashes?   Why did they deliberately target high ranking members of the Shi’ite Islamic movement and execute Hamad Zakaky, son of the movement leader Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky.  Why did they attack and wound the Sheikh’s wife, Zeenat?  Why did they shoot the Sheikh himself, four times in his hands, publicly humiliate and arrest him? Why, if this was not a premediated act of aggression and suppression, had the Army ensured the presence of camera teams at both attacks and why were women and children not spared the murderous hail of bullets?

These are all questions that the mainstream media should be asking, yet this massacre has been swept under the carpet of indifference by Western media.

Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky is a man of peace, unity and vision. These qualities alone represent a threat to the hegemony and neo-colonialist strategy of the Axis of Empire in Africa and would justify the repeated attempts to suppress and inhibit the growth of his Shia Muslim movement and his popular, unifying influence that transcended the borders of Nigeria and was taking root in many countries on the continent.

To more fully understand this violent targeting of the Sheikh and the Islamic Movement, we must take into consideration, both the historical and more recent influences upon Nigeria.

China has been an evolving partnership in Nigeria, investing heavily in the development of infrastructure and fixed assets, refineries and factories.  In a role diametrically opposed to the traditional plundering partnerships of the US and other neo-colonialists with sovereign nations, China contrarily seems to have a genuinely vested interest in the stability of Nigeria to support a mutually beneficial economic and trade relationship reliant upon the growth and profitability of Nigeria itself.

This concept adopted by China of a symbiotic expansion & growth, is an anathema to the US neo-colonialism in the region, and particularly in Nigeria.  The presence of China in a country so abundant in oil, uranium, diamond, mineral & timber resources is an acute thorn in the side of the US carpetbaggers who have perceived the Continent’s largest economy & oil producer to be their bread basket and theirs alone.

It is logical, rational and reasonable to speculate that Boko Haram is effectively another terrorist trade name, brought into existence, to destabilize a region that is daring to jailbreak from US colonialism and to explore alternative bi-lateral trade pathways that deviate from the US regional “road maps”.

Boko Haram’s presence, has a threefold purpose:

1. It successfully elevates the Nigerian army to defender of the “meek” against the “terror” threat and provides cover for any violent opposition suppression.
2. It gives the US justification for “boots on the ground”, military support for anti Boko Haram aka pro US factions,  and the ubiquitous drone strikes against the alleged “terror” strongholds,  a devastating strategy already observed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen to name a few.
3. It ensures the fragmentation, sectarian division, and fracturing of unity and a state of perpetual chaos which will seismically derail China’s investment in Nigeria’s physical and economic infrastructure essential to their US exclusive growth.

Sheikh Zakzaky had alluded to this very terror “patent” in his reaction to the suicide bomb attack on the Shia Arba’een procession in Kano on the 27th November 2015.  Over 24 died and many were injured in further violent targeting of the minority Shia community in Nigeria.

“We know the names of the contractors and those contracted to commit the massacre, their identity is not hidden from us. Therefore we cannot be cowed by an imaginary Boko Haram tale, let them tell it to the fools and ignorant. They should know that they are dealing with those with foresight, wisdom and intelligence, and above all with the real religion”.

This statement struck at the very heart of the US/NATO, Israeli and GCC strategy in Nigeria and threatened to undermine their architecture of “terror” foundations.  The Sheikh made it clear that Boko Haram were none other than gangs of mercenaries, hired contractual killers, being unleashed to foment sectarian violence and an atmosphere of fear and division where only US appointed, backed and controlled “saviours” would emerge victorious.

When we consider the sheer numbers of gangs and rival gangs, extremist factions and sects emerging inorganically and globally, we can begin to connect the dots. All have as their purpose, the sowing and reaping of rapacious violence, the construct of division, the provocation of turmoil, the incitement of hatred and fear. All are posing as the enemies of Imperialism whilst serving Imperialist agendas.  All fulfil roles of humanity- averse abomination and simultaneous US alliance proxy forces percolating from one target region to the next.

Grey Wolves, FSA, ISIS, DAESH, Al Qaeda, Khorasan, AQAP, Jabhat al Nusra and Boko Haram [to name a few], are they all nothing more than trade names, successfully managed brand images, logos and IDs all emanating from the US/NATO, Israel and Gulf State holders of the patent on terror and their associated marketing agents and concept creators?

Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky also challenges another malevolent bastion of Nigeria’s landscape, the powerful pro- Israel lobby whose growth and expansion in Nigeria had been hugely facilitated by former President and Christian Zionist, Goodluck Johnathan.  Nigeria is now home to Africa’s largest Israeli Jewish community [15, 000 in 2014].

The Sheikh is a steadfast and vociferous opponent of the illegal state of Israel and an uncompromising defender of freedom for Palestine, and the right to return for Palestinians living in Diaspora since the 1948 Nakba. His son Hamad, who was reportedly murdered during the 12/12 attacks had been with us at the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine 3rd Annual Conference being held in Beirut and had only left us on the 11th December, one day before he was to be targeted by the pro-Israel Government forces.

Hamad’s final recorded speech before his untimely death had been one that supported and celebrated the Al Quds Day rallies and protests particularly in Nigeria and Pakistan where lives have been routinely lost in the battle to honour and protect the core identity of the Palestinian struggle, Al Quds. Hamad had, himself, lost his three brothers, Ahmed, Hamid and Mahmood during one such rally in 2014 when hundreds of the Islamic Movement supporters were also mown down during another Nigerian army attack on unarmed solidarity demonstrators for the Palestinian cause.

“I would like to give a message to Pakistan’s brave nation, especially to those families who have sacrificed the lives of their loved ones and to those whose loved ones were martyred in Quetta during Al-Quds’ rally. I am proud that my brothers were martyred in Al-Quds’ rally and they gave their lives for supporting Palestinians”.

These were Hamad’s last words to the world before the 12/12 bloodbath in Nigeria stripped one more son from the family of Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky, Hamad gave his young life in the service of peace & freedom.  A life that was unrecognised by Western or even Palestinian media on the day he died.

Paul Larudee of Free Palestine had this to say about a young man who impressed all who met him at the Beirut conference with his quiet humility and unassuming humanity:

“Such a sweet and intelligent young man, very quiet and unassuming.  Made me want to know him better.

According to him Boko Haram is just another group of terrorist thugs, thriving like ISIS through infusions of money and arms from both outside and inside Nigeria.  Our tax dollars at work.  Why does the greatest evil always seem to rise to the top of our societies, while the poor and the meek are always ready to help others?  Is evil the only way to rise to a position of strength?”

Into this maelstrom of lawless and Machiavellian meddling in Nigeria we can add one final component without which the neo-colonialist frontlines would not be complete: the Saudi Wahhabi agents of Islamic “change” who are the subterranean source of Muslim extremism and religious fanaticism;  the funders and suppliers of the brand name proxy forces, deployed to whip up the “terror” frenzy wherever it is required to destabilize or unhinge unity that may jeopardize Empire’s intent.

With ultimate irony, it is Riyadh that is self- appointed to combat the terrorism created in its image, by forming a coalition of 34 predominantly Muslim nations, Nigeria included, with the predictable exclusion of Iran, Syria and Iraq all of whom are involved in battling the Saudi NATO sourced terror hordes on the ground.

In direct contrast with this deliberate policy of divide and conquer,  Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky is a man of religious respect and tolerance, he embraces Christians, Sunnis and Sufis alike despite his Shia centric movement and its ties with Tehran, which naturally represents an additional and perceived monumental threat to US/NATO and Saudi/Israeli regional hegemony.

The Islamic Movement is also renowned for its reformist policies, prioritizing education and establishing Islamic schools incorporating secular subjects in addition to Quranic teaching.  Hospitals and health clinics have been set up where care is free for those without the means to pay for it.  The Sheikh has deterred his supporters from shedding their own blood to commemorate the shedding of Imam Hussein’s blood and redirected them to donate this blood to local hospitals, thus saving lives in memory of their beloved Imam Hussein.

The Western media silence over the Zaria massacre is indicative of their collusion in this mass killing of innocents and proof of the role they play in exacerbating global sectarian division at the behest of their Washington, Tel Aviv and Saudi donors and backers.

The initial silence of the Palestinian community, the media, the NGOs, the solidarity organisations is less expected and more worrying given the Islamic Movement’s steadfast support of the Palestinian cause and opposition to the illegal State of Israel.

This is a missed opportunity for the unity of peoples suffering from the same symptoms of neo colonialism, regardless of creed, sect or religion.  Al Quds represents the identity, not only of Palestinians but of the entire Arab world. Those who defend it from Israeli occupation are those who are enduring their own form of occupation by the patented terror armies: Nigeria, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. As these nations unite behind Palestine to prise loose Israel’s jaws from the third most sacred site for the Muslim Ummah, Palestine is needed to unite behind those who give their lives for Palestine and thus for Humanity.  It is this unity that will resolve the ancient theological disputes that are permitting the externally induced sectarian fault lines to widen and deepen.

We live in a world where those who are honoured are the sowers of discord and the reapers of mayhem, the state sponsored agents of chaos.  We no longer honour the true heroes, we honour an illusion called power and greed.  The state media apparatuses serve only to keep historic Fitna (sedition) wounds festering and the “NGO complex” pied piper plays the tune of stake-holding in human suffering, created in advance by the Empire’s composers of death.

Leaders, visionaries,  like Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky show us the way to a new world, one that is driven by justice and progress, dependent upon compassion, communication and unification. They show us that courage, universal respect & humility is needed to evade the dystopian future that is being forced upon us by the ruling elite. It is these men of integrity who resist corruption and maintain their morals and fundamental principles despite their own personal suffering and loss, that we should honour and aspire to emulate.

Notes:

Dan Glazebrook:  https://www.rt.com/op-edge/323656-deadliest-terror-boko-haram/

WSWS:  http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/30/nige-j12.html

21st Century Wire:  http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/12/14/gladio-global-gangs-and-counter-gangs-in-europe-ireland-iraq-and-now-in-syria/

Plfpakistan:  http://www.plfpakistan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47167:hammad-zakzakys-message-to-pakistani-nation-a-day-before-his-martyrdom&catid=4:general

Elbinawi.wordpress.com:  https://elbinawi.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/why-they-targeted-sheikh-zakzaky/

Vanessa Beeley is a photographer, writer, peace activist and volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine.  She lived in Gaza during Operation Pillar of Defence and again in 2013.  In 2014 she established the Gaza Smile Project to raise funds for children in Gaza. Since 2011, Vanessa has spent most of her time in the Middle East .  She was recently invited to be on the steering committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement.

The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) of today has matured a great deal since the warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were parceled out amongst the victors, scrapped or sunk at the end of World War II. Long decades of pacifist defense policy coupled with non-interventionist foreign policy helped maintain peace in a quite hostile neck of the woods. Imperial Japan wrought destruction, brutal occupation and various crimes against humanity upon many of its neighbors prior to and during the war. This legacy has not been forgotten.

The security agreement between Japan and the United States has changed greatly under the Shinzo Abe and Barak Obama administrations, with Japan being seen as a peer in the overall, shared defensive strategy of the two nations in the region. Japan has been called upon to increasingly modernize its fleet, fully integrate its communications, fire control and tracking systems, and weapons systems with those of the U.S. Navy. Prime Minister Abe has altered the defense posture of the island nation, to the chagrin of a majority of its citizens, to allow for the offensive deployment of the JDF in various U.S.-led “Multinational” enterprises.

These developments have not escaped the notice of Japan’s neighbors, most notably China. Japan’s modernization of its fleet and the increase in the potency of both defensive and offensive platforms has largely occurred in response to a modernizing and more capable Chinese naval presence in the region. The further integration of the Japanese and the U.S. naval forces, the total compatibility of their systems, and their joint strategic planning are forcing China to recalculate and fine-tune their more assertive foreign policy in both the South China Sea and East China Sea.

Brief Overview:

The Imperial Japanese Navy of World War II was one of the most powerful navies in modern history. Japan had a surface fleet of battleships, heavy cruisers, cruisers and destroyers that was on par or superior to any navy of the era. Her naval aviation arm was far more advanced than any other nation at the time, with only the United States being able to rival her to any degree of parity.

With the defeat of Imperial Japan at the conclusion of World War II, Japan was forced to surrender unconditionally, and forfeit what remained of the Imperial Navy. Many powerful assets remained and were either divided amongst the victors or scrapped. After all repatriation of Japanese military forces had been completed, all vessel of destroyer tonnage or below were divided up amongst the U.S.S.R, China, the UK and the U.S. Vessels above this tonnage were either scrapped or sunk in deep ocean waters. An empire with a long and proud naval history was rendered impotent.

A great deal has changed since the end of World War II, the implementation of the Potsdam Declaration, and the acceptance of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan in 1947. The acceptance of Article 9 presaged the age of official Japanese pacifism, or more accurately an era of a posture of non-interventionist self-defense. It is a credit to the people of Japan, regardless of their brutal militarism of the mid-twentieth century that this state of affairs has lasted as long as it has.

Japan has maintained a Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force of very capable organization and function over at least the past five decades; however, the updated security agreement between Japan and the United States that has come into being under the Obama administration holds Japan to be a peer with the United States in establishing a viable offensive and defensive naval, aviation and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) capability in providing for the defense of Japan as well as the overall naval strategy of the United States in the Pacific.

A resurgent Chinese power in the region has lead the Japanese government to reevaluate its pacifist Constitution, realign itself with past foes and take a much more robust defensive posture. The Peoples Liberation Army Navy has been modernizing at a rapid rate and China has more assertively staked its claim to a number of disputed areas both in the South China and East China Seas. The Japanese government moved to solidify its legal claim to the Senkaku (Daioyu) Islands, by buying three of them from the private Japanese owner in the Spring of 2012. This only further enflamed the situation and both powers have been sending Coast Guard vessels and aircraft to the islands in an ever increasing rattling of sabers. China responded by establishing a new air-defense identification zone over the islands in 2013.

Further, Japan carried out naval drills with the United States in the South China Sea for the first time in the summer of 2015. This was a show of solidarity and cooperation with the U.S. at a time when the U.S. has been mounting sorties with warships and military aircraft within twelve miles of the artificial islands that China has constructed in the Spratly Islands. Japan has also pledged to donate older patrol boats to the Philippine Navy in an attempt to bolster that nations rival claims in the region. The “South China Sea Crisis” will continue to evolve in complexity as the man-made islands become operational and China challenges the centuries old established precedents of international maritime law.

Current Organization and Deployment

The JMSDF is commanded by the Maritime Chief of Staff. The Self Defense Fleet consists of the following components:

• Fleet Escort Force
  • Escort Flotilla 1 (Yokosuka)
    • Escort Squadron 1
    • Escort Squadron 5
  • Escort Flotilla 2 (Sasebo)
    • Escort Squadron 2
    • Escort Squadron 6
  • Escort Flotilla 3 (Maizuru)
    • Escort Squadron 3
    • Escort Squadron 7
  • Escort Flotilla 4 (Kure)
    • Escort Squadron 4
    • Escort Squadron 8
  • Fleet Training Command
  • 1st Replenishment Squadron
  • 1st Transportation Squadron
• Fleet Air Force
  • Fleet Air Wing 1 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 2 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 4 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 5 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 21 (Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 22 (Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 31 (Fixed wing patrol, ASW, intelligence, liason and support aircraft)
  • Fleet Squadron 51 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Squadron 6 (Fixed wing transport aircraft)
  • Fleet Squadron 1 ( Medium and Heavy Lift Helicopters)
• Fleet Submarine Force
  • Submarine Flotilla 1
    • Submarine Squadron 1
    • Submarine Squadron 3
    • Submarine Squadron 5
  • Submarine Flotilla 2
    • Submarine Squadron 2
    • Submarine Squadron 4
  • Submarine Training Command
• Mine Warfare Force
• Fleet Research & Development Command
• Fleet Intelligence Command
• Oceanographic Command
• Air Training Command
  • Shimofusa Air Training Group
  • Tokushima Air Training Group
  • Ozuki Air Training Group
• Maritime Material Command
• Vessel and Aviation Supply Depots
• Training units and schools
• Communications command

JMSDF Districts

The JMSDF is responsible for guarding the waters of five military districts. Each district has a regional escort fleet element and shore-side support element or major naval base. Regional escort fleets are comprised of Destroyer Escorts (DDE), patrol craft, minesweepers and ancillary craft. Four of the districts are Home Port for the four Escort Fleet Flotillas. Each flotilla is comprised of one Helicopter Destroyer (DDH) as the command platform, and 7 DDGs/AWDs in escort.

Fleet Vessels

The JMSDF is comprised of over 130 combatant, mine countermeasures, support, training and ancillary vessels as follows:

• Helicopter Destroyers (DDH): 4 (One vessel to be replaced in 2016)
• Landing Ship Tank (LST): 3
• Guided Missile Destroyers (DDG): 12
• Destroyers (DD): 25
• Destroyer Escorts (DE): 6
• Minesweepers (MS): 27
• Patrol Boats (PB): 6
• Attack Submarines Diesel Electric (SSK): 17 (with 5 more planned)
• Replenishment Ships: 5

Most Powerful Vessels

The four Escort Fleet Flotillas of the JMSDF are comprised each of one DDH acting as a command ship and 7 DDGs/DDs. The DDH vessels of the JMSDF are very modern and flexible Anti-Submarine (ASW) and power projection vessels. As a nation comprising of over 6,852 islands, with most of the landmass constituting the 4 main islands, rapidly deployable naval and amphibious forces are essential to defense strategy. Each Escort Fleet Flotilla has the power to defend one of the 5 naval districts from attack from guided missiles, aircraft, surface vessels and submarines, and have the inherent ability to land troops via helicopter, landing craft or hovercraft.

Izumo Class DDA

While carrying the designation of Helicopter Destroyer, many military analysts have studied the design of the JS Izumo DDH-183 and surmised that she is very capable of carrying a number of VSTOL aircraft in addition to her compliment of ASW/MCM and troop carrying helicopters or tilt-rotor aircraft such as the V-22 Osprey. As Japan is slated to take delivery of the F-35A from the US, if and when this aircraft ever becomes operational in light of its many development setbacks and problems, it is not a stretch to imagine Japan taking delivery of the F-35B VSTOL version for future use on the JS Izumo and her soon to be completed sister vessel JS Kaga DDH-184. The JS Izumo was commissioned in late March of 2015 and is soon to be followed by the JS Kaga in Late March of 2017.

Izumo Class vessels in service:

• JS Izumo DDH-183

Specifications:

Displacement (Loaded): 27,000 tons

L.O.A.:  248 meters (814 ft.)

Beam:   38 meters (185 ft.)

Draft:    7.5 meters (25 ft.)

Deck Area: Approx. 8,000sq. meters

Speed: 30+ knots

Range: Not disclosed

Complement: 370 crew and 400 troop landing force

Weapons Systems: 2 x Phalanx CWIS, 2 x SeaRAM CWIS

Aircraft: 7 to 28 ASW/MCM or troop carrying helicopters. Can accommodate medium or heavy helicopters.

It is notable that the Izumo Class DDHs do not have a well deck and thus do not have the capability of delivering troops and equipment in an amphibious fashion. They were designed to provide a long range ASW/MCM capability, command and control and limited air assault and HADR capability. With a large internal hangar deck, and a large aircraft elevator, the vessels are more than capable of carrying a sizeable number of F-35B VSTOL aircraft if this were to be so desired at some future date. This number would most likely not exceed 10 to 12 fixed wing VSTOL aircraft due to the amount of space required for fuel, maintenance and armaments. Accommodation of the aircrews and maintenance crews for the aircraft would be possible if substituted for that originally designed for the air assault troops.

Hyuga Class, Helicopter Destroyers DDH

The Hyuga Class vessels’ keels were laid and they were commissioned between 2006 and 2011. JS Hyuga DDH-181, and JS Ise DDH-182 are extremely capable, long range ASW/MCM platforms. In many ways they can be seen as smaller versions on the Izumo Class, but with a number of differences.

The Hyuga Class DDHs are beautiful examples of a modern ASW warship designed to achieve localized naval dominance in the seaways of Japan, denying any enemy submarine force from threatening maritime or naval traffic within the territorial waters of Japan. When coupled with the advanced DDGs and DDs of the JMSDF with their anti-missile and anti-aircraft capabilities and added ASW/MCM capabilities, an Escort Fleet Flotilla is able to control and deny access to the territorial waters of Japan.

Like the larger Izumo class, these vessels lack a well deck and do not have the capacity to launch amphibious forces via landing craft or amphibious vehicles. The JS Hyuga and the JS Ise have already demonstrated their usefulness in HADR operations, with both vessels having participated in humanitarian support and evacuation operations in response to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (JS Hyuga and Ise) and the 2013 typhoon Haiyan which struck the Philippines (JS Ise).

Hyuga Class vessels in service:

• JS Hyuga DDH-181
• JS Ise DDH-182

Specifications:

Displacement (Loaded): 19,000 tons

L.O.A.:  197 meters (646 ft.)

Beam:   33 meters (108 ft.)

Draft:    7 meters (23 f.)

Deck Area: Approx. 6,500sq. meters

Speed: 30+ knots

Range: Not disclosed.

Complement: 360 – 371 crew

Weapons Systems: 2 x Phalanx CWIS, 16 cell Mk1 VLS (16 Sea Sparrow, 12 RUM-139 VL ASROC),

2 x triple 324mm torpedo tubes, 12.7mm machine guns

Aircraft: 4 to 18 ASW/MCM or troop carrying helicopters. Can accommodate medium or heavy helicopters.

Landing Ship Tank (LST)

The JMSDF has three Osumi Class LSTs; however, their design is more appropriately described as a Dock Landing Ship (LSD), as they have no bow doors and ramp for forward beaching of the vessel to discharge amphibious forces. This is facilitated by a well deck and stern door where a complement of 2 LCAC hovercraft are launched. The vessels have a complement of 330 troops for amphibious of helicopter landing, but sufficient space is available for up to 1,000 troops in an emergency situation or for a short duration. The vessels have sufficient space for 10 x Type 10 MBTs. The vessels carry a complement of 8 helicopters and carry 2 x 20mm Phalanx CWIS for close in air defense. Money has been allocated to research the refitting of all the vessels of the Osumi Class to field V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft instead of traditional helicopters, as well AAV7s for amphibious troops transport.

Osumi Class vessels in service:

• JS Osumi LST 4001
• JS Shimokita LST 4002
• JS Kunisaki LST 4003

Guided Missile Destroyers

The JMSDF operates three different classes of DDG, from the Hatakaze Class of the 1980s, to the most recently commissioned Atago Class. All of these vessel are very capable warships and are joined in their duties by smaller yet equally capable DDs. The Atago Class DDGS are easily one of the most powerful surface warfare platforms in the world.

Atago Class DDG

There are currently two commissioned Atago class DDGs in the JMSDF. These vessels are often seen as larger and more capable versions of the 4 Kongo Class DDGs that immediately preceded them into active service. The Atago’s chief advances over the Kongo are the greater guided missile capacity of the larger vessels, the larger bridge (command and control center of the vessel) and the full aft hanger that can accommodate one SH-60K helicopter. This makes the vessels more flexible and capable of a variety of duties, and give them a longer range ASW capability.

Most importantly, the two Atago Class vessels have been updated with the most recent AEGIS software as well as the capability of carrying the SM-3 Block 1A Standard missile. The SM-3 coupled with the AEGIS BMD 3.0 upgrades makes the Atago a more powerful Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) platform. It is theorized that just two such vessels will be able to fully cover the Japanese home islands from ballistic missile threats. With 6 DDGs in the JMSDF equipped in such a fashion (2 Atago, 4 Kongo), 2 vessels would be constantly deployed while 2 could be in port or conducting training while a further 2 could be in dry-dock for maintenance. It has also been suggested that Japan may look to build two additional Atago Class vessels; however, in light of Japan’s poor economic outlook the funds for such an acquisition are in question.

Atago Class vessels in service:

• JS Atago DDG-177
• JS Ashigara DDG-178

Specifications:

Displacement: 10,000 tons full load

L.O.A.:  165 meters (541 ft.)

Beam:   21 meters (68.9 ft.)

Draft: 6.2 meters (20.3 ft.)

Speed: 30+ knots

Complement: 300 crew

Sensors/Processing Systems: AN/SPY-1D(V) passive electronically scanned phased array radar. AEGIS.

Weapons Systems:

• 96 cell MK-41 VLS (64 cells forward, 32 aft) equipped with SM2-MR or SM-3 ABM and RUM-139 ASROC.
• 2 x missile canisters for 8 Type 90 (SSM-1B) missiles.
• 2 x Type 68 triple torpedo tubes (Mk 46 or Type 93 torpedoes)
• 2 x 20mm Phalanx CWIS
• 1 x 127mm (5 in.) Mk 45 Mod 4 deck gun

Aircraft: Hangar for 1 x SH-60K helicopter assigned.

Kongo Class DDG

The four Kongo Class DDGs were commissioned by Japan between the years 1993 – 1998. They are very similar in design and function to the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke Class DDGs, with the added requirement of being capable of acting as fleet command vessels. It had originally been planned to build six of these vessels; however, the decision was made to opt for the Atago design after the first four vessels had been completed. It is surmised that this was the result of an added BMD threat from North Korea and the fielding of the advanced Type 052D DDGs by the Chinese PLAN. The Atago is a more capable vessel than the Chinese Type 052D in terms of sensors and processing systems; however the Chinese vessels (3 in class) have a larger offensive missile capability.

The Kongo has been fitted with the later AEGIS systems and BMD 3.0 software coupled with the SM-3 Block 1A missile. Kongo class vessels have fired the SM-3 in successful anti-ballistic missile tests starting in 2007. The four Kongo Class DDGs will serve with the two Atago Class DDGs to make up the naval component of the Japanese BMD system.

Kongo Class vessels in service:

• JS Kongo DDG-173
• JS Kirishima DDG-174
• JS Myoko DDG-175
• JS Chokai DDG-176

Specifications:

Displacement:    9,500 tons fully loaded.

L.O.A.:  161 meters (528.2 ft.)

Beam:   21 meters (68.9 ft.)

Draft:    6.2 meters (20.3 ft.)

Speed:   30+ knots

Range: 5,200 nautical mi.

Complement:     300 crew

Sensors/Processing Systems: AN/SPY-1D(V) passive electronically scanned phased array radar. AEGIS.

Weapons Systems:

• 90 cell MK-41 VLS (29 cells forward, 61 aft) equipped with SM2-MR or SM-3 ABM and RUM-139 ASROC.
• RGM-84 Harpoon SSM or Type 90 SSM
• 2 x Type 68 triple torpedo tubes (Mk 46 or Type 93 torpedoes)
• 2 x 20mm Phalanx CWIS
• 1 x 127mm (5 in.) Oto-Breda compact deck gun.

Aircraft: Deck landing area for 1 x SH60K helicopter.

Destroyers (DD)

The JMSDF fields a wide range of destroyers. The most advanced of these small warships are the new Akizuki Class. The Akizuki Class DDs are the newest commissioned vessels of the Japanese navy. Weighing in at 6,800 tons fully loaded, they are 2,700 tons lighter than the Kongo Class DDGs; however, they are meant to escort these vessels and the DDHs of an Escort Fleet Flotilla and protect them from aerial and submarine threats.

Considering their small displacement, these vessels are bristling with weaponry and the most advanced indigenous sensor package available in the ATECS (Advanced Technology Command System) battle management system. Often referred to as the Japanese AEGIS, ATECS is fully compatible with the U.S. system and its weapons components. These DDs are also equipped with an advanced AAW system as well as the OQQ-22 ASW system. The vessel makes use of a stealthy upper hull/conning tower design. There is an aft hangar on the vessel as well as a landing area, which allows for the assignment of an SH-60K helicopter full time as well as the ability to operate two helicopters if the need arises.

Akizuki Class vessels in service:

• JS Akizuki DD-115
• JS Teruzuki DD-116
• JS Suzutsuki DD-117
• JS Fuyuzuki DD-118

Specifications:

Displacement:    6,800 tons fully loaded.

L.O.A.:  150.5 meters (493.7 ft.)

Beam:   18.3 meters (60 ft.)

Draft:    5.3 meters (17.4 ft.)

Speed: 30+ knots

Complement:     200 crew

Sensors/Processing Systems:      ATECS Advanced Technology Command System

Weapons Systems:

• 32 cell MK-41 VLS equipped with RIMM-162 ESSM (SAM), RUM-139 ASROC or Type 07 ASROC.
• 8 Type 90 SSMs
• 2 x HOS 303 triple torpedo tubes (Mk 46 or Type 93 torpedoes)
• 2 x 20mm Phalanx Block 1B CWIS
• 1 x 127mm (5 in.) deck gun

Aircraft: Hangar for 1 x SH-60K helicopter equipped.

Guided Missile Submarine (SSK), Diesel Electric

The JMSDF operates two different classes of diesel electric attack submarines. The Oyashio Class of 11 boats built in a ten year period between 1998 and 2008, and the Soryu Class of which 6 of 12 planned boats have been built starting in 2009. Submarine design and capabilities are a well-kept secret amongst all navies of the world and thus the capabilities of all modern submarines are hard to verify. Any capabilities are hard to confirm, but it is widely accepted that the Soryu Class submarines are perhaps the most advanced diesel electric attack submarines in the world.

As stated earlier, Japan is a nation of islands and thus a capable submarine force is essential to securing the sea lane supply lines that keep the nation alive. Controlling these maritime arteries in a time of war is essential to Japan’s survival, and thus denying an enemy access to these areas with either surface warfare assets or submarines is essential. Given the small geographical area of the home islands of Japan, the long endurance of nuclear powered submarines is not necessary, and Japan has wisely opted for a diesel electric submarine fleet. Modern diesel electric submarines are extremely quiet, an essential survival characteristic in modern submarine warfare, and modern battery technology provides for efficient operation and long endurance. Coupled with high tech sonar, radar and communications systems and state of the art weapons systems, the Soryu is a most effective and deadly submarine warfare platform.

Soryu Class vessels in service:

• JS Soryu SS-501
• JS Unryu SS-502
• JS Hakuryu SS-503
• JS Kenryu SS-504
• JS Zuiryu SS-505
• JS Kokuryu SS-506

Specifications:

Displacement:    2,900 tons surfaced/4,200 tons submerged

L.O.A.:  84 meters (275.5 ft.)

Beam:   9.1 meters (29.8 ft.)

Speed:   13 knots surfaced/ 20knots submerged

Range:  6,100 nautical miles

Complement:     65 crew

Weapon Systems:    6 x HU 606 533mm torpedo tubes for 30 loads of a mixture of Type 89 torpedoes and Harpoon missiles.

Patrol Boat Guided Missile (PG)

Although not a key component of JMSDF naval strategy, the newest PGs fielded by the Japanese are quite interesting in their design and capabilities. The Hayabusa Class PGs are fast, have good endurance and are heavily armed for their size. They also have a stealthy hull and superstructure design. These craft are able to respond to naval threats in shallow and confined waters, especially in and around the many small islands that are scattered about the four larger home islands. They could also police the outlying islands, such as the Ryukyu and Senkakus. Japan and China currently both claim ownership of the Senkakus and the dispute has been a cause of tension between the two nations in recent years. These PGs could react rapidly to any hostile incursion by warships, or respond to acts of piracy in the more remote island chains of Japan.

Hayabusa Class vessels in service:

• JS Hayabusa PG-824
• JS Wakataka PG-825
• JS Otaka PG-826
• JS Kumataka PG-827
• JS Umitaka PG-828
• Shiritaka PG-829

Specifications:

Displacement:    240 tons fully loaded

L.O.A.:  50.1 meters (164 ft.)

Beam:   8.4 meters (28 ft.)

Speed:   42- 46 knots

Complement:     21 crew

Weapon Systems:    2 x aft mounted twin launchers for SSM1-B or Type 90 SSM, 1 x 76mm Oto-Breda deck gun, 2 x 12.7mm M2 machine guns

Aviation

The naval aviation component of the JMSDF is made up of maritime patrol, surveillance, and ASW/MCM fixed wing aircraft and helicopters. The newest maritime patrol aircraft in the JMSDF inventory is the Kawasaki P-1. The P-1 will eventually take the place of all of the aging P-3 Orions in the JMSDF inventory. It has greater speed and range than the P-3, and has more technologically advanced ASW/MCM and surveillance capabilities. It can carry a weapons load of 18,000 lbs., including anti-ship missiles such as the Type 91, as well as torpedoes.

The Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) does provide many powerful assets in supporting the JMSDF. These include the F-2 advanced fighter aircraft which is an indigenous version of the U.S. F-16 produced by Mitsubishi, with notable improvements over the original design. The F-2 is equipped with an AESA (Active Electronically Scanning Array Radar). The payload was increased and an additional 4 hard points for ordinance were added. Although primarily utilized as an air superiority fighter, it is equally suited to anti-ship duties. The F-2 can carry 4 Type 88 anti-ship missiles and is a frightening prospect for any enemy surface vessels when so equipped.

Another U.S. fighter that has been widely used in the JASDF is the F-15, or F-15J as it is known in Japanese service. It is planned to replace the F-15Js with F-35As when and if these aircraft become available. As a future recipient of the F-35A, it is widely theorized that Japan could order a small number of F-35B VSTOL aircraft if deemed necessary to equip the Izumo Class DDHs at some point in the future dependent upon changing contingencies and threats in the region.

Conclusion

Japan faces great geo-political challenges of both global and regional scope. While it is refreshing to see Japan take a more independent and robust role in its own defense, it is at the same time troubling to see her further entrench herself in the overall military strategy of the United States in the region. No one should demand that Japan abandon a robust BMD capability in the face of a number of potential adversaries in the region that both possess nuclear weapons and the means to effectively deliver them via modern, long range ballistic missiles.; however, integrating this BMD system with the greater BMD umbrella of the United States sends a counter-productive message to these same neighbors.

A strong and increasingly militarily independent Japan could couple strength with friendly diplomacy and trade with an ever stronger China as well as Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines. Having no direct stake in the South China Sea territorial dispute, other that freedom of navigation and trade, Japan could be a potential peace maker and moderator. This positive role in dispute resolution would most likely reap positive rewards in its independent dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands. An official government apology to China for their horrible treatment at the hands of Imperial Japan from the Invasion of 1931 through the years of World War II, is long overdue and would carry a great deal of diplomatic weight in future relations.

Japan will be hard pressed to win a naval arms race with the Chinese in the long run, as their economy has been stagnant for decades with a debt to GDP ratio of 230% as of 2014. China has the time and the resources to close the technology gap with Japan in the long run. The newest Type 052D DDGs of the PLAN are evidence of this closing gap, not to mention the PLAN’s conventional aircraft carrier program that is successfully advancing at a strong pace.

Japan undoubtedly has the most powerful and flexible navy in the Asia Pacific region. Its vessels either rival or surpass those fielded by the U.S. Navy, let alone the navies of its neighbors and potential adversaries. Their most advanced vessels are a mixture of high-tech battle management systems, sensors and powerful armaments, married to stealthy and efficient hull designs. The organization of the Fleet Escort Flotillas provides for a rapidly deployable and flexible defensive naval arm while also providing a viable outer ring of BMD capability. The only question is how Japan will decide to utilize their naval power in the coming decades. Will it be used in the pursuit of ensuring their independence and peaceful relations with their regional partners, or in the self-destructive pursuit of U.S. hegemony in the region?

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.

The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) of today has matured a great deal since the warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were parceled out amongst the victors, scrapped or sunk at the end of World War II. Long decades of pacifist defense policy coupled with non-interventionist foreign policy helped maintain peace in a quite hostile neck of the woods. Imperial Japan wrought destruction, brutal occupation and various crimes against humanity upon many of its neighbors prior to and during the war. This legacy has not been forgotten.

The security agreement between Japan and the United States has changed greatly under the Shinzo Abe and Barak Obama administrations, with Japan being seen as a peer in the overall, shared defensive strategy of the two nations in the region. Japan has been called upon to increasingly modernize its fleet, fully integrate its communications, fire control and tracking systems, and weapons systems with those of the U.S. Navy. Prime Minister Abe has altered the defense posture of the island nation, to the chagrin of a majority of its citizens, to allow for the offensive deployment of the JDF in various U.S.-led “Multinational” enterprises.

These developments have not escaped the notice of Japan’s neighbors, most notably China. Japan’s modernization of its fleet and the increase in the potency of both defensive and offensive platforms has largely occurred in response to a modernizing and more capable Chinese naval presence in the region. The further integration of the Japanese and the U.S. naval forces, the total compatibility of their systems, and their joint strategic planning are forcing China to recalculate and fine-tune their more assertive foreign policy in both the South China Sea and East China Sea.

Brief Overview:

The Imperial Japanese Navy of World War II was one of the most powerful navies in modern history. Japan had a surface fleet of battleships, heavy cruisers, cruisers and destroyers that was on par or superior to any navy of the era. Her naval aviation arm was far more advanced than any other nation at the time, with only the United States being able to rival her to any degree of parity.

With the defeat of Imperial Japan at the conclusion of World War II, Japan was forced to surrender unconditionally, and forfeit what remained of the Imperial Navy. Many powerful assets remained and were either divided amongst the victors or scrapped. After all repatriation of Japanese military forces had been completed, all vessel of destroyer tonnage or below were divided up amongst the U.S.S.R, China, the UK and the U.S. Vessels above this tonnage were either scrapped or sunk in deep ocean waters. An empire with a long and proud naval history was rendered impotent.

A great deal has changed since the end of World War II, the implementation of the Potsdam Declaration, and the acceptance of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan in 1947. The acceptance of Article 9 presaged the age of official Japanese pacifism, or more accurately an era of a posture of non-interventionist self-defense. It is a credit to the people of Japan, regardless of their brutal militarism of the mid-twentieth century that this state of affairs has lasted as long as it has.

Japan has maintained a Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force of very capable organization and function over at least the past five decades; however, the updated security agreement between Japan and the United States that has come into being under the Obama administration holds Japan to be a peer with the United States in establishing a viable offensive and defensive naval, aviation and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) capability in providing for the defense of Japan as well as the overall naval strategy of the United States in the Pacific.

A resurgent Chinese power in the region has lead the Japanese government to reevaluate its pacifist Constitution, realign itself with past foes and take a much more robust defensive posture. The Peoples Liberation Army Navy has been modernizing at a rapid rate and China has more assertively staked its claim to a number of disputed areas both in the South China and East China Seas. The Japanese government moved to solidify its legal claim to the Senkaku (Daioyu) Islands, by buying three of them from the private Japanese owner in the Spring of 2012. This only further enflamed the situation and both powers have been sending Coast Guard vessels and aircraft to the islands in an ever increasing rattling of sabers. China responded by establishing a new air-defense identification zone over the islands in 2013.

Further, Japan carried out naval drills with the United States in the South China Sea for the first time in the summer of 2015. This was a show of solidarity and cooperation with the U.S. at a time when the U.S. has been mounting sorties with warships and military aircraft within twelve miles of the artificial islands that China has constructed in the Spratly Islands. Japan has also pledged to donate older patrol boats to the Philippine Navy in an attempt to bolster that nations rival claims in the region. The “South China Sea Crisis” will continue to evolve in complexity as the man-made islands become operational and China challenges the centuries old established precedents of international maritime law.

Current Organization and Deployment

The JMSDF is commanded by the Maritime Chief of Staff. The Self Defense Fleet consists of the following components:

• Fleet Escort Force
  • Escort Flotilla 1 (Yokosuka)
    • Escort Squadron 1
    • Escort Squadron 5
  • Escort Flotilla 2 (Sasebo)
    • Escort Squadron 2
    • Escort Squadron 6
  • Escort Flotilla 3 (Maizuru)
    • Escort Squadron 3
    • Escort Squadron 7
  • Escort Flotilla 4 (Kure)
    • Escort Squadron 4
    • Escort Squadron 8
  • Fleet Training Command
  • 1st Replenishment Squadron
  • 1st Transportation Squadron
• Fleet Air Force
  • Fleet Air Wing 1 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 2 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 4 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 5 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 21 (Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 22 (Helicopters)
  • Fleet Air Wing 31 (Fixed wing patrol, ASW, intelligence, liason and support aircraft)
  • Fleet Squadron 51 (Fixed wing patrol aircraft and Helicopters)
  • Fleet Squadron 6 (Fixed wing transport aircraft)
  • Fleet Squadron 1 ( Medium and Heavy Lift Helicopters)
• Fleet Submarine Force
  • Submarine Flotilla 1
    • Submarine Squadron 1
    • Submarine Squadron 3
    • Submarine Squadron 5
  • Submarine Flotilla 2
    • Submarine Squadron 2
    • Submarine Squadron 4
  • Submarine Training Command
• Mine Warfare Force
• Fleet Research & Development Command
• Fleet Intelligence Command
• Oceanographic Command
• Air Training Command
  • Shimofusa Air Training Group
  • Tokushima Air Training Group
  • Ozuki Air Training Group
• Maritime Material Command
• Vessel and Aviation Supply Depots
• Training units and schools
• Communications command

JMSDF Districts

The JMSDF is responsible for guarding the waters of five military districts. Each district has a regional escort fleet element and shore-side support element or major naval base. Regional escort fleets are comprised of Destroyer Escorts (DDE), patrol craft, minesweepers and ancillary craft. Four of the districts are Home Port for the four Escort Fleet Flotillas. Each flotilla is comprised of one Helicopter Destroyer (DDH) as the command platform, and 7 DDGs/AWDs in escort.

Fleet Vessels

The JMSDF is comprised of over 130 combatant, mine countermeasures, support, training and ancillary vessels as follows:

• Helicopter Destroyers (DDH): 4 (One vessel to be replaced in 2016)
• Landing Ship Tank (LST): 3
• Guided Missile Destroyers (DDG): 12
• Destroyers (DD): 25
• Destroyer Escorts (DE): 6
• Minesweepers (MS): 27
• Patrol Boats (PB): 6
• Attack Submarines Diesel Electric (SSK): 17 (with 5 more planned)
• Replenishment Ships: 5

Most Powerful Vessels

The four Escort Fleet Flotillas of the JMSDF are comprised each of one DDH acting as a command ship and 7 DDGs/DDs. The DDH vessels of the JMSDF are very modern and flexible Anti-Submarine (ASW) and power projection vessels. As a nation comprising of over 6,852 islands, with most of the landmass constituting the 4 main islands, rapidly deployable naval and amphibious forces are essential to defense strategy. Each Escort Fleet Flotilla has the power to defend one of the 5 naval districts from attack from guided missiles, aircraft, surface vessels and submarines, and have the inherent ability to land troops via helicopter, landing craft or hovercraft.

Izumo Class DDA

While carrying the designation of Helicopter Destroyer, many military analysts have studied the design of the JS Izumo DDH-183 and surmised that she is very capable of carrying a number of VSTOL aircraft in addition to her compliment of ASW/MCM and troop carrying helicopters or tilt-rotor aircraft such as the V-22 Osprey. As Japan is slated to take delivery of the F-35A from the US, if and when this aircraft ever becomes operational in light of its many development setbacks and problems, it is not a stretch to imagine Japan taking delivery of the F-35B VSTOL version for future use on the JS Izumo and her soon to be completed sister vessel JS Kaga DDH-184. The JS Izumo was commissioned in late March of 2015 and is soon to be followed by the JS Kaga in Late March of 2017.

Izumo Class vessels in service:

• JS Izumo DDH-183

Specifications:

Displacement (Loaded): 27,000 tons

L.O.A.:  248 meters (814 ft.)

Beam:   38 meters (185 ft.)

Draft:    7.5 meters (25 ft.)

Deck Area: Approx. 8,000sq. meters

Speed: 30+ knots

Range: Not disclosed

Complement: 370 crew and 400 troop landing force

Weapons Systems: 2 x Phalanx CWIS, 2 x SeaRAM CWIS

Aircraft: 7 to 28 ASW/MCM or troop carrying helicopters. Can accommodate medium or heavy helicopters.

It is notable that the Izumo Class DDHs do not have a well deck and thus do not have the capability of delivering troops and equipment in an amphibious fashion. They were designed to provide a long range ASW/MCM capability, command and control and limited air assault and HADR capability. With a large internal hangar deck, and a large aircraft elevator, the vessels are more than capable of carrying a sizeable number of F-35B VSTOL aircraft if this were to be so desired at some future date. This number would most likely not exceed 10 to 12 fixed wing VSTOL aircraft due to the amount of space required for fuel, maintenance and armaments. Accommodation of the aircrews and maintenance crews for the aircraft would be possible if substituted for that originally designed for the air assault troops.

Hyuga Class, Helicopter Destroyers DDH

The Hyuga Class vessels’ keels were laid and they were commissioned between 2006 and 2011. JS Hyuga DDH-181, and JS Ise DDH-182 are extremely capable, long range ASW/MCM platforms. In many ways they can be seen as smaller versions on the Izumo Class, but with a number of differences.

The Hyuga Class DDHs are beautiful examples of a modern ASW warship designed to achieve localized naval dominance in the seaways of Japan, denying any enemy submarine force from threatening maritime or naval traffic within the territorial waters of Japan. When coupled with the advanced DDGs and DDs of the JMSDF with their anti-missile and anti-aircraft capabilities and added ASW/MCM capabilities, an Escort Fleet Flotilla is able to control and deny access to the territorial waters of Japan.

Like the larger Izumo class, these vessels lack a well deck and do not have the capacity to launch amphibious forces via landing craft or amphibious vehicles. The JS Hyuga and the JS Ise have already demonstrated their usefulness in HADR operations, with both vessels having participated in humanitarian support and evacuation operations in response to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (JS Hyuga and Ise) and the 2013 typhoon Haiyan which struck the Philippines (JS Ise).

Hyuga Class vessels in service:

• JS Hyuga DDH-181
• JS Ise DDH-182

Specifications:

Displacement (Loaded): 19,000 tons

L.O.A.:  197 meters (646 ft.)

Beam:   33 meters (108 ft.)

Draft:    7 meters (23 f.)

Deck Area: Approx. 6,500sq. meters

Speed: 30+ knots

Range: Not disclosed.

Complement: 360 – 371 crew

Weapons Systems: 2 x Phalanx CWIS, 16 cell Mk1 VLS (16 Sea Sparrow, 12 RUM-139 VL ASROC),

2 x triple 324mm torpedo tubes, 12.7mm machine guns

Aircraft: 4 to 18 ASW/MCM or troop carrying helicopters. Can accommodate medium or heavy helicopters.

Landing Ship Tank (LST)

The JMSDF has three Osumi Class LSTs; however, their design is more appropriately described as a Dock Landing Ship (LSD), as they have no bow doors and ramp for forward beaching of the vessel to discharge amphibious forces. This is facilitated by a well deck and stern door where a complement of 2 LCAC hovercraft are launched. The vessels have a complement of 330 troops for amphibious of helicopter landing, but sufficient space is available for up to 1,000 troops in an emergency situation or for a short duration. The vessels have sufficient space for 10 x Type 10 MBTs. The vessels carry a complement of 8 helicopters and carry 2 x 20mm Phalanx CWIS for close in air defense. Money has been allocated to research the refitting of all the vessels of the Osumi Class to field V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft instead of traditional helicopters, as well AAV7s for amphibious troops transport.

Osumi Class vessels in service:

• JS Osumi LST 4001
• JS Shimokita LST 4002
• JS Kunisaki LST 4003

Guided Missile Destroyers

The JMSDF operates three different classes of DDG, from the Hatakaze Class of the 1980s, to the most recently commissioned Atago Class. All of these vessel are very capable warships and are joined in their duties by smaller yet equally capable DDs. The Atago Class DDGS are easily one of the most powerful surface warfare platforms in the world.

Atago Class DDG

There are currently two commissioned Atago class DDGs in the JMSDF. These vessels are often seen as larger and more capable versions of the 4 Kongo Class DDGs that immediately preceded them into active service. The Atago’s chief advances over the Kongo are the greater guided missile capacity of the larger vessels, the larger bridge (command and control center of the vessel) and the full aft hanger that can accommodate one SH-60K helicopter. This makes the vessels more flexible and capable of a variety of duties, and give them a longer range ASW capability.

Most importantly, the two Atago Class vessels have been updated with the most recent AEGIS software as well as the capability of carrying the SM-3 Block 1A Standard missile. The SM-3 coupled with the AEGIS BMD 3.0 upgrades makes the Atago a more powerful Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) platform. It is theorized that just two such vessels will be able to fully cover the Japanese home islands from ballistic missile threats. With 6 DDGs in the JMSDF equipped in such a fashion (2 Atago, 4 Kongo), 2 vessels would be constantly deployed while 2 could be in port or conducting training while a further 2 could be in dry-dock for maintenance. It has also been suggested that Japan may look to build two additional Atago Class vessels; however, in light of Japan’s poor economic outlook the funds for such an acquisition are in question.

Atago Class vessels in service:

• JS Atago DDG-177
• JS Ashigara DDG-178

Specifications:

Displacement: 10,000 tons full load

L.O.A.:  165 meters (541 ft.)

Beam:   21 meters (68.9 ft.)

Draft: 6.2 meters (20.3 ft.)

Speed: 30+ knots

Complement: 300 crew

Sensors/Processing Systems: AN/SPY-1D(V) passive electronically scanned phased array radar. AEGIS.

Weapons Systems:

• 96 cell MK-41 VLS (64 cells forward, 32 aft) equipped with SM2-MR or SM-3 ABM and RUM-139 ASROC.
• 2 x missile canisters for 8 Type 90 (SSM-1B) missiles.
• 2 x Type 68 triple torpedo tubes (Mk 46 or Type 93 torpedoes)
• 2 x 20mm Phalanx CWIS
• 1 x 127mm (5 in.) Mk 45 Mod 4 deck gun

Aircraft: Hangar for 1 x SH-60K helicopter assigned.

Kongo Class DDG

The four Kongo Class DDGs were commissioned by Japan between the years 1993 – 1998. They are very similar in design and function to the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke Class DDGs, with the added requirement of being capable of acting as fleet command vessels. It had originally been planned to build six of these vessels; however, the decision was made to opt for the Atago design after the first four vessels had been completed. It is surmised that this was the result of an added BMD threat from North Korea and the fielding of the advanced Type 052D DDGs by the Chinese PLAN. The Atago is a more capable vessel than the Chinese Type 052D in terms of sensors and processing systems; however the Chinese vessels (3 in class) have a larger offensive missile capability.

The Kongo has been fitted with the later AEGIS systems and BMD 3.0 software coupled with the SM-3 Block 1A missile. Kongo class vessels have fired the SM-3 in successful anti-ballistic missile tests starting in 2007. The four Kongo Class DDGs will serve with the two Atago Class DDGs to make up the naval component of the Japanese BMD system.

Kongo Class vessels in service:

• JS Kongo DDG-173
• JS Kirishima DDG-174
• JS Myoko DDG-175
• JS Chokai DDG-176

Specifications:

Displacement:    9,500 tons fully loaded.

L.O.A.:  161 meters (528.2 ft.)

Beam:   21 meters (68.9 ft.)

Draft:    6.2 meters (20.3 ft.)

Speed:   30+ knots

Range: 5,200 nautical mi.

Complement:     300 crew

Sensors/Processing Systems: AN/SPY-1D(V) passive electronically scanned phased array radar. AEGIS.

Weapons Systems:

• 90 cell MK-41 VLS (29 cells forward, 61 aft) equipped with SM2-MR or SM-3 ABM and RUM-139 ASROC.
• RGM-84 Harpoon SSM or Type 90 SSM
• 2 x Type 68 triple torpedo tubes (Mk 46 or Type 93 torpedoes)
• 2 x 20mm Phalanx CWIS
• 1 x 127mm (5 in.) Oto-Breda compact deck gun.

Aircraft: Deck landing area for 1 x SH60K helicopter.

Destroyers (DD)

The JMSDF fields a wide range of destroyers. The most advanced of these small warships are the new Akizuki Class. The Akizuki Class DDs are the newest commissioned vessels of the Japanese navy. Weighing in at 6,800 tons fully loaded, they are 2,700 tons lighter than the Kongo Class DDGs; however, they are meant to escort these vessels and the DDHs of an Escort Fleet Flotilla and protect them from aerial and submarine threats.

Considering their small displacement, these vessels are bristling with weaponry and the most advanced indigenous sensor package available in the ATECS (Advanced Technology Command System) battle management system. Often referred to as the Japanese AEGIS, ATECS is fully compatible with the U.S. system and its weapons components. These DDs are also equipped with an advanced AAW system as well as the OQQ-22 ASW system. The vessel makes use of a stealthy upper hull/conning tower design. There is an aft hangar on the vessel as well as a landing area, which allows for the assignment of an SH-60K helicopter full time as well as the ability to operate two helicopters if the need arises.

Akizuki Class vessels in service:

• JS Akizuki DD-115
• JS Teruzuki DD-116
• JS Suzutsuki DD-117
• JS Fuyuzuki DD-118

Specifications:

Displacement:    6,800 tons fully loaded.

L.O.A.:  150.5 meters (493.7 ft.)

Beam:   18.3 meters (60 ft.)

Draft:    5.3 meters (17.4 ft.)

Speed: 30+ knots

Complement:     200 crew

Sensors/Processing Systems:      ATECS Advanced Technology Command System

Weapons Systems:

• 32 cell MK-41 VLS equipped with RIMM-162 ESSM (SAM), RUM-139 ASROC or Type 07 ASROC.
• 8 Type 90 SSMs
• 2 x HOS 303 triple torpedo tubes (Mk 46 or Type 93 torpedoes)
• 2 x 20mm Phalanx Block 1B CWIS
• 1 x 127mm (5 in.) deck gun

Aircraft: Hangar for 1 x SH-60K helicopter equipped.

Guided Missile Submarine (SSK), Diesel Electric

The JMSDF operates two different classes of diesel electric attack submarines. The Oyashio Class of 11 boats built in a ten year period between 1998 and 2008, and the Soryu Class of which 6 of 12 planned boats have been built starting in 2009. Submarine design and capabilities are a well-kept secret amongst all navies of the world and thus the capabilities of all modern submarines are hard to verify. Any capabilities are hard to confirm, but it is widely accepted that the Soryu Class submarines are perhaps the most advanced diesel electric attack submarines in the world.

As stated earlier, Japan is a nation of islands and thus a capable submarine force is essential to securing the sea lane supply lines that keep the nation alive. Controlling these maritime arteries in a time of war is essential to Japan’s survival, and thus denying an enemy access to these areas with either surface warfare assets or submarines is essential. Given the small geographical area of the home islands of Japan, the long endurance of nuclear powered submarines is not necessary, and Japan has wisely opted for a diesel electric submarine fleet. Modern diesel electric submarines are extremely quiet, an essential survival characteristic in modern submarine warfare, and modern battery technology provides for efficient operation and long endurance. Coupled with high tech sonar, radar and communications systems and state of the art weapons systems, the Soryu is a most effective and deadly submarine warfare platform.

Soryu Class vessels in service:

• JS Soryu SS-501
• JS Unryu SS-502
• JS Hakuryu SS-503
• JS Kenryu SS-504
• JS Zuiryu SS-505
• JS Kokuryu SS-506

Specifications:

Displacement:    2,900 tons surfaced/4,200 tons submerged

L.O.A.:  84 meters (275.5 ft.)

Beam:   9.1 meters (29.8 ft.)

Speed:   13 knots surfaced/ 20knots submerged

Range:  6,100 nautical miles

Complement:     65 crew

Weapon Systems:    6 x HU 606 533mm torpedo tubes for 30 loads of a mixture of Type 89 torpedoes and Harpoon missiles.

Patrol Boat Guided Missile (PG)

Although not a key component of JMSDF naval strategy, the newest PGs fielded by the Japanese are quite interesting in their design and capabilities. The Hayabusa Class PGs are fast, have good endurance and are heavily armed for their size. They also have a stealthy hull and superstructure design. These craft are able to respond to naval threats in shallow and confined waters, especially in and around the many small islands that are scattered about the four larger home islands. They could also police the outlying islands, such as the Ryukyu and Senkakus. Japan and China currently both claim ownership of the Senkakus and the dispute has been a cause of tension between the two nations in recent years. These PGs could react rapidly to any hostile incursion by warships, or respond to acts of piracy in the more remote island chains of Japan.

Hayabusa Class vessels in service:

• JS Hayabusa PG-824
• JS Wakataka PG-825
• JS Otaka PG-826
• JS Kumataka PG-827
• JS Umitaka PG-828
• Shiritaka PG-829

Specifications:

Displacement:    240 tons fully loaded

L.O.A.:  50.1 meters (164 ft.)

Beam:   8.4 meters (28 ft.)

Speed:   42- 46 knots

Complement:     21 crew

Weapon Systems:    2 x aft mounted twin launchers for SSM1-B or Type 90 SSM, 1 x 76mm Oto-Breda deck gun, 2 x 12.7mm M2 machine guns

Aviation

The naval aviation component of the JMSDF is made up of maritime patrol, surveillance, and ASW/MCM fixed wing aircraft and helicopters. The newest maritime patrol aircraft in the JMSDF inventory is the Kawasaki P-1. The P-1 will eventually take the place of all of the aging P-3 Orions in the JMSDF inventory. It has greater speed and range than the P-3, and has more technologically advanced ASW/MCM and surveillance capabilities. It can carry a weapons load of 18,000 lbs., including anti-ship missiles such as the Type 91, as well as torpedoes.

The Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) does provide many powerful assets in supporting the JMSDF. These include the F-2 advanced fighter aircraft which is an indigenous version of the U.S. F-16 produced by Mitsubishi, with notable improvements over the original design. The F-2 is equipped with an AESA (Active Electronically Scanning Array Radar). The payload was increased and an additional 4 hard points for ordinance were added. Although primarily utilized as an air superiority fighter, it is equally suited to anti-ship duties. The F-2 can carry 4 Type 88 anti-ship missiles and is a frightening prospect for any enemy surface vessels when so equipped.

Another U.S. fighter that has been widely used in the JASDF is the F-15, or F-15J as it is known in Japanese service. It is planned to replace the F-15Js with F-35As when and if these aircraft become available. As a future recipient of the F-35A, it is widely theorized that Japan could order a small number of F-35B VSTOL aircraft if deemed necessary to equip the Izumo Class DDHs at some point in the future dependent upon changing contingencies and threats in the region.

Conclusion

Japan faces great geo-political challenges of both global and regional scope. While it is refreshing to see Japan take a more independent and robust role in its own defense, it is at the same time troubling to see her further entrench herself in the overall military strategy of the United States in the region. No one should demand that Japan abandon a robust BMD capability in the face of a number of potential adversaries in the region that both possess nuclear weapons and the means to effectively deliver them via modern, long range ballistic missiles.; however, integrating this BMD system with the greater BMD umbrella of the United States sends a counter-productive message to these same neighbors.

A strong and increasingly militarily independent Japan could couple strength with friendly diplomacy and trade with an ever stronger China as well as Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines. Having no direct stake in the South China Sea territorial dispute, other that freedom of navigation and trade, Japan could be a potential peace maker and moderator. This positive role in dispute resolution would most likely reap positive rewards in its independent dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands. An official government apology to China for their horrible treatment at the hands of Imperial Japan from the Invasion of 1931 through the years of World War II, is long overdue and would carry a great deal of diplomatic weight in future relations.

Japan will be hard pressed to win a naval arms race with the Chinese in the long run, as their economy has been stagnant for decades with a debt to GDP ratio of 230% as of 2014. China has the time and the resources to close the technology gap with Japan in the long run. The newest Type 052D DDGs of the PLAN are evidence of this closing gap, not to mention the PLAN’s conventional aircraft carrier program that is successfully advancing at a strong pace.

Japan undoubtedly has the most powerful and flexible navy in the Asia Pacific region. Its vessels either rival or surpass those fielded by the U.S. Navy, let alone the navies of its neighbors and potential adversaries. Their most advanced vessels are a mixture of high-tech battle management systems, sensors and powerful armaments, married to stealthy and efficient hull designs. The organization of the Fleet Escort Flotillas provides for a rapidly deployable and flexible defensive naval arm while also providing a viable outer ring of BMD capability. The only question is how Japan will decide to utilize their naval power in the coming decades. Will it be used in the pursuit of ensuring their independence and peaceful relations with their regional partners, or in the self-destructive pursuit of U.S. hegemony in the region?

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.

On Dec.20, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies successfully captured the town of Khan Touman and the village of Qarasi in southern Aleppo. On Dec.21, the Syrian forces advanced west of Khan Touman capturing Kalidiyah village and several hundred meters along the Aleppo-Damascus highway. Strategically, this cuts the terrorists’ supplies through the highway. Now it’s useless for militants of the Jaish al-Fateh coalition which includes such groups as al Nusra.

However, this offensive has come at a heavy cost for the SAA as Jaish al-Fateh militants have massively used the US-supplied TOW-missile against government vehicles in the area.

The SAA is currently attempting to relieve the situation in Aleppo pushing towards the government-enclave and Shi’a towns of Fuah and Kafrhaya near Idlib city.

This maneuver does seem to approach Nubl and al-Zahraa from the south. If the main direction of the offensive isn’t successful, there will be a possibility that the Syrian Army will launch an offensive towards the predominately Shi’a towns of Nubl and al-Zahraa. The government troops have made steady advances in the Aleppo province in the past two months largely due to Russian Airstrikes and massive Shia reinforcements from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.

According to the pro-government sources, the SAA has moved reinforcements to the northeastern part of the Aleppo province to conduct large-scales operations against the ISIS strongholds Northwest of Raqqa. For instance, large groups of the fresh forces have been sent to the town of Sarrin. An expected aim of the Syrian forces is Tishrin Dam and its nearby areas. Considering a lack of manpower to continue successful advances in all directions, the opening of a new front could pursue only the political goals. The Syrian government aims to show possibility to take control of the crucial Syrian city amid the planned US-backed advance on Raqqa.

On Dec.21, a sum of 116 militants surrendered to the Syrian authorities in the Homs province.

According to the reports, the recent militant’s loses at the buttleground and the Russian warplanes in the air have caused a growing number of militants to lay down arms in the hope of the general amnesty granted by the Assad government. Over 35 militants surrendered to the authorities in Homs on December 13. Earlier, militants began to evacuate from the Homs city under a deal signed with the government in late November.

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Eleven years ago, I initiated a discussion about the fact that jet fuel fires could not have melted steel at the World Trade Center. The government agency investigating the WTC destruction responded by holding “some of its deliberations in secret.” Although it’s not a secret that jet fuel can’t melt steel, due to propaganda from sources like The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, Americans often get confused about what facts like that mean to any national discussion. In a nutshell, what it means is that the molten metal found at the WTC, for which there is a great deal of evidence, cannot be explained by the official 9/11 myth.

No one thinks that jet fuel fires can melt steel beams—not even The Posts’ new science champion, who doesn’t bother to actually use jet fuel or steel beams to teach us about “retarded metallurgical things.” Instead, he uses a thin metal rod and a blacksmith forge to imply that, if the WTC buildings were made of thin metal rods and there were lots of blacksmith forges there, the thin metal rods would have lost strength and this would be the result. If you buy that as an explanation for what happened at the WTC, you might agree that everyone should just stop questioning 9/11.

This absurd demonstration highlights at least two major problems with America’s ongoing struggle to understand 9/11. The first is that there was a great deal of molten metal at the WTC. Those who know that fact sometimes share internet memes that say “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” when they want to convey that “Thermite Melted Steel at the WTC.” The second major problem is that certain mainstream media sources continue to put a lot of energy into dis-informing the public about 9/11.

Sources like The Posts, The New York Times and some “alternative media” continue to work hard to support the official myth of 9/11. That effort is not easy because they must do so while providing as little actual information about 9/11 as possible. The dumbing down of the average citizen is a full time job for such propagandists. Luckily for them, American students receive almost no historical context that encourages them to think critically or consider ideas that conflict with blind allegiance to their government. When it comes to the WTC, it also helps that almost 80% of Americans are scientifically illiterate.

As media companies attempt to confuse the public about 9/11, they must avoid relating details that might actually get citizens interested in the subject. For example, it’s imperative that they never mention any of these fourteen facts about 9/11. It is also important to never reference certain people, like theordnance distribution expert (and Iran-Contra suspect) who managed security at the WTC or the tortured top al Qaeda leader who turned out to have nothing to do with al Qaeda. In fact, to support the official myth of 9/11 these days, media must ignore almost every aspect of the crimes while promoting only the most mindless nonsense they can find. Unfortunately, that bewildering strategy becomes more obvious every day.

Kevin Ryan blogs at Dig Within.

Featured image: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (L) shakes hands with former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi near the latter’s home town of Sirte May 29, 2007. (Reuters / Leon Neal)

The US and NATO are preparing to carry out new military operations on Libyan territory, a Guardian report made clear on Sunday.

The Western powers are pressuring the newly formed Libyan “unity government” coalition, assembled last week under the nominal leadership of the Maltese government, to approve strikes against ISIS targets in the country, according to the British newspaper.

The first task of the “unity government” should be to issue “a direct call for help from the West,” the European Union’s Libyan ambassador said. UK Prime Minister David Cameron called on the new coalition to serve as “one unified, representative government in Libya in the fight against Daesh [ISIS].” The Gulf regimes will also send forces in support of the imperialist-backed “unity government,” British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond said.

US State Department spokesman John Kirby vowed that Washington would support the new governmental coalition with “full backing and technical, economic, security and counterterrorism assistance.” In his end-of-the year press conference Friday, President Barack Obama hinted at the plans for a new US-NATO military intervention in Libya, saying the country now faced “a very bad situation” as a result of the failure of the NATO coalition to “rebuild government there quickly” after the 2011 war.

The so-called “unity government” does not include either of the two regimes that currently claim sovereignty over Libya. Nor does it include numerous other factions that are heavily involved in fighting on the ground, where at least six major tribal-based militias are struggling for control of portions of the strategic Mediterranean coastline. These include the Libyan National Army, Ansar al-Sharia, the anti-Islamist Cyrenaica militia, Islamic State, the Shura Revolutionary Council, and the Libya Dawn coalition of so-called “moderate Islamist” and Berber militias.

Far from securing any real unity or stability, the new government has been cobbled together to fabricate a legal fig leaf for another military onslaught against Libya by the imperialist powers, which seek to exploit the political chaos produced by the 2011 war to carry out another round of neocolonial predations against Africa and the Middle East. Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa.

Last week, Western media reported a mounting threat from the growth of a Libyan branch of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), claiming on Sunday that ISIS militias were on the verge of seizing the key town Ajdabiya. Media reports asserted that such a victory would give the militias control over a substantial portion of Libya’s oil wealth.

The sinister nature of the war preparations are underscored by the complete silence of the US media on these developments. A looming escalation in Libya, opening up a new front in a spreading war that already encompasses Iraq, Syria and Yemen, is to be launched behind the backs of the American people without any public discussion or debate.

A US Special Forces mission in Libya ended in a debacle last week, with the commandos making a hasty withdrawal after meeting with unexpected hostility from local forces, according to the Guardian .

The US troops, deployed to “foster relationships,” were reportedly withdrawn soon after deployment when it became clear that Libyan forces in control of the area were hostile to the US presence. Before departing, the US soldiers, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying rifles equipped with silencers and high-tech optics, stopped for a group picture outside a Libyan airport.

On Sunday, NBC News informed readers that US commandos have been operating secretly in Libya for “some time now,” moving “in and out” of the country, according to comments by unnamed US officials.

It was already well established that US Special Forces conducted extensive operations inside Libya prior to 2011, as the US and NATO sought to mobilize Islamist militias for wars against the Libyan and Syrian governments. The NBC story, one of a handful of reports produced last week before the story was buried by the American press, underscores the fact that US forces have continued to wage secret operations in Libya since the official end to the war.

The evidence of US covert operations in Libya comes amid the preparations of the imperialist powers for open air and ground operations to be carried out in the name of fighting Islamist jihadist forces. These are the same militia American and European intelligence agencies and their regional allies such as Saudi Arabia financed and armed in the war that saw the overthrow and murder of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and were then deployed against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

The most aggressive proposals for new operations in Libya have been advanced by London, which has worked with Italy to contrive a strategy that would send sizable ground forces to occupy portions of Rome’s former colony. Britain is preparing to deploy 1,000-plus troops as part of plans to train new Western-backed militias and link up with pro-Western political elements, according to Al Alam .

Earlier this month, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls made clear that France would launch its own renewed operations against Libya, declaring “[W]e have an enemy, Daesh, that we must fight and crush, in Syria, in Iraq and tomorrow without doubt in Libya.”

Last week, in a report to the United Nations, the British government claimed that ISIS viewed Libya as “the best opportunity to expand its so-called caliphate,” and that the Islamist group had established new safe zones and staging areas in North Africa in response to escalated operations by the Western powers in Syria and Iraq.

The French military is already carrying out reconnaissance missions in preparation for the new campaign, including scouting operation over the city of Sirte, which was reduced to rubble by the 2011 bombing campaign. With the media blaring reports that hundreds of ISIS fighters have massed in Sirte, the city appears to be coming into the crosshairs of the Western powers once again.

The “war against ISIS” has become the all-purpose pretext for a new imperialist carve-up of the Middle East and North Africa.

At least 1,160 people have been killed by US police in 2015, according to an online aggregator of police killings, exceeding last year’s figure of 1,108. The statistics, compiled by killedbypolice.net, show that the wave of police violence has only intensified despite nationwide mass protests by tens of thousands this year against police brutality.

A more detailed database of killings by US police beginning in January 2015 compiled by the Guardian newspaper, which broadly corresponds with figures from killedbypolice.net, demonstrates that the epidemic of police violence affects broad layers of the American population from all ethnic backgrounds. While African-Americans were killed at nearly 2.5 times the rate of whites, the total number of white victims of police killings, 537 by the Guardian’s figures, was larger than the total number of either black or Hispanic victims.

Eighteen people in the Guardian’s database were minors. Two hundred-twelve people, or around one-fifth of all people killed by police in 2015, were unarmed, and 40 were killed while in custody.

According to statistics kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, widely acknowledged to radically undercount the real number of police killings, “justifiable homicides” by police officers have reached record highs in recent years, while the number of police officers killed in the line of duty has reached their lowest levels in decades. Thus, while it is impossible to be certain due to the government’s refusal to compile accurate data, it is highly likely that police killings for 2015 have been at or above record levels.

On Saturday morning, police in Los Angeles beat and tasered 26-year-old Ruben Herrera to death. Herrera had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Just hours earlier, an off-duty cop in Baltimore shot and killed Edel Cato Moreland for wielding a toy gun. In Amarillo, Texas on Sunday, police shot and killed Mark Ramirez, a 31-year-old suicidal man, in his own home, in what appears to be yet another police killing during a routine “welfare check.”

Also over the weekend, Andrew Thomas, who was shot in the neck last month by a police officer in Paradise, California after wrecking his car, died in a California hospital. Citing the officer’s claim that the shooting was “accidental,” the district attorney in that case declined to press charges, declaring the shooting “not justified, but also not criminal.”

Yesterday the Guardian newspaper released surveillance footage and an eyewitness account of the fatal shooting in Chicago last June of 23-year-old Alfontish “Nunu” Cockerham, who police claimed brandished a weapon at them. Video from a private security camera shows Cockerham was unarmed at the time he was shot, and a pistol allegedly belonging to him suddenly appearing on the ground several feet from where he was shot as police closed in.

Also late Monday evening, a grand jury in Texas decided not to return any indictments in the death of Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old black woman and police violence protester found dead in her cell in Waller County, Texas, after being detained for three days following a routine traffic stop. While police claimed that Bland had hanged herself with a plastic trash bag, numerous holes in the police version of events suggest that Bland was the victim of a police lynching, possibly due to her political views.

The ruling in Texas continues the nationwide trend of grand juries refusing to indict police officers in murder cases, which have often been deliberately manipulated by prosecutors in order to let police off the hook.

Only in rare instances, such as when overwhelming video evidence becomes public, have police officers been charged with any crime. No officer in the most high-profile police killings that occurred in 2015, including those of Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Zachary Hammond, and Sandra Bland, has been convicted.

Officers who were charged and later acquitted this year include Chicago police officer Dante Servin, charged over the 2012 shooting death of Rekia Boyd; Cleveland officer Michael Brelo, who used his “Marine training” in 2012 to unload dozens of rounds at two unarmed motorists at point-blank range; and Chicago police commander Glenn Evans, acquitted last week for an incident in which he jammed a gun down a suspect’s throat. With the mistrial declared last week in the case of William Porter, charged for his role in the Freddie Gray murder, the odds that some or all of the six officers in that case will be acquitted are significantly raised.

The Obama administration has led the drive by the political establishment to shield killer cops from prosecution. The White House has sided with the police in every use of force case to appear before the Supreme Court, and the Justice Department has not brought any charges against officers in numerous civil rights investigations, notably in the killing of Michael Brown last August in Ferguson.

In the case of Laquan McDonald, the Justice Department carried out a sham “investigation” for more than a year while sitting on the incontrovertible proof of police misconduct contained in the police dash-cam video. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former Obama White House chief of staff, fought for months against the video’s release on the grounds that it would disrupt this “investigation.”

Meanwhile the White House worked behind the scenes to coordinate the military-style crackdowns on protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore, while Obama took to the mass media to denounce protesters as “thugs.” The flow of military-grade hardware from the federal government to local police departments, including assault rifles and armored vehicles, has expanded considerably under Obama and has continued after the program sparked popular outrage during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri last year.

The ongoing wave of police violence in the United States and the defense of killer cops are the outcome of the continuous strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state under conditions of ever-growing inequality and continued mass poverty. Having no solutions to any of the mounting social problems facing the country, the ruling elite turns ever more to the defense of arbitrary state violence as the means to bolster its continued domination over American society.

 Christmas is normally known as the time of year when Americans try to be a little more giving, more compassionate, and more altruistic than during the other 11 1/2 months of the year. But in cities across the US, many are simply fighting for the right to exist in hastily-constructed homeless camps. The National Alliance to End Homelessness reports that on any given night, there are over 578,000 Americans sleeping on the streets. At the same time, there are at least 10 million vacant homes across America that are lying empty.

Here are 19 cities that are going above and beyond to push the most vulnerable Americans out of the public eye during the most compassionate time of the year:

1. Portland, Maine

Earlier this year, Portland cut funding for the city’s homeless shelters after a state audit by Republican governor Paul LePage accused the city of mismanaging funds — a claim city officials deny. After the latest cuts, the city will no longer have the funds to provide overflow space at local motels to homeless citizens who are turned away from overcrowded shelters.

As a result of no shelter space, many of Portland’s homeless, and indeed, homeless people across America, build encampments out of spare supplies to provide some semblance of shelter. But throughout the month of December, Portland city officials have been busy tearing down dozens of homeless encampments, providing those depending on them with little options aside from sleeping on concrete.

The city alleged the homeless camps were cleared out for a brush removal project along I-295, and gave the homeless residents sleeping there 24 hours to vacate the premises. “It’s sad because they’re taking everything away from us,” 45-year-old Sherri Ferrier told the Portland Press-Herald.

2. Seattle, Washington

One of the most insidious forms of war on the homeless is cloaking it in charity. After openly declaring a “war on homelessness,” Seattle mayor Ed Murray authorized two “legal” encampments, which only house roughly 100 people. The remaining encampments will be torn down by city officials. Seattle police are waging a crackdown on all of the “illegal” homeless camps, which are growing exponentially year after year. According to the Seattle Times, police destroyed 80 encampments in 2012, 131 in 2013, 351 in 2014, and 527 as of November of 2015.

3. Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix was one of the first states to proclaim it had ended chronic veteran homelessness in early 2014. However, Camp Alpha, the designated name for a homeless veterans’ encampment in Phoenix, was recently torn down by city officials. Camp Alpha had been at the same location at 19th Avenue and Hatcher in the Sunnyslope neighborhood of Phoenix for over three months. “It’s upsetting, it’s sickening to me, and a lot of people here,” Aaron Pomrenke, founder of Camp Alpha, told Fox 10 Phoenix. Camp Alpha residents are now looking to find a vacant building to use for shelter and storage of their belongings.

4. Eureka, California

Police in Eureka, California — a liberal haven in the far-northern part of the state — have cracked down on homeless encampments so much that the area’s homeless are forced to literally sleep in the swamp. The Marsh, as locals call it, is the coldest, wettest part of Eureka, and is the only place where Eureka police won’t enforce the city’s no-camping ordinance. Homeless advocates say just leaving the camp requires rubber boots or hip waders due to high water levels.

A homeless encampment in the marshes of Eureka, CA.

Some of the residents in the marsh refuse to stay in the city’s emergency homeless shelter, as shelter policy forces couples to separate, and doesn’t allow dogs. A letter to the editor posted to an area blog described the situation as “heartbreaking.”

Why don’t they leave? Why don’t they go somewhere else? Because there is no where else they can go to. Would you leave your dog behind? Would you risk the sum of the possessions you had to leave to a place you did not know? Would you in the cruelest of conditions leave your partner?

5. New Orleans, Louisiana

Homeless residents of New Orleans are also facing a targeted crackdown on homeless encampments. The situation for The Big Easy’s homeless has grown especially dire, with many of them working part-time jobs and unable to find alternative shelter, depending instead on charitable nonprofits. “It’s very urgent, because not only do we see people that are coming here from out of state that are homeless, but we have a lot of working homeless people here, and they come to our center every morning, to take a shower, to get ready for work,” Kenitha Groom-Williams of the Rebuild Center’s Lantern Light program told WWL-TV.

Homeless residents have grown to fear what the city’s police department calls “sweeps” of encampments. A homeless woman referred to as “Natalie” said personal belongings are often confiscated and not returned. “Well they have done it before, they took my boyfriend’s id, they took his phone. It had all our baby pictures in there, or my kids, they took everything,” Natalie said. “What do you expect me to do? I got nothing, I’m homeless.”

6. Washington DC

A series of homeless encampments near Rock Creek Parkway in Washington, DC was torn down last month to make room for a sewer project. The city is offering help finding support housing and shelter space for some of the residents who used to camp out near the Watergate Hotel. However, some residents prefer to stay outdoors, citing pervasive theft, violence, and bedbugs in shelter beds.

7. Boise, Idaho

A group of 100 homeless campers in Boise, Idaho were staying in a tent city known as Cooper Court near downtown Boise for several months, but police cleared the camp in early December.

While the owner of an RV park in Boise had offered space to some of the former residents of Cooper Court to erect a new encampment, he backed out of the deal after residents of the park stated they were fearful of homeless advocates and protesters.

Some of the residents of Cooper Court said they had no choice but to decline staying in Boise’s homeless shelters, as some are veterans with PTSD, and others have mental health conditions like schizophrenia, both of which can be exacerbated by the crowded environment at a homeless shelter.

“When they get into a setting like that it can make them behave badly,” Homeless advocate Jodi Peterson told Boise State Public Radio. “They can become aggressive because their anxiety level raises so high. So they become banned from shelters.”

8. Mendota, California

In late November, a homeless encampment near Mendota in the Central Valley area of California, which has been in place for roughly a year, was torn down at the request of the local water district. While police gave advance notice to the camp’s residents, roughly 20 campers were forced out of the area by police and private security.

“I feel sad because I didn’t come more here. I feel like they’re my family. Sometimes they talk about their problems with me. They will live in the streets again in the cold and rain,” Cathilic volunteer Maria Hernandez told the Merced Sun-Star.

9. Kissimmee, Florida

Approximately 40 homeless people camping on a piece of property in Kissimee were forced to leave earlier this month after the property owner learned a handful of registered sex offenders were among the residents in the encampment. Now, the bulk of those campers have no place to go.

“We thought we were homeless,” one camper told WFTV. “Now we’re really homeless.”

“I wish I had better news to say,” Kissimmee city commissioner Jose Alvarez said. “There’s really nowhere we can put them.”

10. Tucson, Arizona

In Pima County, Arizona, just outside of Tucson, a homeless camp that’s been in place since 1999 was torn down in early December. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department cited numerous complaints filed with the state Department of Environmental Quality over alleged illegal dumping, straining local budgets, as the reason for the eviction. Residents who chose to leave upon request were offered services. However, those who didn’t were threatened with imprisonment.

“If they don’t leave, we will arrest them for trespassing and then their belongings will be confiscated,” Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told News 13 Tucson.

Tucson News Now

However, budget concerns will likely be amplified the more homeless people are jailed. The cost of processing a new inmate is $300, and each prisoner costs $85 per day to house.

At least 21 encampments have been torn down by local sheriffs so far this year.

11. Salinas, California

In Salinas, a city near the California coastline, the war on the homeless has intensified to the point of the local city council passing a resolution allowing the city to steal homeless people’s possessions in the middle of the night, while contracting with a private company to demolish encampments. The city will be spending between $175,000 and $200,000 per year contracting with Smith and Enright landscaping services, who will be tasked with confiscating and storing the possessions of the homeless.

While the city isn’t charging a storage fee, isn’t confiscating necessary medication, identifcation, sleeping bags, and pillows, and is allowing all items to be reclaimed, advocates say it’s just one more burden homeless people are forced to endure for simply not having a place of their own to store their belongings.

Attorney Anthony Prince, who is suing the city claiming the anti-homeless ordinance is unconstitutional, says the window is wide  open for the city to ignore the rules in seizing property.

“We are getting reports that the city is already violating its own ordinance and destroying without notice or opportunity to contest the seizure,” Prince wrote.

12. Oakland, California

On December 3, in the middle of pouring rain, the California Highway Patrol enlisted prison labor to clear out a homeless encampment under the I-880 highway in Oakland. Prisoners were forced to throw mattresses, pillows, tents and sleeping bags in garbage trucks.

“We got nowhere else to go, and it’s raining,” a camper identifying himself as Kevin, who had lived under the bridge for months, told the East Bay Express. “We had something under the bridge, out of the rain. We cleaned up the area, and we’re not bothering nobody.”

“This is our property,” said a California Department of Transportation supervisor at the scene who didn’t identify himself. “They’re trespassing.”

13. Honolulu, Hawaii

Approximately 300 homeless residents of Honolulu have lived in an encampment along the Kakaako shoreline for years. The camp is one of the longest-lasting in the US. But this month, city officials will enter into a deal with private companies to “sweep” the Kakaako encampment and evict all of the residents who call it home. However, the city has had trouble finding a bidder, as contractors don’t want to deal with the resulting PR problems.

Eight private contractors recently turned down the HCDA’s request to submit bids on how much they would charge to clear encampments. The agency acknowledged that at least some of those contractors may not have wanted the high-profile publicity that comes with clearing out a homeless encampment.

14. Dallas, Texas

A sad and ironic story comes out of Dallas, Texas, where a homeless encampment in “Old City Park” was recently destroyed by local police. The irony is because the 27-acre park is a museum popular for showing how residents used to live in the 1800s, and the people who lived in the tent city just removed by local officials lived in far worse conditions than residents 150 years ago.

“They drink, they do things, they harass the staff here, they’ve been inappropriate around the children and it’s just this constant barrage of garbage,”museum board member Michael Przekwas told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth.

But the homeless residents in the park claim that the accusations against them are unfounded.

“We don’t bother them, all we do is sleep,” said park resident Vanessa Spurlock.

15. New York City

Homelessness in the nation’s largest city is so bad that homeless people are using LaGuardia airport’s terminal B as a permanent residence. Some employees of the LaGuardia food court say homeless people have lived in the airport for a long-term basis — one wheelchair-bound man and his partner have lived in terminal B for 5 years, according to CBS New York:

Vendors who could not speak on camera said as many as 50 homeless people are living in the Central Terminal at LaGuardia – eating, sleeping and even bathing there.

“It’s safe. It’s clean. It’s heated. It’s air-conditioned. There’s food there,” said former Department of Homeless Services Deputy Commissioner Robert Mascali.

Mascali said even if limited shelter space were to open up, many of the homeless residents there would opt to instead live at the airport, and not have to worry the crowding, acts of violence, and chaos that comes from a large number of people, some with mental health issues, co-habitating in a small space.

As evidenced by the nationwide crackdown on encampments, America’s homelessness crisis has been dealt with largely out of fear, rather than compassion. America’s homeless population has been pushed to the margins of society, having to live in swamps and airports. Will the world’s richest country continue down this path, or recognize the right to exist for the most marginalized of its citizens?

Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact Tom via email at [email protected].

In late October, we noted that for the second time this year, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest exporter of crude to China.

Russia also took the top spot in May, marking the first time in history that Moscow beat out Riyadh when it comes to crude exports to Beijing. “Moscow is wrestling with crippling Western economic sanctions and building closer ties with Beijing is key to mitigating the pain,” we said in October, on the way to explaining that closer ties between Russia and China as it relates to energy are part and parcel of a burgeoning relationship between the two countries who have voted together on the Security Council on matters of geopolitical significance. Here’s a look at the longer-term trend:

You may also recall that Gazprom Neft (which is the number three oil producer in Russia) began settling all sales to China in yuan starting in January. This, we said, is yet another sign of the petrodollar’s imminent demise.

On Monday, we learn that for the third time in 2015, Russia has once again bested the Saudis for the top spot on China’s crude suppliers list. “Russia overtook Saudi Arabia for the third time this year in November as China’s largest crude oil supplier,” Reuters writes, adding that “China brought in about 949,925 barrels per day (bpd) of Russian crude in November, compared with 886,950 bpd from Saudi Arabia.”

This is an annoyance for Riyadh. China was the world’s second-largest oil consumer in 2014 and closer ties between Moscow and Beijing not only represent a threat in terms of crude revenue, but also in terms of geopolitics as the last thing the Saudis need is for Xi to begin poking around militarily in the Arabian Peninsula on behalf of Moscow and Tehran.

As we documented in “Saudis Poke The Russian Bear, Start Oil War In Eastern Europe,” Riyadh has begun to encroach on Moscow’s markets in Poland. Here’s what Bloomberg wrote back in October:

“Poland has long been a client of Russian oil companies. Last year, about three-quarters of its fuel imports came from Russia, with the rest from Kazakhstan and European countries. Poland, however, is at the center of efforts to reduce the European Union’s dependence on Russian energy.

“A new and reliable supplier is a godsend. As for the Saudis, they need to expand outside Asia where demand is falling.

“This could turn into a more active shoving match between the world’s two biggest oil exporters, which already are at odds over the Syrian conflict.

Indeed, one could plausibly argue that one of the reasons the Saudis moved to artificially suppress prices last year was to sqeeze Putin and ultimately force The Kremlin to give up its support for Assad. As The New York Times put it, a dramatic decline in crude prices has certain “ancillary diplomatic benefits.”

Unfortunately for Riyadh, the strategy hasn’t worked. In fact, it’s backfired in more ways than one.

First, Saudi Arabia is facing a fiscal crisis as Riyadh’s budget deficit balloons to 20% of GDP, forcing the kingdom to tap the debt market in order to offset the SAMA burn.

Second, Putin not only refused to give up his support for the government in Damascus, he actually doubled down by sending the Russian air force to Latakia. Meanwhile, Russia continued to pump even more oil, and as Bloomberg reports, Moscow is now producing at “the fastest pace since the collapse of the Soviet Union.” 

“Russia’s unexpected oil bounty this year is the result not of a new Kremlin campaign but of dozens of modest productivity improvements across the sprawling sector. Even pressured by plunging prices, as well as U.S. and European Union sanctions that cut access to much foreign financing and technology, Russian companies have managed to squeeze more crude out of some of the country’s oldest fields,” Bloomberg writes, before noting that

“Bashneft and other Russian companies working fields in the Volga River basin — some of the first to be discovered in Russia early in the last century — are benefiting from Soviet inefficiency as [the old motto was]: ‘whatever we don’t produce will be left for our children.'”

For analysts, Russia’s resiliency has come as a surprise. “I know of no one who had predicted that Russian production would rise in 2015, let alone to new record levels,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s global head of commodities research said.

As for what it would take to curtail production, Mikhail Stavskiy, head of upstream at Bashneft PJSC which has been “the biggest single contributor to increased crude output this year,” says he doesn’t know. “I don’t know what the oil price would have to fall to for things to change dramatically. We’ve been through $9 a barrel and production continued, so if something like that happens, we know what to do.”

Indeed, thanks to the low cost of extracting crude from Russia’s oil fields in West Siberia and the devaluation of the ruble, production costs are rock bottom:

But not everyone agrees that this is sustainable. Some say efforts to improve efficiency have run their course and with financing for exploration scarce, further gains may be hard to come by. Interestingly, Bloomberg also notes that because Moscow takes “nearly everything above $30-$40 a barrel” on exports, producers won’t feel the impact of low prices until crude falls substantially below those levels.

“Russia will maintain its current oil production levels within the bandwidth of 525 million to 533 million tons next year, as the federal government’s budget is set on such production levels,” Stratfor’s Lauren Goodrich says, presaging more of the same in 2016.

The takeaway here is that the Saudi gambit failed to wrench market share away from the Russians and between the conflict in Syria, Moscow’s closer ties with Beijing, and Riyadh’s move to antagonize The Kremlin by encroaching on Russia’s eastern European market share, one shouldn’t expect Putin to back down any time soon. In short, if John Kerry and Riyadh did in fact plan to bankrupt the Russians by tanking crude prices, the effort was a miserable failure that resulted not only in a 20% fiscal deficit for the Saudis, but also in the destruction of American jobs in the oil patch.

We close with a bit of humor from Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molodtsov:

“I will tell you when Russian companies are for sure going to decrease production — when oil costs $0.” 

“I am sorry that I am still somewhere a punching ball.” – Sepp Blatter, 21 December 2015

Banning the President of FIFA Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, Vice-President and member of the Executive Committee of FIFA and President of UEFA from the football family is a bit like castration and merry mutilation after a self-congratulatory orgy.  That is to say, if you are associated with FIFA, can any genuine cleansing be undertaken except from the outside?

This is the sheer desperate nature of FIFA’s latest acts of cleansing and ostracising.  The apparatus has been vested with various powers, and attempts have been made to do some brushing in the face of enormous criticism – and, let’s face it, arrests – that have made doing something, anything perhaps, imperative.  The result, as it has proven before, is inconsistent.

Platini is a clear target here, having been feted as Blatter’s successor. Having been a footballer’s footballer, he became the obvious target of opprobrium, having gotten first class tickets on FIFA’s gravy train bonanza.

The FIFA ethics committee, in finding the two guilty for breaches surrounding the CHF 2m “disloyal payment”, also claimed that Platini and Blatter had demonstrated “abusive execution” in their positions. That payment, authorised by Blatter, supposedly took place in 2011, and went to Platini from FIFA funds.

It had no legal basis in the original written agreement signed between both officials on August 25, 1999, which was a rather nice way of saying that it was not quite a bribe.  In that sense, it fell within the provisions of Article 21, paragraph 1 of FIFA’s code of ethics.  But Platini insists that the payment was salary for consultancy work he carried out at FIFA between 1998 and 2002 under a gentleman’s understanding with Blatter.

In the wording of the Ethics Committee, chaired by that least reliable of ethicists, Hans-Joachim Eckert, it was claimed that, “Neither in his written statement nor in his personal hearing was Mr Blatter able to demonstrate another legal basis for this payment.  His assertion of an oral agreement was determined as not convincing and was rejected by the chamber.”[1]

Platini received an eight year ban regarding all football related activities and a fine of CHF 80,000.  Ditto Blatter, who remains unrepentant and, one might even say non-cognisant of his own behaviour. “Blatter,” observed Tracey Holmes, “cannot understand or accept how an organisation to which he has dedicated half his life and now runs can toss him aside.”[2]

And what a time he has had.  As Michael Powell would explain in The New York Times, “His professional life was magnificent: so many hours spent in grand hotels, eating grand meals and sipping grander wines, with an annual salary estimated as north of $6 million.”[3] Then came those “Visigoths” in the form of financial investigators from the US and Switzerland to burst the bubble.

Blatter’s issues with the ethics committee are manifold. For one, he created the body as a front of modest, and disingenuous reform.  Being his creature, he expected it to do his bidding, endorsing facets of conduct while occasionally ticking off the less severe elements within the organisation.  “I want to talk about betrayal,” he told gathered members of the media in Zurich on Monday.  “Today, first of all, I was very sad.  But not anymore. Now I am fighting.”

Both have denied the claims made against them, and will appeal the rulings, with Platini explicit about taking his matter to the FIFA Appeals Committee and the Court of Arbitration for Sport.  Even now, he still entertains the notion that he might nab the FIFA presidency in the special election scheduled to take place on February 26.  Given that the appeal is unlikely to be resolved before that date, his chances are slim.

UEFA has also shown caution in throwing in its lot against Platini. There is honour amongst thieves after all and a vast gulf between football governance and the players on the field.  “Naturally, UEFA is extremely disappointed with this decision, which nevertheless is subject to appeal.  Once again, UEFA supports Michel Platini’s right to a due process and the opportunity to clear his name.”[4]

The exercise by the ethics committee is a delightfully contorted way on FIFA’s part of saying that the duo went too far in executing the remit of their positions.  As the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord warned: Above all, not too much zeal. Such matters do not merely apply to the making of war.

Punishments being meted out by FIFA’s otherwise inactive and far from independent ethics committee have tended to be of a minor sort. But these actions suggest the heavy hand of the US Justice Department and associated agencies. The disease that is FIFA, however, remains. The body continues to decay, and fresh blood remains a distant reality.

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

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-22/holmes-the-blatter-battle-doesn’t-end-here/7047210

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/sports/soccer/once-a-sports-emperor-sepp-blatter-is-now-a-punching-ball.html

[4] http://www.wsj.com/articles/fifa-bans-sepp-blatter-and-michel-platini-from-soccer-for-eight-years-1450688209

Five years ago in Tunisia a nationwide rebellion erupted against the government of Zine Abideen Ben Ali. Youth, students, workers and small businesspeople rose up demanding an end to the system of dictatorship and subservience to France and the United States.

By mid-January of 2011, Ben Ali’s regime had fallen forcing him to flee to Saudi Arabia. An interim government took over promising to hold elections and draft a new constitution for the North African state.

A longtime opposition political figure Moncef Marzouki, the founder of the Congress of the Republic, was elected by the Constituent Assembly to be president in December 2011. Marzouki appointed Hamadi Jebali of the moderate Islamist Ennahda Movement, dominated by Rashid al-Ghannushi, which established a government by the end of the same month.

Nonetheless, these developments did not bring stability to Tunisia. Tensions between left, centrists and Islamist forces were evident from the beginning of 2012.

In 2013, two leading leftist politicians from the Popular Front Coalition, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmin, were assassinated. Violence and unrest erupted again with strikes across the country demanding the resignation of the government.

These assassinations were blamed on a Salafist group called Ansar al-Sharia. Contributing to the decline in confidence in the government was the failure to deal with the rise of such organizations.

In addition there were attacks on security personnel and state institutions. These events resulted in the government listing the group as a terrorist organization.

By the end of 2013, the post-Ben Ali political dispensation was collapsing. A year later in 2014, the reconstitution of political elements from the Ben Ali era appeared in the form of Nidaa Tounes, the party which won the elections catapulting 88-year-old Beji Caid Essebsi to the presidency.

Consequently, one could ask quite honestly, where is the Tunisian revolution in 2015? A deadly attack on a tourist beach at Sousse during the year revealed further that deep divisions exist over the future direction of the state and society.

In neighboring Egypt, which was the center of unrest beginning in late January 2011 leading to the removal of the-then President Hosni Mubarak, stability has still not been achieved. The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) Muslim Brotherhood-allied government elected in 2012, was overthrown a year later by the military headed by Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, who took off his military uniform and ran successfully for president in 2014.

Eliminating the political and social networks of the FJP-Muslim Brotherhood through mass assassinations, imprisonment and forced exile, paved the way for the political hegemony of the military but created the conditions for a growing Islamist insurgency in the Sinai. Egypt remains within the orbit of U.S. imperialist domination of the region.

During late December, it was announced that the World Bank had agreed to extend $8 billion of credit to the Egyptian government. The Egyptian state and national bourgeoisie, including the military apparatus, has been heavily dependent upon subsidization from the Pentagon which supplies $1.3 billion annually in order to maintain the status-quo.

Despite the close links between the U.S. defense establishment and the Egyptian military, the masses of workers, youth and farmers remain extremely poor and underdeveloped. The purpose of the World Bank loan is to further this dependency bringing into clear view the absence of any diversion from the neo-liberal model of economic growth.

According to the state-owned Al-Ahram website, “Egypt, which is currently experiencing a foreign liquidity crunch, requires foreign currency for imports of basic foodstuffs and raw materials for industries….. Egypt embarked on a politically sensitive fiscal reform program following the election of President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in June 2014. The first phase of the program saw fuel subsidy cuts, raising prices at the pump by up to 78 percent.” (Dec. 20)

The situation in neighboring Libya exposes the character of Washington’s foreign policy in North Africa in its most extreme manifestation. After creating a false premise for military intervention and the backing of counter-revolutionary elements which destroyed the continent’s most prosperous state turning it into the major source for instability, human trafficking and poverty throughout the region, at present the imperialists are planning to deploy a 6,000-person occupation force ostensibly headed by Italy, the former colonial power, and bolstered by British troops and U.S. Special Forces.

Efforts aimed at establishing coordinates for another aerial campaign in Libya are well underway. France, Britain and the U.S. have warplanes on standby to bomb the country under the guise of enforcing an imposed unity accord between two neo-colonial dominated regimes as well as targeting the so-called Islamic State which has set up a base in Sirte and is expanding its influence in other areas of Libya.

West Africa and the Fallacy of Economic Growth Under Neo-Colonialism

Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are not the only states in Africa contending with worsening economies and Islamist rebels, circumstances which have grown directly out of the destabilization created by U.S. and NATO military interventions on the continent and in the Middle East.

The Federal Republic of Nigeria was designated as having the largest economy in Africa by the western-based financial publications during 2014. Ostensibly surpassing the Republic of South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized state, the West African country has been dependent upon the production and marketing of oil and natural gas for the last five decades.

However, the ongoing war against the Boko Haram sect in the Northeast has illustrated the structural limitations of the military within a neo-colonial dominated capitalist state. The recently-elected administration of Muhammadu Buhari, a former military coup maker in 1984-85, has not resulted in the destruction of the rebels who it is said now have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

A regional coalition of military forces from Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria has cleared out some of the bases of the rebels. However, the rebel tactics have shifted making them just as deadly and disruptive. During 2014, an international campaign demanding the return of hundreds of high school girls who were abducted by Boko Haram at Chibok in Borno state, served to politically weaken the previous government of President Goodluck Jonathan.

Nonetheless, most of the Chibok students have not been returned to their families. The focus on the young women represented a profound symbol of the overall dislocation in the Northeast extending to the contiguous territories of Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

Under the Jonathan administration, officials accused the U.S. of refusing to provide arms and intelligence to the Nigerian defense forces crippling its capacity to fight Boko Haram. Buhari after being elected in 2015, made a state visit to Washington in efforts to mend relations with the Obama government.

Buhari said soon after taking office that the military would defeat Boko Haram by the end of 2015. This has further brought into question the efficacy of the armed forces and political grasp of reality held by the current administration.

Meanwhile, with the decline in petroleum prices internationally, the post-colonial economic crises inherent within the state have become more aggravated. Civil servants, publically-employed healthcare workers, educators and others have gone for months without salaries.

The present administration has stated openly that the Nigerian government is insolvent. Political divisions persist between the ruling All-Progressive Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Although the Buhari administration has launched a campaign against corruption, the source of the financial crisis inside the country has more to do with the overall character of the international division of labor and economic power. As long as Africa remains dependent upon the more advanced capitalist states to purchase their natural resources amid a precipitous decline in commodity prices, these economies will not be able to “diversify” under the predominant capitalist relations of production.

This observation and conclusion is applicable as well in Ghana, which was one of the first British colonies to win national independence in 1957 under Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Ghana has also become an oil producer, yet civil servants, physicians and educators have engaged in strikes and mass actions resulting from the non-payment of salaries and the falling value of the cedi, its national currency.

Both the cedi and the Nigerian naira are losing value at a rapid pace. Hardships endured by working people and youth are the source of continuing industrial and public sector unrest. Both Accra and Abuja are wedded to the neo-colonial model having gone through the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and its variants from the late 1960s through the present period.

The 50^th anniversary of the overthrow of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) government of Nkrumah will be commemorated on February 24, 2016. This sad and prophetic anniversary which marked the end of the Pan-Africanist and Socialist-oriented experiment under Nkrumah during 1951-1966, was engineered by Washington in order to undermine any genuine independent existence for the African continent after the transition from classical colonialism to neo-colonialism.

In order to revive the Nkrumaist Pan-Africanism of the 1960s, there must be a total break with neo-colonialism, which the CPP under its founder described as the last stage of imperialism. It is quite obvious that imperialism has nothing to offer African people other than continued immiseration and military interventions which foster instability and destabilization.

Niger, which contains the world fourth largest source of uranium, has remained an impoverished state. The West African state is an ally in Washington’s so-called “war on terrorism”.

Nevertheless, President Mahamadou Issoufou announced on December 18 that an attempted military coup had been foiled. Several high-ranking defense officials were arrested some of whom received training in Britain, France and the U.S.

Burkina Faso, another state in West Africa which is also a participant in the U.S. military operations on the continent, has elected a new government. A national uprising in late October 2014 forced the decades-long military turned civilian ruler Blaise Compaore out of office and into exile in neighboring Ivory Coast.

Compaore led a coup against Capt. Thomas Sankara, the Pan-Africanist and Socialist leader of Burkina Faso, formally known as Upper Volta, who ruled the agriculturally-based country from 1983-1987. Sankara was brutally murdered and buried in a mass grave along with other victims of the reactionary coup in October 1987.

After Sankara’s removal the political direction of Burkina Faso shifted sharply to the right. Even after the rebellion during 2014 and the installation of a new elected government, very little has changed. The country under Compaore became a major producer and exporter of gold, the fourth largest in Africa, although the masses have yet to benefit from these developments.

The current leader of Burkina Faso, President Roch Marc Kabore, was a former close collaborator with Compaore. In a profile published by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on December 1, it says “Mr. Kabore, who served as prime minister and speaker of parliament under veteran President Blaise Compaore, won the November 2015 presidential election, easily beating his main rival, former economy and finance minister Zephirin Diabre. A long-standing Compaore loyalist, he quit as chairman of the then-president’s Congress for Democracy and Progress in 2014 over the head of state’s plans to amend the constitution to extend his 27-year rule.”

This same article goes on to note that the new leader is “A French-educated banker, Mr. Kabore sees himself as a social democrat, and has pledged to reduce youth unemployment, improve education and healthcare, and make health provision for children under six free of charge.”

A coalition of Sankarist parties failed to win a substantial portion of the vote and until the progressive forces inside the country can organize effectively in the electoral arena, Burkina Faso will remain firmly within the political orbit of neo-colonialism.

Southern Africa in Transition: Harare, Pretoria and the Beijing Factor

In the sub-continent, which was the last region to achieve political independence, much hope grew out of the popular and mass struggles that overthrew white-minority rule in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. The liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa during the course of the armed phase of the revolution appeared to be sympathetic to socialist reconstruction of the post-colonial states.

Nonetheless, with the shift in foreign and domestic policy of the People’s Republic of China during the 1970s and 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist governments (the COMECON sector), the prospects for socialism receded. South Africa’s independence from the apartheid system in 1994 ushered in a new era of neo-liberalism under the governmental leadership of the African National Congress (ANC).

There was no large-scale nationalization of land as well as the gold, diamond, iron ore, coal and platinum mines in South Africa. In Zimbabwe, a radical land redistribution program initiated in 2000 drew the ire of the imperialist states. Sanctions were imposed by Britain, the U.S., the European Union and Australia.

An opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which sprang up in response to the economic crisis of the post-colonial state, one even led by a genuine national liberation movement turned political party, received large amounts of funding from the imperialists. A western media campaign of vilification against the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) sought to demonize its leader and state President Robert Mugabe.

Nonetheless, ZANU-PF has continued to weather the storms and remains in power 35 years after the winning of the first non-racial elections of 1980. Assistance from China and South Africa has been critical in maintaining political stability in Zimbabwe.

Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Zimbabwe in early December on a two-day state visit. Pledges of additional assistance in rebuilding the infrastructure of the country and providing much needed credit constituted the character of the discussions between Mugabe and Xi.

Xi then moved on to Johannesburg where the second full summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was held. The conference was preceded by additional agreements signed between the ANC government under President Jacob Zuma and his Chinese counterpart.

The deliberations during Xi’s visit acknowledged the challenges facing the so-called “emerging economies.” China has recently lowered the value of its currency amid the slowing of growth.

South Africa is experiencing perhaps the worst period economically since the ANC took power twenty one years ago under former President Nelson Mandela. The national currency, rand, has depreciated to over 15-1 against the U.S. dollar.

Leading mining firms have shed thousands of workers while joblessness remains high. Students shut down major universities and colleges across the country in October demanding a moratorium on fee increases, which the ANC government was compelled to honor.

A political controversy has been generated over the dismissal of two finance ministers by the Zuma administration during December. A day of action on December 16, the anniversary of the beginning of the armed struggle by the ANC in 1961, saw demonstrations in several cities calling for the resignation of the president.

However, the main opposition party within the South African parliament and local government structures is the Democratic Alliance (DA) which advocates policies far to the right of the ANC. Any yielding to deeper forms of neo-liberalism will not solve the economic and social problems of the South African people and contiguous states throughout the region.

At the same time the ANC government is cognizant of the reaction by international finance capital to the land reform program in Zimbabwe and any such move would evoke a similar response towards South Africa if a shift to left in regard to economic policy was adopted. Facing local governmental elections in 2016, the ANC has very little choice but to implement the moratorium on fee hikes in tertiary institutions and the demands as well for an increase in social spending.

Challenges for 2016: A People-centered Trajectory or Further Steps Backward?

Political and economic developments in all these geo-political regions are at a crossroad. Will North, West and Southern Africa be able to overcome the decline in currency values, capital flight, escalating Pentagon and NATO military interventions along with efforts aimed at destabilization?

The African Union (AU) under the rotating chairpersonship of Zimbabwe President Mugabe has taken a Pan-Africanist view on many burning questions facing the continent. However, the continuing dominance of neo-colonial rule is hampering the forward social movement of the people and their respective governments.

African unity is not a rhetorical question but one of necessity. Divisions within the working class organizations, popular alliances and national liberation movements which have been transformed into political parties will only serve the interests of imperialism.

Overall the world capitalist system is fragile where the leaders of the industrialized states have imposed austerity and political repression on their populations while deflecting attention away from the declining standards of living in Western Europe and North America to the purported urgency of the contrived “war on terrorism.”  This militarized response to the global crisis of capitalist over-production has had a devastating impact on Africa through the destruction of Libya, the explosion in instability across the Northern and Western regions of the continent, and the deteriorating socio-economic conditions of the workers, youth and farmers.

Africa must reject this hegemonic militarization of U.S. and European foreign policy. Continental integration should become the principal policy imperative for the present period.

The continuation of dependency on the neo-colonial system of governance can only lead to worsening crises. AU member-states and their people must move forward in preparation for and anticipation of the actual emerging world situation characterized by capitalist decline and expanding imperialist war.

Abayomi Azikiwe is editor of the Pan-African News Wire

The Spanish elections – 20 December – were a deceit and a farce. Nobody seems to notice. At least not those concerned, the ignorant electorate, those who will suffer again possibly under a new neoliberal Rajoy leadership.

People forget and are vulnerable to propaganda and lies and manipulations through the bought media in Europe as much as in the US. And this in Spain of all places, where unemployment is still hovering around the 20% – 25% mark, with youth unemployment around 50%, and where an average grad student coming out of university earns on average 1,000 euros or less per month, if he can find a job; hardly a liveable wage.

Others have to survive on monthly incomes in the 500 to 800 euro range. Spain, a country like Greece, where neoliberal troika policies cut minimum wages, pensions, increased retirement age, privatized the health system – and are at the verge of privatizing education. Spain, a country where the ruling Partido Popular (PP) was and still is involved in horrendous corruption scandals all the way to the top, as was widely divulged earlier this year even by the mainstream media. Does it not seem absurd that in this miserably down-trodden Spain, the largest single block of people are no more awake than voting again for their hangman?

Maybe they are awake, but stunned of the results and are too tired from working for peanuts than ‘wasting’ their scarce spare-time to investigate election results, analysing how elections could have turned out the way they did: The arch-conservative neoliberal PP winning a majority of parliamentary seats – 123 (28.7% of votes), though a far cry from the absolute majority (176) and a drop of 64 seats from 2011; the PSOE (Socialist Party) coming in with 22% and 90 seats (down 20), its worst result ever; the up-and-coming PODEMOS – gaining 69 seats (20.7%); and the new center-right Ciudadanos Party winning 40 seats (13.9%), the latter two from basically zero in 2011.

Forming a new Government with these fractured election results will not be easy. While the new Congress is normally responsible for choosing the new Prime Minister, in the present divided Spain it is likely that King Felipe will have to intervene, negotiating with the leading parties to propose a candidate that suits them all. This process starts officially on 13 January 2016, when the new deputies are sworn in and the speaker is selected. If the Monarch’s suggested candidate doesn’t get an absolute majority in the first round, there will be a second round of voting 48 hours later, where the proposed candidate must only receive a majority of the cast votes. Failing this, new elections will have to be called within two months. This would be a first in Spain’s history. The socialists have already said they would not support the incumbent, Mariano Rajoy. But will they stick to their promise?

The 2015 Spanish elections beg two questions: First, how come that in the traditional two-party system, suddenly four parties emerge, three of which of almost equal strength, PP, PSOE and Podemos, and the fourth, Ciudadanos rapidly growing. Together they accumulate 322 of the 350 seats, or 85.3%. The two new ones, Podemos and Ciudadanos (also called C’s) grew from basically nothing in March 2014, some 18 month ago, to take a total of 109 parliamentary seats, almost one third of all seats. That is unheard of anywhere in the western world. This coincides with the time when in Greece Syriza started making headways.

Second, how come that in a country where 80% to 90% of the population suffered misery and social hardship from the neoliberal PP-imposed austerity programs – still vote with a considerable majority for the party that punished them? Is this the Stockholm syndrome, or what? – Is there perhaps something else behind it?

Spain was ruled by fascist General Francisco Franco for 39 years, from 1936 to his death in 1975. Out of the Civil War (1936-1939) grew an authoritarian, nationalistic fascist party, the Falangistas. They became Franco’s official ruling party in 1939. The Falangistas were instrumental in commandeering death squads and ‘disappearances’.

After WWII Spain was internationally considered a pariah state due to her fascist and oppressive government and was kept out of the UN, the Marshall Plan and NATO. Nevertheless, in 1953 Washington tempted by the peninsula’s strategic situation entered into an alliance with Franco by signing the Pact of Madrid. It was a calculated step for the US to establish military bases which guaranteed America’s support for the dictator – who was also a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union. Spain was admitted to the UN in 1955 and eventually seven years after Franco’s deaths, in 1982, Spain became the 15^th NATO member.

During Franco’s reign, the Falangistas solidified as a dictatorial fascist party. After Franco’s death, the party did not disintegrate; to the contrary, to this day it remains very influential with close ties to the Catholic Church. With this semi-clandestine right-wing political scenario alive and well, wouldn’t it have been relatively simple for Washington to pull the strings and creating a multi-party divided Spain, easier to manipulate and to control? Another form of divide and conquer. US global interests wanted to avoid the risk of another Greece, where the left would come to power and would need to be smashed as did happen with Syriza under the command of Anglo-Zionist Washington – implemented by the troika (European Central Bank, European Commission and IMF).

Had it not been for most likely criminal threats to the lead-politicians of Syriza, Greece was at the point – and still is – of disintegrating and exiting the euro – and possibly also leaving the EU – the European non-Union. Another ‘Greece’, as Spain could have become, might have prompted not just a ‘Spaxit’, but most probably the collapse of the EU altogether. That would have been an unforgiveable and probably unrepairable disaster for the Unite States which needs Europe as its puppet union of states directed by Washington lackeys in Brussels, for trade and manipulating markets, as a monetary stability base and for highly qualified cheap labor; and – maybe most importantly – as a vital buffer vis-à-vis Russia and the emerging eastern alliance with China – the BRICS and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) states.

For those still in doubt – the Unite States of America were the initiators and creators of the European Union, carefully planned, step by step, from the Brussels Treaty after WWII in 1948, to the Paris Treaty 1951/52, to the Modified Brussels Treaty 1954/55, to the Treaty of Rome 1957/58, and eventually to the Merger of Treaties in 1965/67 forming the three pillars of the European Community (European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), European Economic Community – EEC); leading to the Maastricht Treaty of 1991/92 – the foundation of the European Union, enhanced and modified by the Amsterdam Treaty, 1997/99; followed by the Nice Treaty, 2001/2003; and finally the 2007/2009 Lisbon Treaty, currently in force.

You may notice the European Union has no Constitution; and none of the various Treaties foresees a political European Union, one that would have solidarity of federal nations as a fundamental basis. A 2004 attempt to establish an EU Constitution was immediately boycotted by the UK as a proxy for Washington, so as to have subsequent popular votes in France and the Netherlands fail.

A Union of nations without a common political agenda and goal cannot have a sustainable common currency. That’s where the thought process may have failed. The Euro may sooner or later be doomed to collapse and so may be the European Union; the sooner the better. The prompting of the process of dissolving this fake union, of breaking loose of the nefarious fangs of Washington and NATO, will be a sign of the European populations’ awakening and wisdom.

Reflecting on the Spanish elections of 20 December 2015, putting them into context with never ending austerity imposed by the rich on the poor, resulting in a never ending economic ‘crisis’ – leading to ever richer banks and an ever richer Anglo-European elite — may hopefully be a trigger for action.

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

One of the most meaningful Christmas stories that I have ever read came from my friend from Vancouver, Canada, Reverend Kevin Annett. His story is titled “Nativity” and is printed further below (scroll down).

The “little matter of genocide”, about which the United States of America shares considerable guilt, is the century-long history of abuse, rape and murder of tens of thousands of Canada’s aboriginal children in church-run Indian residential schools (known as mission schools in the US), a subject on which Kevin is an acknowledged world expert.

Annett has authored two books on the subject and has also co-produced an award-winning documentary film entitled “Unrepentant”. (It is viewable for free at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88k2imkGIFA.).

The film (and a short book by the same name) documents the history of the Canadian genocide of aboriginal children and also the shameful character assassination that was perpetrated against Annett, whose marriage, family and ministry were trashed when he refused to keep quiet about his church’s criminal activities.

Early in his ministry at a church in Port Alberni, British Columbia, Rev Annett uncovered details of a secret land deal involving stolen native land that was negotiated between his United Church of Canada [UCC – no relation to the United Church of Christ here in the US]) church, the provincial government, and church-funder MacMillan-Bloedel Ltd. When he appropriately confronted the church with the evidence, he was summarily fired (without cause) and shortly thereafter expelled from the UCC without due process.

Below is a summary paragraph from Annett’s father (author William Annett), which summarizes some of the background information that makes the “Nativity” story more understandable.

“Imagine what happens when a church minister in a small Vancouver Island community decides to blow the whistle on criminal activity extending over a century among all the churches of Canada, the government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Attorney General of British Columbia, MacMillan Bloedel, the largest forestry company in that Province, and it’s blushing parent, the Weyerhaeuser Company of Seattle, all thinking that it would be nice if Reverend Kevin Annett were quietly blown away. Which they did, quite effectively, trashing his life, his family and his livelihood.

“Of course there was also the mainstream Canadian media and the Canadian public, who have been, as usual, fast asleep on the subject of anything indigenous or genocidal for the past 20 years since the whistle was first blown.

“But the story also has to deal with a little defrocked shepherd boy/pastor who has the most lethal, long range, accurate weapon on earth, The Truth, which is especially potent when it hits us in the middle of the forehead.”

Here is the moving story of Rev Annett’s last Christmas (1995) at Saint Andrew’s United Church at Port Alberni, British Columbia. With the recent Canadian election deposing the Conservative Party government of Stephen Harper (who had gone to great lengths to cover-up and whitewash the painful history of the genocide), there is some small hope that the painful documentable truths will finally come out and be acknowledged by the involved institutions. If that happens there may be realized the potential of true reconciliation, which has so far been denied to the many suffering generations of victims, their families and their progeny.

Dr. Gary G. Kohl, December 22, 2015

Nativity

By Reverend Kevin D. Annett

The last Christmas we were all together hangs over memory like the fog did that year in the Alberni valley. It was a time of gathering, two years and more of labor summoning so many together where once there were but a few. And it was a time of ending.

The church stewards had warned me to expect an overflow crowd at the Christmas Eve service, and like overgrown elves they had busied themselves around the building, stringing wires and sound systems in the cold auditorium kept that way to save money. The snows had come early, and our food bank was already depleted.

With my eldest daughter who was but five, I had walked to the church one morning in the week before yule, pondering the cold and the sermon, when I met the one who would pierce the fog that year for us. She stood patiently at the locked door, her brown eyes relaxing as we approached. Her bare hand gestured at me.

“You’re that minister, ain’t you?” she mumbled to me, as daughter Clare fell back and grabbed my hand.

Before I could answer, the stranger smiled and nodded, and uttered with noticeable pleasure at her double entendre,

“They say you give it out seven days a week!”

I smiled too, gripping Clare’s hand reassuringly and replying, “If you mean food, we’re a bit short, but you’re welcome to whatever’s left.”

She nodded again, and waited while I unlocked the door and picked up Clare, who was clinging to me by then.

The basement was even more frigid than the outside, but the woman doffed her torn overcoat and sighed loudly as we approached the food bank locker.

“For all the good it’ll do …” she said, as I unlocked the pantry and surveyed the few cans and bags lying there.

I turned and really looked at her for the first time. She was younger than she had sounded, but a dark, cancerous growth marred her upper lip, and a deep scar ran down her face and neck. Her eyes were kindness, and in that way, very aboriginal.

“I’m sorry there’s not more …” I began, since back then I still saw things in terms of giving. But she shook her head, and instead of saying anything, she looked at Clare, and the two of them exchanged a smile for the first time.

I stared, confused, at the cupboard so bare, and heard her finally utter,

“Them people in church, you know what they need?”

I set Clare down and shook my head.

“They need Him. They sing about Him, and pretend they know Him, but hell, they wouldn’t spot Him even if He came and bit ‘em on their ass.”

I smiled at that one, and even dared a mild chuckle.

“You doin’ a Christmas play for the kids?” she continued.

“Yeah”.

“I bet it’s the usual bullshit with angels and shepherds, right?”

I nodded.

“That don’t mean nuthin’ to those people. Why don’t you do a story about … well, like, if He came to Port Alberni to be born, right now?”

I finally laughed, feeling very happy. She smiled too, walked over to the cupboard and picked up a small bag of rice. Donning her coat, she nodded her thanks, and said,

“My bet is Him and Mary and Joseph, they’d end up in the Petrocan garage, down River road. The owner there lets us sleep in the back sometimes.”

And then she was gone.

I didn’t try explaining the stranger to anyone, ever, or what her words had done to me. All I did was lock the food cupboard and lead Clare up to my office, where I cranked up the heat and set her to drawing. And then I sat at my desk and I wrote for the rest of the day.

The kids in church were no problem at all. They got it, immediately. The Indians who dared to mingle in the pews that night with all the ponderous white people also took to the amateur performance like they had composed it themselves, and laughed with familiarity as the holy family was turned away first by the local cops, and then hotel owners, and finally by church after church after church.

It was mostly the official Christians who were shocked into open-mouthed incredulity at the coming to life of something they thought they knew all about. As the children spoke their lines, I swear I saw parishioners jump and writhe like there were tacks scattered on the pews.

“Joe, I’m getting ready to have this kid. You’d better find us a place real friggin’ quick.”

“I’m trying, Mary, but Jehovah! Nobody will answer their door! I guess it’s ‘cause we’re low lifes.”

“Look! There’s a church up ahead. I bet they’ll help us!”

If you believe the Bible, whoever He was loved to poke fun at his listeners and shock them out of their fog, and our play would have made him proud. As the eight-year old girl who played Mary pleaded fruitlessly for help from a kid adorned in oversized clerical garb, and was covered in scorn by the young “priest”, I heard a sad moan rise from the congregation.

But things took a turn when Mary and Joseph came upon an Indian, played by one of the aboriginal kids.

“Sir, will you help us? My wife’s going to have a baby …”

“Sure!” replied the native kid with gusto. “I got a spot in a shed behind the gas station down the road. The owner lets us all sleep in there!”

And in a contrived scene of boxes and cans scattered where our communion table normally stood, Mary had her baby, as erstwhile homeless men with fake beards and a stray Rez dog looked on, and one of the witnesses urged Mary to keep her newborn quiet lest the Mounties hear his cries and bust everyone for vagrancy.

Voices were subdued that night in the church hall over coffee, cookies and Christmas punch, and the normally dull gazes and banalities about the time of year were oddly absent. The Indians kept nodding and smiling at me, saying little, and not having to; and the kids were happy too, still in costume and playing with the local stray who had posed as the Rez dog in the performance that would always be talked about. It was the white congregants who seemed most pregnant that night, but they couldn’t speak of it.

It was one of my last services with them, and somehow they all knew it, since we had all entered the story by then. For a churchly Herod had already heard a rumor, and dispatched assassins to stop a birth, and me, even though it was already too late.

My daughter Clare was not running and rolling with the other kids, but in her manner joined me quietly with her younger sister Elinor in tow. Our trio stood there, amidst the thoughtful looks and unspoken love, and person after person came to us and grasped our hands, or embraced us with glistening eyes. An aging Dutch woman named Omma van Beek struggled towards me in her walker and pressed her trembling lips on my cheek, and said something to me in her native tongue as the tears fell unashamedly from both of us.

Later, when we were scattered and lost, I would remember that moment like no other, as if something in Omma’s tears washed away all the filth and loss that were to follow. And perhaps that looming nightfall touched my heart just then, for I gave a shudder as I looked at my children, almost glimpsing the coming divorce, and I held my daughters close as if that would keep them safe and near to me forever.

The snow was falling again as we left the darkened building, kissing us gently like it had done years before when as a baby, Clare had struggled with me on a toboggan through the deep drifts of my first charge in Pierson, Manitoba, on another Christmas Eve. The quiet flakes blessed us with memory, and settled in love on the whole of creation, even on the unmarked graves of children up at the old Indian residential school.

The old Byzantine icon depicts Jesus as a baby, hugging his worried mother while she stares ahead into his bloody future: her eyes turned in grief to the viewer, yet his loving eyes seeking her, past the moment, past even his own death.

The image may still hang in the basement of my church, where I left it.

Kevin Annett was re-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. Messages for him can be left at 386-323-5774 (USA). His personal website is www.KevinAnnett.com.

Kevin’s award winning documentary film Unrepentant can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88k2imkGIFA .

See also Dr Jennifer Wade’s powerful testimony on the Kangeroo Court proceedings and the UCC cover-up, plus many documents establishing the facts of the case (Dr Wade is a co-founder of Amnesty International) can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5HKRJTfp7U

See the evidence of the Canadian Genocide at www.hiddennolonger.com and at the website of The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State at www.itccs.org.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his family practice career. He now writes a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. Many of Dr Kohls’ columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn.

GR Editor’s Note

This incisive article by Catholic World Report confirms that the government of Bashar al Assad by combating the ISIS/Al Nusrah terrorists is committed to protecting Syria’s Christian community. It also reveals the unspoken truth: the Obama administration by bombing Syria is supporting the Islamic insurgency.

Even the mainstream media (Daily Telegraph, quoted by Catholic Reporter below) has acknowledged that:

“We should not be blind to the fact that there is a project out there to destroy [Syria’s]  rich, pluralist, and unbelievably intricate culture and replace it with a monochrome version of Wahhabi Islam”.

What the Telegraph article fails to mention is that the “version of Wahhabism” has nothing to with Islam, it’s made in America, its a diabolical tool of US foreign policy. Wahhabi Islam is being used by Washington in liaison with America’s indefectible allies including Turkey and Saudi Arabia to wage an undeclared war on Syria.

US foreign  policy has nurtured Al Qaeda, a creation of the CIA for almost half a century, with the support of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and Saudi Arabia’s  infamous  General Intelligence Presidency (GIP).

And now the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose military and GIP intelligence services are routinely supporting the training, recruitment and financing of the Islamic State (ISIS) —  has configured a coalition of 34 countries “to go after the Islamic state”.

Theater of the absurd: those who support terrorism have initiated –with the blessing of the self proclaimed “international community”– a campaign against the terrorist organizations which they themselves have created.

Michel Chossudovsky, December 21, 2015

*     *     *

Syria, once home to a unique, multireligious society, is being destroyed. The West is turning a blind eye to the real cause of the tragedy.

Alessandra Nucci is an Italian author and journalist.

GR Editor’s Note

While this report provides useful background information on Russia’s,  it is largely based on official statements of Russia’s  Ministry of Defense.

*     *     *

Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoygu reported on the situation within his ministry to the Russian Parliament. While he did not specify when Russia’s operation in Syria would end. he also ruled out a land operation saying that the conflict is low-level thanks to Russia’s ability to deter escalation.

However, the prospect of a significant Russian ground deployment is one of the major factors deterring Turkey and other ISIS sponsors from intervening in the Syrian war more forcefully.

And just as the Center-2015 exercise in the Central MD [Ministry of Defense] turned out to be a grand rehearsal for the deployment to Syria, so does the planned Caucasus-2016 joint exercise will demonstrate Russia’s capabilities to escalate if needed. Exercise participants will include Ground Forces units from Southern MD, Black Sea Fleet, Caspian Flotilla, and tactical aviation, with the goal of perfecting Russia’s joint warfare doctrine.

The importance of the southern direction is also underscored by the recent MR brigade exercise in Chechnya and by the delivery of Ratnik individual soldier systems to Russian units stationed in Armenia.

However, Syria is not the only hot-spot close to Russia’s borders. Daesh activities in Afghanistan is prompting a response in the form of deploying a motorized rifle regiment to Dushanbe, which suggests the threat of Central Asia destabilization might be more imminent than it appears.

The low hydrocarbon prices do not appear to have impacted Russia’s military modernization plans. While briefing foreign defense attaches, Russian General Staff Chief, General Valeriy Gerasimov said that the current modernization program will be largely complete by 2021, at which point the Russian Armed Forces’ equipment will be 70-100% modern.

As of late 2015, that figure is only 47%. In order to achieve that, the Russian military plans to procure every year 70-100 combat aircraft, 600 armored vehicles, 120 helicopters, up to 30 ships, which means the modernization pace of the past several years will be maintained.

The Russian Federation has been also making progress in quality of its soldiers. The number of contract soldiers has more than doubled to 352 thousand in only three years. That number is to rise to nearly 500 thousand by 2020. The Ground Forces alone formed 8 new brigades, received over 1,000 armored vehicles, and two complete Iskander-M brigades in 2015.

To keep pace with the new weapons, the Russian military is currently placing into operation advanced simulation centers like the combined arms center in Mulino (Nizhniy Novgorod Region), where an entire battalion task force can undergo simultaneous training on advanced 3D simulators which greatly reduces the wear-and-tear on heavy equipment and makes it possible for soldiers to attain a high level of proficiency prior to engaging in field exercises.

Effective deterrence noted by Shoygu also relies on constant demonstration of capabilities, which the Russian military is continuing to provide.

A Southern MD missile brigade is scheduled to stage a complex exercise including a 1,000km deployment using various means of transport, followed by simulated missile launches from the Kapustin Yar training area in Astrakhan Region. This exercise is no doubt intended to demonstrate the ability to deploy an Iskander brigade to Syria at a moment’s notice should the Turkish Army attempt an invasion of Syria.

And, as if to underscore that the Iskander does not represent the ceiling of Russia’s escalation capability, Verkhoturye SSBN launched a Sineva SLBM from the Barents Sea, and another Yars-equipped mobile ICBM regiment became operational in Kozelsk.

The following text is the first in a series of articles which will present an analysis and evaluation of NATO enlargement in the Balkans, the interests that are driving this policy and the implications this has for Russia.

The escalation of tensions between the NATO military alliance and Russian Federation has become the most critical issue within the domain of contemporary international relations. The potential for devastation on a global scale as a consequence of an eventual direct military confrontation has increased exponentially.

The prospect of such a scenario occurring is no longer a remote possibility and as such demands an objective evaluation as to the origins of discord and sources of contention. The evolution of an antagonistic atmosphere between NATO and Russia emerged in tandem with events that immediately followed upon the culmination of the Cold War in 1991. The NATO military alliance interpreted the disintegration of the Soviet Union as its ‘victory,’ thus proceeding with a formal policy of enlargement into the domain of former Warsaw Pact and Soviet republics.

In effect, NATO utilised the new circumstances advantageously, in abandoning its ostensibly defensive character as prescribed by its own charter. In so doing, the military alliance assumed an openly offensive position in preparation for aggressive Eastward expansion, which would be consolidated by a series of military interventions and an extension of its basing system. The security conditions in the world over a decade later had deteriorated to such an extent, that President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin was inspired to assert in his 2005 address to the Federal Assembly, that: “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century” [1].  The instability that has engulfed much of the world since the end of the Cold War is a direct consequence of military operations initiated by NATO or by leading NATO member states in a variety of coalition arrangements, namely the US, UK, France and Germany. The principal objectives that have never been formally acknowledged by NATO, but are apparent from the resulting reality of an openly offensive strategy, are:

1. The prevention of the emergence of a rival to NATO in political as well as military terms
2. The incorporation the entire Eurasian landmass into a NATO allied military structure
3. The establishment of a NATO-led protectorate administrative authority in strategic locations

Immediately upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO embarked upon its first such post-Cold War ‘out of area’ conquest, or extra territorial operation, within the Balkan Peninsula. The former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was located upon NATO’s Western-most frontier at that time and subsequently became a priority target for destabilisation. NATO’s operations within the former Yugoslavia instigated a Third Balkan War, which would set a precedent, as well as a standard, for its later actions.

The history of the reality of Yugoslavia’s dissolution as opposed to the mainstream media presentation, has been documented in Diana Johnstone’s book Fools Crusade. [2] The Third Balkan War consisted of a series of secessionist aggravated conflicts, based upon sectarian agitation, in which territories of the former Yugoslavia were amputated and reconfigured under NATO supervision.  Military interventions led to troop deployments and permanent base installations in Bosnia and in Kosovo, where the largest US/NATO military base in Europe has been established, Camp Bondsteel. [3] NATO’s advance has proceeded in accordance with the 2010 Strategic Concept document formulation, a key objective as stated, is to: “facilitate the Euro-Atlantic integration of the Western Balkans.” [4] Serbia however, with the exception of Kosovo-Metohija, alongside Montenegro, has resisted incorporation into the NATO structure, albeit at great cost and significant loss of life.

Montenegro, nonetheless, received a formal invitation to join NATO on 02 December 2015, invoking vocal objections and appeals to desist on the part of the Russian Foreign Ministry and Federal Assembly. [5] NATO enlargement in the region is therefore nearing completion, leaving Serbia increasingly isolated and under intensifying pressure to yield in the face of encirclement and encroachment. The implications of Montenegro’s prospective accession to NATO was cogently evaluated by retired Yugoslav (Third) Army General, Goran Jevtovic, at a public meeting of the Strategic Culture Foundation, held in Cacak in Serbia on 05 December 2015.  Jevtovic explained that in isolation, Montenegro is of negligible significance for NATO from a political, economic, financial, and even territorial perspective, given its size (13,812km 2) and current population (6220,029 according to 2011 census). Geostrategic significance however, is evaluated in accordance with criteria concerning geographical physical space and location, coordinates and communication networks, transportation routes and force projection staging positions. In this context, Jevtovic contended, Montenegro is of high priority and high value significance to the NATO military alliance.

This reasoning conforms to a military doctrine which apprehends the world in terms of a permanent battlefield or theatre of war and military operations, and in this perpetual state of war the world is segregated into respective operational command areas. Montenegro is located within the NATO Joint Force Command area (previously designated as Southern Command prior to reorganisation in 2004), which is centred at the Military Command base in Naples, Italy.

According to Jevtovic, on the basis of classified and partially secret documentation he had access to during his military career, NATO is in a potentially defensive position in relation to Russia. NATO Joint Force Command (JFC) could effectively be severed in the hypothetical event of a landing of approximately one airborne division of Russian combat forces in Montenegro. From the perspective of NATO military analysis therefore, Montenegro would require the combined armed forces of two member states for an adequate defence of this territory, in the event that it is incorporated formally into the JFC area. Jevtovic thus contended that the geostrategic significance of the Western Balkans region is quite unique from the perspective of global military powers generally, but particularly for the military alliance. The Balkan Peninsula in its entirety falls within two highly strategic military command areas, according to NATO geostrategy, those being both Southern Europe and the Middle East. Hence the urgency with which NATO currently seeks to fulfil the objectives outlined within its 2010 Strategic Concept document. [6]

Notes:

1. Annual Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, April 25, 2005, The Kremlin, Moscow (http://www.archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2005/04/25/2031_type70029type82912_87086.shtml)
2. Diana Johnstone, Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, 2002, Pluto Press
3. http://www.army-technology.com/projects/campbondsteel/
4. NATO, Strategic Concept for the Defence and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Adopted by Heads of State and Government at the NATO Summit in Lisbon 19-20 November 2010, NATO Public Diplomacy Division 1110 Brussels – Belgium  (http://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_publications/20120214_strategic-concept-2010-eng.pdf)
5. Launch of process of Montenegro accession to NATO regrettable — parliamentarian, 02 December 2015 (http://www.tass.ru/en/politics/841026), Russia’s NATO envoy: Balkans should stay away from NATO’s geopolitical rivalry, 07 December 2015 (http://www.tass.ru/en/politics/842040)
6. Fond Strateske Kulture, ФСК Трибина – Чачак – 05.12.2015, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x38i3qyu4vM)

Viktor Milinkovic is a criminal justice professional and specialist with over a decade of experience within the field of law enforcement, public protection, risk assessment and security analysis and strategy.

Ukraine was not exactly clamoring to get into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the antiquated military alliance created in the wake of World War II to prevent a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

In order to even raise the prospect of Ukraine’s inclusion, first NATO itself would have to overthrow the elected government via an armed coup. Then it would have to ensure its new client regime remained in power. To do that, it organized, trained, funded, armed and militarily backed a patchwork of military units, including “volunteer battalions” openly founded upon Nazi ideology.

The incredible shrinking state… 

In the process of building this obedient client regime, Ukraine would entirely lose the Crimean peninsula when its population voted to join the Russian Federation. While Kiev and its NATO patrons claim Crimea was “invaded” and is now being “occupied” by Russia, the people of Crimea are clearly counting themselves lucky to have escaped the fate of other regions with large Russian demographics.

Several of Ukraine’s eastern-most oblasts were not so lucky. Upon coming to power, the regime, tainted with Neo-Nazi ideology imported by coalition members such as Svoboda, began instituting anti-Russian policies which included rolling back many of the privileges and compromises long made by previous governments to accommodate Ukraine’s large Russian minority. Neo-Nazi “volunteer battalions” were sweeping the country, imposing Kiev’s authority and attempting to preempt any counter protests that might threaten its grip on power.

Their heavy handed tactics coupled with the people’s deep-seated hatred for their Neo-Nazi political and ideological stripes quickly provoked violence. Several oblasts rose up in armed rebellion against the new regime and its Neo-Nazi enforcers. As a result, Ukraine now has effectively lost Donetsk and Luhansk as well.

And while Ukraine shrinks territoriality, what remains becomes increasingly divided within.

Ukraine’s government/circus… 

The halls of Ukraine’s government have of late become notorious for outrageous scenes of violence and disorder altogether locked in absolute dysfunction, incompetence and inaction. While many of the scenes making headlines in recent months may appear comical to outsiders, the world should note that the lives of millions are subjected to the decisions (or indecision) of these politicians.

For many nations, both East and West, the idea that one politician would attempt to pick up and physically remove the prime minster from his podium is almost unthinkable. Yet just such a scene played out just before a large, violent brawl unfolded shortly after. Onlookers must remember that the current regime in Kiev has all but expunged any semblance of real opposition, so those physically assaulting each other in Ukraine’s parliament are actually, supposedly, on the same side.

Another scene unbecoming of the halls of political power, played out as the ex-Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, vocally berated Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, provoking him to throw a filled glass of water at Saakasvili. It should be noted that Saakasvili has inexplicably become the governor of Odessa, despite obvious questions regarding his nationality, political and criminal past, and qualifications to even hold such a position.

Saakasvili isn’t the only foreigner now running the Ukrainian government (this openly). There is also David Sakvarelidze, also from Georgia, now Ukraine’s deputy prosecutor general.

It seems in NATO’s new Ukraine, all of Eastern Europe is one big happy family/front with which to fight Russia, and the norms that generally govern national sovereignty and those allowed to lead one’s nation have been shown the door, together with dignity and statesmanship.

Suffering the insufferable…

When NATO’s new Ukraine is not losing territory to those disinterested in living within its borders, but equally disinterested in leaving their homes, and when the Ukrainian government is not busy fighting itself in pauses between fighting its own people, NATO sits them down to literally lecture them on how to run their country.

US Vice President Joseph Biden recently traveled to Ukraine to lecture the parliament. In his talk, he went on at length like a father scolding his son, over the harm corruption does to a nation.

And speaking of Vice President Biden’s son, and also corruption for that matter, it should be mentioned that at no time during Vice President Biden’s talk, was it explained how the appointment of his own son, Hunter Biden, as a director in Ukraine’s Burisma gas company, was not a perfect example of abuse of power, nepotism and of course, corruption.

The BBC’s article “Vice President Joe Biden’s son joins Ukraine gas company” explains further by stating:

The younger Mr Biden isn’t the only American with political ties to have recently joined Burisma’s board. Devon Archer, a former senior advisor to current Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and a college roommate of Mr Kerry’s stepson HJ Heinz, signed on in April. 

Mr Biden and Mr Archer are also managing partners at Rosemont Seneca Partners, a Washington, DC-based investment company.

Perhaps Vice President Biden’s talk was actually about irony? Or hypocrisy?

For a Ukraine that claims it overthrew an elected government to escape Russian “domination,” one now must question that decision seriously as clearly Ukraine is now under NATO domination.

Ukraine, a warning to others… 

There are other nations the United States and NATO are courting. But considering the fate of Ukraine, it will likely take coups, terrorism, and coercing, unparalleled even to what Ukraine has suffered, in order to strong-arm them into the alliance.

The loss of territory to those disinterested in NATO membership and all that it entails, the loss of national sovereignty or dignity as NATO imports foreigners to run their country for them, the prospect of ethnic persecution at the hands of NATO-backed extremists, the loss of any sense of destiny or progress with inept, infighting proxies intentionally kept needy and dependent on Washington and Brussels, are all not exactly ideal “enticements” on their own.

Ukraine had been doing far better playing both sides of the NATO-Russian coin, a strategy many nations throughout history have used to avoid being dominated by any number of competing foreign interests. With the NATO-backed coup in 2013-2014, this balancing act has been upset, and Ukraine has come tumbling down from great heights. It will take years, if not longer for the nation to recover from the damage its courtship with NATO has wrought.

This tumble is something the rest of Eastern Europe, and indeed, all other nations globally must consider before trading in careful balancing acts for the close embrace of geopolitical hegemony.

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

In a statement by China’s Defence Ministry, Beijing called Washington’s move a serious military provocation. It says such actions render more complex and even militarizes conditions in the South China Sea. Last week a B-52 bomber flew within two nautical miles of a Chinese-built artificial island. The US said the bomber mistakenly ran off course, and that the Pentagon is investigating the incident. The dispute between the US and China over the islands has heated up in recent months. Washington believes the construction of the sandy islands is part of Beijing’s efforts to militarize international waters.

PressTV interviewed Geopolitical analyst and Global Research author Peter Koenig regarding this conflict:

Moldova, which is caught between Romania (a country whose policies are closely controlled by the US) and Ukraine (which is sinking into chaos following the US-inspired Maidan), has existed for seven years already without a legitimate government. The most recent of three governments since 2009, led by the liberal democratic Valeriy Streltsov, was approved by parties forming the European Integration Alliance (EIA) but then dismissed due to intervention of the Democratic Party of Moldova (DPM) which broke its agreement with other parties in order to monopolize its grip on power.

The de-facto owner of the DPM, Moldova oligarch Vlad Plakhotnyuk, turned out to be Moldova’s absolute leader once he was able to use the Prosecutor’s Office and the courts to send another oligarch, his main competitor, to prison. Vlad Filat was at the time the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, and he was accused of defrauding Moldova’s banks of $1 billion, then stripped of parliamentary immunity and placed under arrest for the duration of investigation. Most Moldovan experts believe Plakhotnyuk had some connection to the fraud but was able to frame his partner Filat and take the money out of the country, thanks to his control over law enforcement institutions. Which means he is now able to enjoy the fruits of his victory.

US and EU diplomatic missions have tended to ignore Moldovan oligarchs’ lawlessness, and moreover gave them support and political cover. This was explained by the fact the parties they led had pro-Western orientation and are opposed to Russia. However, after Streltsov’ dismissal their patience ran out.

US ambassador in Chișinău James Pettit told journalists during a press club meeting that Plakhotnyuk should ideally leave Moldova. It was clear he became inconvenient to the US which seeks to closely control Moldova’s rulers.

During the past 7 weeks Western diplomats, who wish to prevent Moldova’s change of orientation away from EU Association Agreement which its signed last year and toward the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, continued to exhort LPM, LDPM, and LP to re-establish the EIA for the fourt time. The need for such a coalition was emphasized by Federica Mogherini and Pettit. Just recently Chișinău was visited by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Bridget Brink. She met with the leaders of all three parties but also with the leader of the opposition Party of Communists (PC), the former president Vladimir Voronin who is suspected in close ties to Plakotnyuk. It’s not clear what Brink discussed with Voronin, but shortly after the meeting a letter appeared on the Internet attributed to the leader of PKRM informing his supporters of his resignation. The letter was revealed by anonymous hackers who claim they broke into the party’s official web site and found several documents ready for publication. PKRM so far had no comment.

The probability of a new EIA being formed is seen as very low due to the clash of interests between DPM and LDPM. Moreover, Moldova’s Constitutional Court resolved that the new government must be in place no later than 29 January 2016. If the parliament fails to do so, it will be dissolved and the president will call a special election. Which would be a logical way out of the crisis. But that’s precisely what Western diplomats fear, who don’t want opposition Party of Socialists and Our Party to score a victory and change Moldova’s foreign policy priorities.

Thus while the Americans are trying to pick up power in Moldova from the hands of the oligarchs, democracy in that tiny Eastern European country remains a hostage to geopolitics.

Translated by J.Hawk

The largest arms exports contract in Canadian history will see Canadian-made military equipment shipped to one of the worst human rights violators in the world — Saudi Arabia. This will happen despite an existing export control regime specifically intended to prevent Canadian goods from fuelling human rights violations abroad.The deal was brokered by the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) — a taxpayer-financed Crown corporation — for an undisclosed number of Light Armoured Vehicles to be manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), based in London, Ontario.While many details of the deal remain shrouded in secrecy, below are 10 indisputable facts.

Europe and Turkey closed their airspace for Russian Long-Range Aviation planes carrying out airstrikes on Daesh positions in Syria, forcing Russian pilots to reroute, Deputy Commander Maj. Gen. Anatoly Konovalov said Saturday.

The notion that negotiations on a ceasefire and political settlement will take place lacks credibility, because the political-military realities on the ground in Syria won’t allow it. Those opposition groups that are prepared to contemplate some kind of settlement with the Assad regime do not have the capacity to make such an agreement a reality. And those organizations that have the capacity to end the war against the Damascus regime have no interest in agreeing to anything short of forcible regime change.

On top of those serious contradictions, Russia is openly contesting the U.S. plan for a negotiated settlement. The United States is pushing the line that President Bashar al-Assad must step down, but Russia is insisting that such a demand is illegitimate.

The contradiction between the pretensions of the U.S.-sponsored plan and Syrian political-military realities was very much in evidence at the Riyadh conference earlier this month. The conference, which was supported by the United States and the other “Friends of Syria,” including Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar and the UAE, was in theory to bring together the broadest possible range of opposition groups – excluding only “terrorist” groups. Belying that claim, however, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (YPD) being armed by the United States in Syria was excluded from the conference at the insistence of Turkey.

A key objective of the conference was apparently to bring Ahrar al-Sham, the most powerful opposition military force apart from the Islamic State, into the putative game of ceasefire negotiations. But inviting the organization was bound to backfire sooner or later. Ahrar al-Sham has been closely allied with al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, both politically and militarily. Moreover, it has explicitly denounced the idea of any compromise with the regime in Damascus.

Ahrar al-Sham showed up at the conference, but refused to follow the script. The representative of Ahrar al-Sham called for “the overthrow of the Assad regime with all its pillars and symbols, and handing them over for a fair trial.” That is not exactly the game plan envisioned in the negotiating process, which assumes that Assad must leave after a transitional period, but that the government security institutions would remain in place.

On the second day of the conference, Ahrar al-Sham’s representative announced that the group was leaving, complaining that the conference organizers had refused to endorse its insistence on the “Muslim” identity of the opposition.

The Ahrar al-Sham refusal to play ball was the most dramatic indication of that the entire exercise is caught in a fundamental contradiction. But it wasn’t the only case of a major armed organization whose attendance at the Riyadh meeting raised the obvious issue of conflicting interests. Jaysh al-Islam is a coalition of 60 Salafist armed groups in the Damascus suburbs whose orientation appears to be indistinguishable from that of Ahrar al-Sham.

The coalition is led by Salafist extremist Zahran Alloush, and has fought alongside Ahrar al-Sham as well as al-Nusra Front. Last April, Alloush travelled to Istanbul, where he met with the leader of Ahrar al-Sham. Like their close allies, moreover, Alloush and his coalition reject the idea of a political settlement with a secular Syrian state authority, with or without Assad.

If it is so obvious that the Riyadh conference and the larger scheme for peace negotiations are not going to come to fruition, why has the Obama administration been pushing it? The explanation for what appears to be a lost cause can be inferred from the basic facts surrounding the administration’s Syria policy.

First, the administration adopted the objective of regime change in Syria in late 2011, at a time when it was convinced that the regime was on the ropes. And although it has partially backtracked from that aim by distinguishing between Assad and the institutional structure of the regime, it cannot back off the demand for Assad to step down without a humiliating admission of failure and major domestic political damage.

Second in its pursuit of that regime change policy the administration allowed its Sunni regional allies – especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia – to do things that it wasn’t prepared to do. Obama tolerated Turkish facilitation of foreign fighters and Turkish, Qatari and Saudi funneling of arms to their favorite Islamist groups. The result was that Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam emerged in 2013 and 2014 as the main challengers to the Assad regime.

But the White House has officially maintained its distance from al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, while continuing to collaborate closely with Sunni allies, as they have provided financial support to the “Army of Conquest” command dominated by al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham to help the forces under their leadership gain control of Idlib province and pose the most serious threat to the Assad regime thus far.

And the third fact about the policy is that the Obama administration embarked on its campaign of illusory peace negotiations with little more than one year left before Obama leaves the Oval Office.

The obvious implication of these facts is that the ostensible push for a ceasefire and peace negotiations is a useful device for managing the political optics associated with Syria during the administration’s final year. If it is not questioned by media and political elites, the administration will be able to claim both that it is insisting on getting rid of Assad and at the same time moving toward a ceasefire and political settlement.

Never mind that claim has nothing to do with reality. Being the dominant power, after all, means never having to say you’re sorry, because you don’t have to acknowledge your responsibility for the terrible war and chaos visited on a country because of your policy.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. 

The alarming findings that levels of Fukushima radiation off the North American coast are higher now than they have ever been, is being spun by the press as an issue of no concern.

In March 2011, Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered multiple meltdowns following a massive earthquake and tsunami. The exploding reactors sprayed massive amounts of radioactive material into the air, most of which settled into the Pacific Ocean. Since then, more radioactive material has continued to pour from the coastal plant into the ocean.

In a study presented at the conference of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Dec. 14, researchers found that radiation levels from Alaska to California have increased since samples were last taken. The highest levels yet of radiation from the disaster were found in a sample taken 2,500 kilometers (approx. 1,550 miles) west of San Francisco.

“Safe” according to whom?

Lead researcher Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was one of the first people to begin monitoring Fukushima radiation in the Pacific Ocean, with his first samples taken three months after the disaster started. In 2014, he launched a citizen monitoring effort – Our Radioactive Ocean – to help collect more data on ocean-borne radioactivity.

The researchers track Fukushima radiation by focusing on the isotope Cesium-134, which has a half-life of only two years. All Cesium-134 in the ocean likely comes from the Fukushima disaster. In contrast, Cesium-137 – also released in huge quantities from Fukushima – has a half-life of 30 years, and persists in the ocean, not just from Fukushima, but also from nuclear tests conducted as far back as the 1950s.

The most recent study added 110 new Cesium-134 samples to the ongoing studies. These samples were an average of 11 Becquerels per cubic meter of sea water, a level 50 percent higher than other samples taken so far.

Instead of presenting the findings as an alarming sign of growing radiation, however, Buesseler emphasizes that the Cesium-134 levels detected are still 500 times lower than the drinking water limits set by the U.S. government. The news site The Big Wobble questions whether Buesseler and Woods Hole’s heavy financial reliance on the U.S. government – Woods Hole has received nearly $8 million in research funding from several government agencies – plays any role in this emphasis.

Situation still worsening

The reality, however, is that radiation along the West Coast is expected to keep getting worse. According to a 2013 study by the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway, the oceanic radiation plume released by Fukushima is likely to hit the North American West Coast in force in 2017, with levels peaking in 2018. Most of the radioactive material from the disaster is likely to stay concentrated on the western coast through at least 2026.

According to professor Michio Aoyama of Japan’s Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity, the amount of radiation from Fukushima that has now reached North America is probably nearly as much as was spread over Japan during the initial disaster.

The recent Woods Hole study also confirmed that radioactive material is still leaking into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled Fukushima plant. Cesium-134 levels off the Japanese coast are between 10 and 100 times higher than those detected off the coast of California.

Without directly challenging the U.S. government’s “safe” radiation limits, Buesseler obliquely references the fact that any radioactive contamination of the ocean is cause for concern.

“Despite the fact that the levels of contamination off our shores remain well below government-established safety limits for human health or to marine life,” he said, “the changing values underscore the need to more closely monitor contamination levels across the Pacific.”

Sources for this article include: 

TheBigWobble.org

ScienceAlert.com

NaturalNews.com

GlobalResearch.ca

“Butcher”; “thug”; “dictator”; “murderer”; “savage”; “tyrant”; “oppressor”; “despot”. These are just some of the words that many in the Western world associate with the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, after four years of incessant and hypnotic war propaganda. Democratically elected leader of a sovereign country however, is not a narrative the propagandists want to be circulated. The 2014 election in Syria is an event that the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in the West desperately wants to be memory-holed, as it runs in stark contrast to the narrative they are still trying to inculcate in the minds of the public.

In June of last year, Assad won Syria’s Presidential election with 88.7 percent of the vote, in the country’s first multi-candidate election in almost five decades. In a country which had a population of 17,064,854 in July 2014 (according to an estimate from CIA World Factbook) [23.85 million in 2013 according to Syrian government sources], over 10 million people voted for Assad. [Many refugees voted at the Syrian Embassy in Beirut].  73.42 percent of the Syrian population voted in the election, with voting only taking place in government controlled areas.

A group of international observers emphasized that the election was a valid and democratic expression of the views of the Syrian people. Predictably, Western nations denounced the election as a sham and a fraud, with US Secretary of State, John Kerry, calling the election a farce a few months prior to the vote.

Despite the efforts of the Western establishment to delegitimize the election, it is obvious that Assad has popular support in Syria. The Western narrative – which claims that Assad is an insane dictator who butchers his own people – is illogical, as if this was true, Assad would have been ousted years ago.

How can a man stay in power for so long if the majority of the Syrian population is fervently against his rule? Considering the fact that the entire Western world has been obsessively trying to overthrow him for years, in addition to many governments in the Middle East – the Gulf States, Turkey, Israel, Jordon… – there is absolutely no way Assad could survive without having a large support base in Syria.

As Assad explained in an interview with RT in 2012, it’s “not logical” that the entire Syrian population is against him, yet he still remains the President:

The problem is not between me and the people; I don’t have a problem with the people. The United States is against me, the West is against me, many Arab countries including Turkey – which is not Arab of course – [are] against me, and if the Syrian people are against me, how can I be here? If the whole world, or let’s say [a] big part of the world, including your people [are] against you, are you superman? No, you’re just a human being – so this is not logical…It’s not about reconciliation between the Syrian and the Syrian; we don’t have [a] civil war. It’s about terrorism and support coming from abroad, to support terrorists and destabilize Syria.

A large section of the Syrian population understands that if Assad is ousted from power at the present moment in time, and the government is destroyed, Syria will cease to exist as a sovereign, cohesive state, and will be Balkanized into feuding rump states.

The Real Criminals Reside in the West

Lost in the incessant demonization of the latest bogeyman of the mainstream media however, are the crimes of Western leaders.Comparative to the plethora of imperial butchers in the Western world, who still manage to escape prosecution for their crimes, the Syrian President really is an angel.

Tony Blair and George Bush launched a war of aggression in Iraq that has killed and maimed millions of innocent people, an invasion that was denounced by the former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, as “illegal”. In 2011, a Malaysian tribunal which applied the Nuremberg Principles to the 2003 war found that both Bush and Blair were guilty of war crimes.

The illegal war in Iraq is just one example of the abhorrent crimes of the West and the flagrant hypocrisy of its leaders. Unfortunately, there is no accountability for the criminal class in the Western world, only a conveyer belt of future Machiavellian leaders.

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

There can’t be many universities around the world where an occupying army has built a firing range on campus. But that is the reality for Palestine Technical University in the West Bank.

Since October, the Tulkarm campus has been under repeated attack by Israeli forces, with student demonstrations suppressed by rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas – and even live ammunition. In an approximately six week period, 350 students were injured by the Israeli army.

According to data provided by UN OCHA, Israeli occupation forces injured 726 Palestinians in clashes at the university from October 1 to end of November (including both students and non-students). Of those, 48 were injured by live ammunition, and 126 by rubber-coated metal bullets.

More than 20 students have been arrested by Israeli forces in the context of the protests – including five who were “ambushed” on campus. By November 22, the university had been forced to evacuate the premises on at least 10 occasions over the previous weeks, “due to tear gas or skunk water.”

Palestine Technical University – Kadoorie was established in 1930 as an agricultural school, and achieved full university status in 2007. There are approximately 7,000 students enrolled. It is located in the west of Tulkarm, right next to the so-called Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank.

The university lost land in 1967, and again later, to the path of the Apartheid Wall. In addition, however, further university land was confiscated by the Israeli military for use as a training area – right next to the experimental greenhouses, and just 200 metres away from the library.

On this land, Israeli forces have built a firing range, including “mounds of earth, a winding channel of concrete…and concrete blocks and slabs.” The army has confirmed it has no plans to stop using the range – and has even prevented the university from building a wall to protect students.

Over recent months, Israeli forces positioned at the training facility have brutally put down numerous anti-occupation protests. On October 5, Israeli forces closed the university’s main entrance; a few days later, a military bulldozer destroyed part of the university’s wall.

On October 8, Israeli forces shot 12 youths with live fire, and 20 with rubber-coated metal bullets; three days later, 18 more were shot. On October 19, three students required hospital treatment when Israeli forces “suppressed a demonstration”.

In a video dated November 5, Israeli occupation forces can be clearly seen opening fire from within the heart of the campus. (More videos of clashes can be found here, here, here, andhere.

On November 9, Israeli forces “raided the university’s campus library and the engineering department”, with students sent home early for their safety. In this video, dated November 12, a student is chased down by an army jeep, before being punched and kicked by Israeli soldiers.

Another video from November 24 shows Israeli forces advancing from their positions, across the campus towards the university buildings. The soldiers repeatedly open fire on protesters (see 5’45, 6’52, 7’18), as well as tossing stun grenades into university premises (6’42).

On November 29, dozens of students were injured, with one “taken to the intensive care unit in Nablus.” Last week, seven more Palestinians were shot with live ammunition on one day alone.

Numerous images shared by Palestinians on social media show Israeli occupation forcesstorming the campus, including with jeeps, and deploying tear gas. Other photos of Israeli attacks on the campus include from Oct. 19, Oct. 22, Nov. 11, Nov. 23, Nov. 24, Nov. 25, Nov. 26, and Dec. 9.

In the above video, students speak about what it is like to study not just under occupation, but with an Israeli army base actually on your campus. Speaking to international activists earlier this month, 21-year-old Nabeha Hasan Ahmad recalled when Israeli forces entered the university.

 They were shooting live bullets at the students. They started to get inside the university more and more. They threw skunk water on the library. The students who were there were getting hurt by bullets. So many students have had a gun shot. It affects our psychology, we become more afraid when we are doing our exams. We hear the sound of the bullets and we smell the gas. It became normal for our body to smell gas.

On some days, the wounded “are placed on Students Union meeting table”, explainedstudents to activists. “There is no University anywhere else in the world with a training field of an occupation army inside its campus.”

Just three days ago, emerging from Moscow meetings with Russian foreign minister Lavrov and president Putin, US Secretary of State John Kerry signaled a major shift in US foreign policy toward Syria. “The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change,” he told the media. The media rightly reported the apparent US about-face as, “Assad can stay.”

The shift was seen as paving the way for the adoption of a UN Security Council Resolution calling for a ceasefire and political solution to the nearly five-year old brutal war in Syria.

Dropping the demand that the overthrow of Assad must precede any political solution to the conflict was essential to resolving the apparent stalemate, where legal Russian and Iranian assistance had effectively thwarted a US-led escalation of regime change operations to include a “safe zone” near the Turkish border from which a rival government could be formed.

As expected, then, a UN Security Council Resolution was agreed today providing the framework for continued meetings, starting in January, for working out which opposition forces would be acceptable as part of a future political order and which ones must be classified as “terrorist” organizations and thus barred from the process. It was agreed that Syrian president Assad would be allowed to remain in power as this process began, and language on whether he might be left in power after democratic elections was left purposely vague.

So according to Kerry, and implicitly enshrined in the UN Security Council resolution today, Assad can stay.

But then President Obama opened his mouth at his end-of-year press conference this afternoon and hung his Secretary of State and entire foreign policy apparatus out to dry.

No, Obama decided this afternoon, Assad cannot stay. Assad must go.

While some alternative news outlets have gloated over the seeming US shift away from a policy of regime change for Syria — “The Humiliation is Complete: Assad Can Stay, Says Kerry After Meeting Putin,” one of them wrote— we have been far more suspicious of claims that the US had backed away from the demand. It looks like our suspicion has been justified.

Here is the US president returning the US to the “Assad must go” policy three days after John Kerry said he could stay:

A newly-leaked report on illegal oil sales by Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS/ISIL), which was ordered to be compiled by Norway, has revealed that most of the IS-smuggled oil has been destined for Turkey, where it is sold off at bargain low prices.

Turkish officials were involved in illegal transport of oil from Iraq long before the emergence of the so-called Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS/IS/DAESH). Their illegal trade expanded to the Syrian Arab Republic with the intensification of the conflict in Syria. Turkey, however, is not the only player involved in the illegal oil trade in Syria and Iraq. The operations of the Anglo-Turkish company Genel Energy PLC, which works in Iraqi Kurdistan and Malta, illustrates the constellation of financial and energy sector interests involved.

General Energy PLC

Genel Energy PLC has its headquarters in the English Channel’s Crown Dependency of the Bailiwick of Jersey, which is an offshore tax haven governed by Britain’s monarchy as a separate entity from the United Kingdom and its overseas territories. With the involvement of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Cazenove, the Jersey-based energy company surfaced in 2011 after a £2.5 billion reverse merger takeover of Genel Enerji International Limited by Vallares PLC, an investment company setup by former BP oil conglomerate executive Anthony («Tony») Bryan Hayward, JNR Limited financier and banking dynasty scion Nathaniel («Nat») Rothschild, Nat’s financer cousin Thomas («Tom») Daniel, and Dresdner Kleinwort and Goldman Sachs investment banker Julian Metherell. Vallares is modeled on the Jersey-incorporated predecessor of Asia Resource Minerals PLC, Vallar (later BUMI PLC), which in 2010 raised £707.2 million in initial public offering and was co-founded by Nat Rothschild and Tom Daniel.

In June 2011, Hayward, Rothschild, Daniel, and Metherell quickly raised £1.35 billion (or $2.2 billion) for the deal between Valleres and Genel Enerji. Half this money came from investors in the US during the Jersey-based company’s initial public offering and involved investments from firms like the British asset management company Schroders and the Lloyds Banking subsidiary Scottish Widows. Two of Turkey’s richest men, Turkish billionaire business mogul and banker Mehmet Emin Karamehmet, who was appealing an eleven-year jail sentence for embezzlement at the time of the deal, and Genel Enerji CEO Mehmet Sepil, who was caught and fined for insider trading of shares from Heritage Oil by the British Financial Services Authority in February 2010, were given half of the new company by the quartet and issued a further £1.25 billion in equity from the deal.

It was agreed that Mehmet Karamehmet would be represented on the Genel Energy’s board by his daughter Gulsun Nazli Karamehmet Williams and Sepil would be represented by the lawyer Murat Yazici of Yazici Law Offices, who formerly represented Royal Dutch Shell, the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPAO), and Exxon from 1974 to 1989. Sepil was appointed president of Genel Energy PLC and given a «key executive role» or as Metherell puts it, «a key member of the leadership» due to his «unique knowledge of Kurdistan.» A former BP executive and chair of the Jersey-based Petrofac oilfield services corporation, Rodney Chase, and a former US ambassador to Turkey, Mark Parris, were reported as being part of the new company too.

War and Profit

This was a forecast in 2011 about Genel Energy’s expected production: «Genel owns stakes in valuable oil fields in Kurdistan, currently producing 42,000 barrels per day for the Turkish market. The new management, led by former BP boss Mr Hayward as chief executive, is planning to double output. ‘We want to be producing 110,000 barrels per day by 2012 and by 2015 the expectation is 150,000 barrels,’ Mr Metherell said».

Were escalated war and the plunder of Syrian oil foreseen and part of the equation? It is worth mentioning that the Anglo-Turkish energy company has been involved in the illegal export of Iraqi oil to Israel, appears to be working to integrate the energy infrastructure of the Eastern Mediterranean with Israel and Turkey, and was planning on announcing a deal to work with a «consortium responsible for oil and gas explorations in Lebanon» in 2012. The latter two objectives would all only be feasible if regime change in Damascus took place and compliant regimes were established in Syria and Lebanon. A noteworthy admission by Nat Rothschild to the British journalist Simon Goodley that certain locations in the world were outside of the limits of Genel Energy, including Venezuela and post-Soviet Central Asia, confirms that geopolitical rivalries are taken into consideration in the Anglo-Turkish company’s operations.

According to the South African journalist Khareen Pech, these interlocked directorship and companies are part of a labyrinth of networks that profit off insecurity and war. In this context, an earlier merger deal between Genel Enerji and Heritage Oil, another English Channel-based offshore company founded by mercenaries connected to the British military, that collapsed in 2009 should be examined with scrutiny. Explaining about Heritage Oil and Gas, Pech states thus: «In London, a similar web of companies can be found at the Heritage Oil and Branch Energy offices at Plaza 107. Over fifteen companies operate from this suite, share the same telephone numbers and the same UK-based directors and personnel. This clandestine approach to business enables [Executive Outcomes] and its British principals to operate and benefit from a hidden empire of corporate and military companies.»

Funding Division: Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kirkuk-Ceyhan Pipeline

In 2009, Genel Energy’s Turkish predecessor Genel Enerji began exporting oil from Iraqi Kurdistan to the Turkish coast with the opening of the Kirkuk-Ceyhan Pipeline. The port of Ceyhan is run by Botas International Limited, a Turkish state company that also operates the Turkish portions of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline that deliberately circumvents Russia and Iran exporting Caspian Sea oil from the Republic of Azerbaijan by going through Georgia and Turkey. According to Reuters, using sanitized language hiding the illegal nature of the operations, this «export route to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, designed to bypass Baghdad’s federal pipeline system, has created a bitter dispute over oil sale rights» inside Iraq.

Since 2002, the Turkish company had been illegally making inroads into Iraqi Kurdistan and slowly working to integrate the area’s energy infrastructure with Turkey through illegitimate trade agreements with local Kurdish chieftains that circumvented Iraq’s government in Baghdad and the Iraqi State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO). The Guardian also pointed this out in 2011, amidst similar circumstances involving a deal between Exxon Mobil and the Kurdistan Regional Government, by writing that with the British government’s support Hayward, Rothschild, Daniel, and Metherell categorically threw their «money and efforts into drilling rights obtained in [Iraqi] Kurdistan which have never been ratified by the federal government in Iraq».

From an economic standpoint and in practice, Genel Energy is supporting the balkanization of the Middle East and Africa by providing revenues for breakaway republics and secessionist tendencies. The oil it is illegally exporting from Turkey is financing the Kurdistan Regional Government and helping Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani reject the constitutional authority of the Iraqi federal government. Genel Energy even calls itself «a partner for the Kurdistan Region» in its corporate literature. In 2012, in this regard, the Anglo-Turkish company secured an exploration license from the unrecognized government of the breakaway republic of Somaliland, which declared its independence from Somalia on May 18, 1991.

The Israeli Connection and the Port of Ceyhan

It is also no coincidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed Massoud Barzani’s takeover of Kirkuk and other disputed territories in Iraq. Barzani and Netanyahu even called for the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan simultaneously in 2014. In fact, with the help of Turkey and Genel Energy, the Kurdistan Regional Government used its energy links to Turkey to transport oil through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan Pipeline to Israel. Large oil conglomerates, like BP and Exxon Mobile, were afraid to buy this oil publicly due to the threat it could pose to their existing deals in Iraq. Thus, according to Kurdistan Regional Government Natural Resource Minister Ashti Hawrami, Israel and Malta became key actors for avoiding detection of the smuggled oil from Iraq. Reuters reported the following on June 20, 2014: «A tanker delivered a cargo of disputed crude oil from Iraqi Kurdistan’s new pipeline for the first time on Friday in Israel, despite threats by Baghdad to take legal action against any buyer». Reuters also explained that the sale of oil from the Kirkuk-Ceyhan Pipeline that bypasses the network of energy pipelines controlled by the Iraqi federal government is crucial for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s drive for «greater financial independence from war-torn Iraq».

According to the conclusions of a University of Greenwich study authored by George Kiourktsoglou and Alec D. Coutroubis, oil export from the port of Ceyhan includes oil smuggled from Iraq and Syria to Turkey. Since 2014, according to the study’s analysis of the export data from Ceyhan, the «tanker charter rates from Ceyhan re-coupled up to a degree with the ones from the rest of the Middle East». While the authors of the report are inconclusive about the increased imports being «attributed to additional [Iraqi Kurdistan] crude, whose export via Ceyhan coincided with the rise of» the ISIL’s oil smuggling or as a «result of boosted demand for ultra-cheap smuggled crude», it can be confidently assessed that it is a result of both. Kiourktsoglou and Coutroubis also point out that «through the concurrent study of the tanker charter rates from the port» of Ceyhan and the timeline of the fighting with the ISIL it «seems that whenever the Islamic State is fighting in the vicinity of an area hosting oil assets, the exports from Ceyhan promptly spike» which «may be attributed to an extra boost given to crude oil smuggling with the aim of immediately generating additional funds, badly needed for the supply of ammunition and military equipment.»

The oil that Turkey is selling for the ISIL is being camouflaged with the oil that the Kurdistan Regional Government is illegally selling from Iraq. In fact, the ISIL has been transporting stolen Syrian oil into Iraq’s Ninawa Governorate and then from close proximity to the city of Mosul smuggling the oil into Turkey, where it is sent to Ceyhan for re-export. The Turkish military deployment in the Mosul District and its plans to establish a permanent military base are meant to protect these oil routes and dually maintain the flow of illegally sold Iraqi oil by the Kurdistan Regional Government and to secure the stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil taken by the ISIL.

Click here to read part one of this article.

Click here to read part two of this article.

Click here to read part four of this article.

(to be continued)

This article was originally published by the Strategic Culture Foundation on December 19, 2015.

The 239 Year Timeline Of America’s Involvement in Military Conflict

By Michael Welch, Prof. James Petras, Andy Lee Roth, and John Schertow, December 20, 2015

 On this week’s Global Research News Hour, the last regular program of 2015, we go over some of the major under-reported stories of the year.

Par Barry Grey, 18 décembre 2015

Comme l’on s’y attendait, la Réserve fédérale américaine a annoncé mercredi une hausse d’un quart de pourcent du taux d’intérêt des fonds fédéraux, le taux d’intérêt que les banques font payer l’une à l’autre pour les prêts à un jour des réserves conservées à la banque centrale.

Un debat important (…) fait suite à une proposition présentée par le Patriarcat de Moscou de l’Église orthodoxe. La proposition, qui ressemble à bien des égards aux modèles bancaires islamiques sans intérêts, a été dévoilée la première fois en décembre 2014, face à la profondeur de la crise du rouble et au prix du pétrole en chute libre.

Not only does the absence of media help to maintain a climate of impunity for those who would seek to harm, undermine or even annihilate Indigenous Peoples, it offers a platform of consent that perpetrators—including corporations, right-wing militias, NGOs and governments – can use to justify morally reprehensible acts.” Introduction to People Land Truth 2014, a publication of Intercontinental Cry.

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This episode of the Global Research News Hour is dedicated to the memory of Carl Jensen (1929-2015), founder of Project Censored. .

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, the last regular program of 2015, we go over some of the major under-reported stories of the year.

We speak with John Ahniwanika Schertow, founder and editor of the on-line magazine Intercontinentalcry.org about the major stories affecting the world’s Indigenous peoples and why even progressive alternative media often fail to report on them.

Intercontinental Cry has been spotlighting indigenous issues for the last ten years. IC does not draw corporate or government financing and must rely on readers to keep it alive. The site is in the midst of a fund-raiser. Donations are urgently needed for this hub of unique information. Please consider making a contribution here.

Andy Lee Roth is an editor with Project Censored. He discusses significant stories from 2014-2015 that got significantly omitted or downplayed, such as the ongoing poisoning of the Pacific ocean by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants, and the global impacts of methane releases and arctic warming.

Finally, prominent commentator Prof. James Petras supplies an overview of the pivotal stories of 2015 and what they bode for the new year. James Petras is retired Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. He is an award winning author and Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

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President Bashar al-Assad affirmed that the majority of international reports about Syria are politicized, incredible and financed by the Qataris and Saudis.

President al-Assad added in an interview given to Netherlands NPO2 TV that the western policy towards counter-terrorism file is not objective and not stable.

Following is the full text;

Question 1: Mr. President, after four years of civil war in your country, what’s left of Syria?

President Assad: What’s left is about the people. If you talk about the infrastructure, many have been destroyed during the last four years and few months, but it’s about the people, what’s left of the people, that is the question, and it’s about how much they withstand this dark ideology that the terrorists brought with them from different countries. I think the majority of the people now support their government, regardless of their political spectrum, and they still support the unity of Syria and the integration of the society as one society with multi-color aspects.

Question 2: Now, we hear shelling every day, even here in Damascus, even close by to where we are now. You said there is unity, the people believe in their government. Are you still so confident about that?

President Assad: I’m more confident than before, to be frank, because if you go to the areas under the control of the government, you can see all the different colors of the Syrian society with no exception. If you go to the areas where the terrorists control, you can see either part of this Syrian spectrum, social spectrum, or you can see no inhabitants, only fighters. So the contrast is very clear.

Question 3: Now, roughly 4,000 Syrians flee your country every day, 4.3 million up to date, and you must hear some of their stories, why they are leaving. How does it make you feel if you hear that?

President Assad: They are sad stories. It’s about the hardship of every single person, every single family. We live with these stories on a daily basis, as you mentioned. But it’s not enough to feel; what can we do? They left because of the terrorist attacks, direct attacks, because the terrorists attacked the infrastructure, and because of the Western embargo that led to the same target of the terrorists, directly or indirectly. I think most of those are ready to go back to their country. They still love their country, but living in Syria could be unbearable for them for different circumstances.

Question 4: You say most of them are ready to come back, but from many stories they tell, they flee from terrorism, of course, but a lot of them flee from your government, your armed forces, as well.

President Assad: You are in Syria now, you can go to the areas under our control. You can see that some of the families of the terrorists or the extremists or the militants, whatever you want to call them, live under the supervision of the government and the support of the government. So, why didn’t those families leave Syria?

Question 5: Okay, while we hear stories in the West of Syrians coming here, they talk about torture, widespread, people in prison, things done by your armed forces. That’s the reason why they leave. Is there truth to their stories?

President Assad: Let’s talk about the facts. The facts will tell you if it’s true or not. If you are torturing your people, attacking, killing, and so on, and you have the enmity of Western governments, the strongest countries in the world, the richest countries like in the Gulf, like Turkey, our neighbors, are against me as president or against the government, how could you withstand for nearly five years in such circumstances if you don’t have public support? And how can you have public support if you are torturing your people? I mean, if you have mistakes in reality, that could happen, that would happen anywhere.

Question 6: So there are mistakes?

President Assad: Of course, especially when there is war, you could have a single mistake committed by a single person, that would happen. You have chaos, sometimes that would happen, we don’t exclude this. But there’s a difference between having this kind of mistakes and having a policy in order to torture your people and lose their support.

Question 7: You say there is no such policy?

President Assad: No, definitely.

Question 8: Because today, Human Rights Watch, and the UN before that, came out with a report saying there’s widespread, as they call it, “death and dying in detention centers, since the uprising in 2011.” Is there any truth to that?

President Assad: If you want to verify the credibility of those reports, to say that they’re not politicized, they’re not talking about one side of the story. You mentioned the shelling of Damascus a few days go, and that happens every few days, killing many civilians, innocent civilians. Did they mention anything about this in the reports? You have many pieces of evidence that’s been published by the terrorists on the internet, photos, videos, about torturing, about killing, about beheading. Did they mention those stories?

Question 9: So it’s one sided? Even the UN?

President Assad: Of course, definitely, it’s politicized. Even the UN, it’s controlled by the United States, and the United States is against Syria. This is the reality, everybody knows it.

Question 10: But you are part of the UN. Syria is part of the UN family.

President Assad: Of course, but the UN is a biased institution because it is under the control of the United States and its allies.

Question 11: And so, you say reports about widespread torture, human rights violations after 2011, those are biased, not true?

President Assad: They are based on stories. Stories, you can pay anyone to tell you any story, like the Qataris are doing this. They publish many reports financed by the Qataris, by the Saudis, this means nothing. You want to make investigations, come to Syria. You have reality, it’s obvious.

Question 12: They say it’s difficult to come to Syria and doing independent investigation.

President Assad: No, it’s not difficult. You are here, so anybody could do the same. Otherwise, if it’s difficult for them to come, it’s going to be difficult for them to judge the situation and to make reports.

Question 13: Moving on. As you know, we are from Holland, from the Netherlands, and my country is bombing ISIS just across the border here in Iraq. They are fighting the same enemy as you are. Would you consider the Netherlands an ally?

President Assad: It depends on the real intention. What do you mean by fighting terrorists? Is it just because ISIS came here? Is it because you are afraid of their influence or effects in your region? If the incentive is fear, no, we’re not allies.

Question 14: You think the incentive is fear?

President Assad: Yes, not values. Because why didn’t they fight terrorism from the very beginning, before ISIS appeared? You had al-Nusra, you had Al Qaeda, you had many terrorists. You didn’t fight. Only this fight on terrorism started to appear when there was September 11 in the United States, the recent attacks in Paris, and in different European countries, but before that they didn’t say we are at war with terrorism.

Question 15: So you mean they are late? They’re late to the party?

President Assad: It should be a matter of principle. When it’s a principle, it should be sustainable, not what you call a kneejerk reaction when something you want to do it just as a reaction to something. So, it’s not principle. Fighting terrorism should be a stable, sustainable principle. This is the way we can be allies.

Question 16: So you say, in our case, Dutch bombers over Iraq bombing ISIS is a kneejerk reaction? It’s not sustainable?

President Assad: It is part of European politics and European politics is part of the American, it’s not independent. Everybody knows this. So, I cannot judge only Dutch politics as an isolated case; it’s part of this, and all this, let’s say, Western politics regarding terrorism, is not objective, and not realistic, and actually not only not productive; it’s counterproductive.

Question 17: Right, because, you would say, well, you would say they’re bombing your enemy, so, well, they’re helping in some way.

President Assad: Because when you don’t have the real intention and the realistic vision, the result will be in the other direction. You’ve been bombing, maybe you had intentions. Maybe, I mean, the politicians in your country, have good intentions, but what is the reality? 

Question 18: So bombing is not working?

President Assad: It’s not working. You cannot fight terrorism without troops on the ground, and without a real incubator, a social incubator that supports you in your war against those terrorists.

Question 19: So you say, bombing like the Dutch are doing, is for show?

President Assad: Maybe for show, that depends on the intention. But in reality, for nothing, let’s say, for no avail.

Question 20: Our government is, next month, deciding whether or not they will start bombing in your airspace as well, bombing ISIS targets in Syria, and as they are debating this, what would you tell them?

President Assad: This is illegal. This is against the international law. We are a sovereign country. If you are serious about fighting terrorism, what is the obstacle for that government to call the Syrian government, to say “let’s cooperate in fighting terrorism?” The only obstacle is that the Western policy today towards Syria is “we need to isolate this state, that president, so we cannot deal with him.” Okay, you cannot reach anything then.

Question 21: So you say it’s illegal if the Dutch bomb? They should ask your permission, that’s what you’re saying?

President Assad: The Syrian government’s permission.

Question 22: Have they ever been in touch with you about any of this?

President Assad: No-one of them, no-one. Some European governments send their intelligence in order to make a kind of cooperation, security cooperation, regarding terrorism, because they are afraid of the terrorists. Of course, we refused.

Question 23: Because they say there’s a mandate for it, because Iraq has asked for help, and now we can bomb in Syria as well.

President Assad: No, they cannot, they don’t have the right, this is illegal, in every sense of the word illegal.

Question 24: Now, moving on as well, the Netherlands, for what it’s worth, as you were saying, the Netherlands are also saying if there should be sustainable peace in Syria, that has to be without you. There might be a transitional period, but in the end, it can only be without you. What would you say to a statement like that?

President Assad: If you accept as a Netherlands citizen that somebody in Syria would tell you who’s going to be your Prime Minister or not, we would accept it. But you don’t accept it, and we don’t accept it. As you say, we are a sovereign country, whether they have a good president or bad president, this is a Syrian issue, it’s not European. The Europeans have nothing to do with such a thing. That’s why we don’t respond. We don’t care about it.

Question 25: Right. You don’t care about, in this case, the Dutch-

President Assad: No, no. This is a Syrian issue. The Syrian people would say who’s going to stay or not. If the Syrian people doesn’t want me to stay, I have to leave right away, today.

Question 26: One more question about Holland and our neighboring country Belgium. Hundreds of wannabe Jihadis come here to Syria. Why are they coming here, what are they looking for?

President Assad: The most important question is: why did you have them in Europe? Coming, that’s natural; when you have chaos, when Syria has been turned into a hotbed for terrorism because Europe and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and those countries supported terrorists in different ways, of course you’re going to have chaos, and it’s going to be a nexus for terrorism. That’s natural for this, how to say, fertile soil, to attract terrorists from the rest of the world. But the question: why did you have them in Europe? You didn’t deal with terrorism in a realistic base.

Question 27: So what did Europe do wrong in dealing with them?

President Assad: I think it’s about two things, if you ask me about why. First of all, the European governments didn’t do their job to integrate these people in their societies; they lived in a ghetto. When you live in a ghetto, you’re going to be an extremist. The second one, many European officials have sold their values for the petrodollar, and they allowed the Wahabi Saudi institutions to pay money and to bring this dark and this extremist ideology to Europe, and that’s why now you are exporting terrorists to us. We don’t export, actually, they came to Syria, and then they go back to Europe.

Question 28: They come back to us.

President Assad: And the three criminals who committed the attacks in Paris, all of them lived in Europe; Belgium and France and others. They didn’t live in Syria.

Question 29: Now, internationally, the United States always said “President Assad has to go.” Even yesterday, Secretary Kerry said, “well, maybe not immediately, and we’re not looking for a regime change.” Even the French are now saying the President may be part of a solution. Your luck seems to be changing.

President Assad (sarcastically): Thank them for saying that; I was packing my luggage, I had to leave, now I can stay. We never care about whatever they say. They’ve been saying the same for four years now. Did anything change regarding that issue? Nothing. So, this is a Syrian issue, whether it’s Obama or the United States or Europe or any country, we don’t care about it. As long as the Syrians want this president or any other president to be in power, he will be there. So, to say that that he’s leaving now or leaving in six months or six years, it’s not their business, very simply.

Question 30: Okay, but it might help in negotiations, some sort of peace, their attitude towards you.

President Assad: This is not the issue. That depends on the problem that we’ve had in Syria. It has many aspects. What’s the relation between this president or any other president to be in power and ISIS and al-Nusra and Al Qaeda coming to Syria and terrorists killing and beheading? There’s no relation, so this is just to mislead the public opinion, just to say that the problem is in Syria is the president. So, who’s more important, the president or the country? Of course the answer is the country, so the president has to leave. So, this is the equation that they’re trying to promote. The only equation for the president is the public opinion in his country, like your country, like any other country. Other than this, if they are serious in solving the problem in Syria, every European official just trying to deliver homilies that could be suitable for church and for mosque, not for politicians, they have to go and work to stop the flood and the flowing of terrorists and the money and logistic support, armaments, through Turkey. That’s what they have to do.

Question 31: Turkey is the key in all of this?

President Assad: Of course, this is the logistical key. Of course, Saudi Arabia is the other key, with their money and their ideology.

Question 32: Well, coming to that, you say there’s Turkey, Saudi Arabia. Internally, if there is – because there are three different initiatives to come to some sort of peace process – what would be the parties you are willing to negotiate with?

President Assad: Any person who holds armaments and kills people and destroys public and private properties and so on, he’s a terrorist, so we don’t, as a government, we don’t make negotiations with the terrorists.

Question 34: But the problem in this whole conflict is that everybody does that.

President Assad: Exactly. So, how? How to deal with this situation? Because we are very realistic and pragmatic, we made negotiations with groups of militants, not organizations; we don’t recognize them as legitimate, to say we are making negotiations about the future of Syria. All of them are terrorists, and they don’t have any political agenda, by the way. We made negotiations with a group of those in order to go back to their normal lives, to give up their armaments, and to have amnesty, and it worked, and this is a real solution on the ground now. It’s moving from area to area.

Question 35: Because, as I said, all the parties are involved in shelling, killing, your government as well. How about international parties, because they are involved in this conflict as well. Who would you be willing to talk to? Is it the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or just Iran and Russia?

President Assad: We are talking to everyone who wants to help in solving the problem. We don’t have a problem about talking. The question is who is ready to deliver? That is the question.

Question 36: And who is ready to deliver?

President Assad: None of them, only Russia and Iran and their allies, and the other countries that support politically the Syrian government or the Syrian legitimacy, but not the West, no-one in the West is ready, few countries are ready, because they don’t dare to make contact with Syria to solve the problem unless the United States wants to impose its agenda on them and on us.

Question 37: But in the end, you would have to negotiate with as many parties as possible. Would you be willing to negotiate with parties whose aim it is to have you removed, in the end?

President Assad: Of course, of course. I mean, their way, if they want me to go, they have the ballot box. We are ready, we don’t have a problem. They can convince the Syrian people that there’s a better alternative, this is not an appropriate choice for the future, and the president will leave. We don’t have a problem.

Question 38: That sounds really good, but in practice, realistically, in Syria, if you see the history of Syria, how much freedom do opposition parties have? How much freedom do politicians have to criticize you or to rise up against you?

President Assad: Let me be objective; we’re not Europe yet, and this is a cultural issue, it’s not only political. But we are on the way for more democracy in Syria. We are moving slowly but surely. It’s not something related to the president, because Syria is not my company; it’s a country, it has people. I mean, the process of democracy is a social process, and political at the same time, so we’re moving forward.

Question 39: But, one could say that four years ago, there was a step in that process of people rising up, and there was a brutal crackdown.

President Assad: How many? How many rose up? Do you have a number? The majority of the number, in one day, in Syria, at the beginning of the crisis, was 130,000, let’s make them double, 300, double them again, 600,000. It’s nothing out of 24 million Syrians.

Question 40: So you’re saying nobody really has risen up against you during those day?

President Assad: No, no, you have of course, but it was a mixture between people who really wanted to demonstrate against the political system that they don’t believe in, you have people who have been paid by Qatar in order to demonstrate for the propaganda, and you have the terrorists who have been infiltrating those demonstrations in order to kill the policemen in order to retaliate. That’s what happened in the first week of the crisis.

Question 41: So that’s only what happened? The police retaliated on killings that were done from within the group that was protesting?

President Assad: The first week, we had many policemen being killed by the demonstrators. Who are they? Peaceful demonstrators, of course you had machineguns and you had everything from the very beginning. So, that’s what happened. Anyway, the president, if he wants to leave, he will leave through the constitution and ballot box, and if he wants to come, he will come through the constitution and the ballot box, and both will reflect the public opinion.

Question 42: Has there been credible opposition in the last years, credible people who challenge you?

President Assad: We have, yeah. We have opposition. You can meet them, they are in Syria, they live in Syria, they have grassroots, Syrian grassroots, big, small opposition, new, old. I mean, this is not the issue, but we have them, they are allowed.

Question 43: Because we in the West would think, well, what we have seen in the media, all kinds of media, brutal crackdown, and now a war where there’s stories of barrel bombs, of massive incarceration, of extreme government violence. One would think twice before they would oppose or criticize you.

President Assad: The question is what means would you resort to when you have people killing police and destroying and burning for the first days? It didn’t happen six months later, like the propaganda in the West tried to promote, that the peaceful demonstrations turned into armed actions just because of the crackdown. That’s not true. Again, they killed the policemen in the first week.

Question 44: Looking back, what would you have done differently in 2011, what would you have done differently now?

President Assad: The two things we have based our politics on are two pillars, are dialogue and fighting terrorism. Today we are going to keep fighting terrorism and we are going to continue the dialogue with every involved party in Syria.

Question 45: Even if there will be an uprising like there was in 2011, you would react the same?

President Assad: If the same happens, people killing police, we have to respond. That’s our job as a government.

Question 46: Concluding, if you look back on four years, a large part of the country is under the control of different rebel groups, of ISIS, innocent people are dying on both sides of the front, people are suffering, and you are the president. You are responsible for protecting your people. Do you ask yourself “have I done enough to protect my people?”

President Assad: I cannot judge myself because I am not going to be objective talking about myself, I mean, the Syrian people would say the president did enough or not. At the very beginning, you mentioned the crackdown; many people said the president didn’t do enough to crack down on those terrorists. This is versus what you mentioned, and that has been published in the West. So, if you want to be objective, all of us as Syrians, to judge this situation, it should be at the end of the crisis, because the end result will tell you about the beginning. Now we are still in the middle, it is not enough to talk about this.

Question 47: Okay, but can you look at yourself in the mirror thinking “I am doing enough?”

President Assad: Yes, of course, and that changes every day. Sometimes you judge the same action in two different or three or four different ways every day, because we live with a very quickly changing situation, your mood, and thinking; you’re influenced by all these things on daily basis. So, you may change, but no one of them will be concrete and absolute unless you overcome this crisis. This is where you can think more objectively and realistically about your actions as a president.

Question 48: Last question: how long will this take before it’s resolved?

President Assad: If the responsible countries take actions against the flood and the flowing of terrorists and the logistic support, I can guarantee that it will take less than one year.

Question 49: Less than one year?

President Assad: Less than one year. But the problem is that they are still supporting them on daily basis more and more in order to make it more messy, and to put obstacles in front of any solution, because they want the solution, what they called a political solution, to be ended with the changing of this state, getting rid of this president or depose him, and so on. So, that’s why it will drag on.

Question 50: So, if it were without outside influence, you’d be done in one year.

President Assad: Definitely, for one reason because the terrorists in Syria, they don’t have the social incubator yet. That’s why we do not worry about them.

Journalist: Mr. President, thank you very much.

President Assad: Thank you for coming to Damascus.

The funding to continue the war against ISIL is an authorization of force against ISIL, albeit a quiet one, designed not to attract public attention. Jack Goldsmith, Lawfare, Dec 17, 2015

Money is raining down on the US military complex in the $1.15 trillion spending bill that was unveiled on Wednesday by various leaders of Congress.[1] Of that portion, a good $572.7 billion is set aside for Pentagon expenditure. (These figures tend to be deceptive in themselves, given the notoriously unreliable accuracy of defence accounting.)

The portions, roughly broken down, come to $58.6 billion for so-called Global War on Terror/Overseas Contingency Operations (GWOT/OCO) funds, $111 billion for procurement, which comes to $17 billion more than actual expenditures for the 2015 fiscal year, and $49.8 billion for R&D – $13.7 billion more than 2015 (Defense News, Dec 16).[2]

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) pressed his colleagues to pass the legislation, insisting that the “package reflects conservative priorities in both funding and policy – including support for critical areas such as our national defence, halting many harmful regulations, and trimming wasteful spending.”

The overwhelming message here was placed on security, even if there were also very public utterances on the issue of Puerto Rican debt and an end to the ban on crude oil exports. There was less concern about funding ongoing civilian operations – the stress, rather, was on the issue of entrenching the state in what could only be described as a deeper war footing.

Democrat mainstays, despite facing opposition within their own ranks on various parts of the bill, were similarly eager to get it to pass, which it ultimately did. To not pass it would be irresponsible, suggested Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) while minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was insisting that differences be worked out.[3]

The Omnibus bill contains a few sneaky provisions. All in all, this forms a standard tactic: a weighty volume of 2000 pages, in which various provisions can be slipped in and importantly, not debated with any degree of thoroughness, let alone awareness. In the case of such matters as continued authorisation of force, this is a notable point indeed.[4]

Rogers claims, for instance, that the bill “includes funds to combat the real-world threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).” Some analysis on this suggests that the funds will issue from the OCO funding pool, a practice that has been previously suggested by the Obama administration. In November last year, President Barack Obama proposed amendments for the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of State and Other International Programs to fund Overseas Contingency Operations. These included “$5.6 billion for OCO activities to degrade and ultimately defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – including military operations as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.”[5]

The legal overview of this by legal commentators such as Harvard University’s Jack Goldsmith suggests that Congress will effectively authorise the use of force by way of its appropriations power. This is an interesting point, given that section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution suggests that congressional authorisation for the use of force “shall not be inferred from any provision of law…, including any provision contained in any appropriation Act, unless such provision specifically authorises the introduction of the United States Armed Forces into hostilities”.

Quibblers will see this differently, but it seems clear that a bit of legal acrobatics has been done here to effectively engage the US in deeper involvement in overseas conflict without broader public debate. At the very least, it suggests that the war machine should continue uninterrupted by the intrusiveness of public discussion.

A memorandum opinion for the US Attorney general from the Justice Department regarding continued authorisation for military operations in Kosovo in 2000 is a case in point.[6] The opinion regards it as given wisdom that “Congress may express approval through the appropriations process” in the area of war making.

It doing so, it takes a rather flexible view about the War Powers Resolution framework, which is supposedly designed to “fulfil the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities” and “continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.”

Section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution is effectively neutered, as, according to the Kosovo memorandum, it “does not bar later Congresses from authorizing military operations through appropriation” as a later Congress cannot be bound by the will of a previous one. In any case, one should try as best to see a direct intent on the part of Congress to authorise such force.

An open door in the bill is thereby allowed for the introduction of US armed or military forces into hostilities against Iraq and Syria, or into their respective territories. While the public face of the Obama administration is set against the formal deployment of US combat personnel on the ground, the infrastructure is very much there to permit it. Best, it would seem, to cover those legal channels.

The permanent state of war the US finds itself is not merely set to get deeper at the operational level; it is set to be further legalised, at least in the eyes of Congress, in a surreptitious way. Fine, and importantly informed scrutiny, is set to further abate.

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

Notes

[1] http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20151214/CPRT-114-HPRT-RU00-SAHR2029-AMNT1final.pdf

[2] http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/policy-budget/budget/2015/12/16/congress-includes-5727b-dod-spending-bill/77411080/

[3] http://thehill.com/homenews/house/263683-ryan-pelosi-corral-votes-as-11t-funding-bill-speeds-to-floor

[4] https://www.lawfareblog.com/congress-about-vote-aumf-against-isil-quietly-and-without-debate

[5]https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/budget_amendments/amendment_11_10_14.pdf

[6] http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/2000/12/31/op-olc-v024-p0327.pdf

Spokesperson for  Donald Trump’s front running GOP presidential campaign lashed out at his fellow Republican candidates for saber-rattling about war — inferring that they are all talk and no action — before wondering whether it does the U.S. any good to have nuclear weapons if our leaders are afraid to use them.

Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, Trump spokesperson Katrina Pearson hammered at the other candidates while covering for her boss who, in a recent debate, was stumped when asked the country’s nuclear strike capability known as the “nuclear triad.”

“What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” Pierson asked. “And that’s where we are today and we need to fix these problems. Not just complaining and name-calling about who started this and who started that.”

Pierson’s comments stunned conservative columnist and Desert Storm veteran Kurt Schlichter, who got into a contentious argument with Pierson over her boss’s ignorance on nuclear matters.

“The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing. You want to scare the hell out of the other side,” Schlichter excitedly yelled. “And frankly, my side will be more scared if Donald Trump gets his finger on the button.”

In a previous television appearance, Pierson defended Trump’s much-criticized proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country, telling a horrified S.E. Cupp of CNN: “So what? They’re Muslim.”

Watch video of Pierson on the O’Reilly Factor below, via Mediaite:

United Nations accord imposed despite ongoing clashes inside the country and the presence of the so-called Islamic State

Two regimes claiming to be the legitimate government of the embattled North African state of Libya have signed a unity accord at the aegis of the United Nations.

Martin Kobler, the latest UN envoy to the country which was destroyed after the United States engineered a war of regime-change in 2011, announced the agreement. Kobler is a German career diplomat who was involved in the imperialist wars in Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Whether the unity accord holds depends on many factors. Dozens of other militias and political interests were not party to the talks, including supporters of the former government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi who was killed at the conclusion of the Pentagon and NATO led bombing campaign of March-October 2011.

Beginning on December 17, fighting erupted in the eastern city of Ajdabiya where 14 people were reported killed and 25 wounded. The clashes took place between members of the so-called Libyan National Army and armed groups who have not been clearly identified.

The Expansion of the Islamic State

Some analysts think that the Islamic State could be moving into this area as a result of the political vacuum in existence. The group has established a base within Sirte, the former home of slain leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi who was brutally assassinated during the war of regime-change on October 20, 2011. Sirte, the founding location of the continental organization the African Union (AU), is west of Ajdabiya.

At present IS reportedly controls a 150 mile-wide territory along the Mediterranean coast of Libya with the city of Sirte as its headquarters. On December 11, the rebel group seized control of the ancient Roman ruins at Sabratha, 30 miles to the west of the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

Not only has IS taken control of Sirte and other areas on the western coast but some articles suggest that its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is currently residing there. IS has been severely damaged in Syria where its oil supply lines have been disrupted as a result of the aerial campaign launched by the Russian Federation.

The rebel organization, which the United States administration under President Barack Obama claims is its principal enemy internationally, was created and expanded through the post-occupation political dispensation established by imperialism in Iraq and the war of regime-change in neighboring Syria. IS commands substantial resources including transport trucks, banks and the control of areas of oil production and distribution in both Iraq and Syria.

According to an article published by the writer on international affairs, Joseph Micallef, which appeared in the Huffington Post, “Libya has always figured prominently in the Islamic State’s expansion plans. The first three foreign provinces of Islamic State were all in Libya. On November 13, 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the creation of three new Islamic State wilayats, or provinces, in Libya (Wilayat al-Barqah, Wilayat al-Tarabulus and Wilayat al-Fizan). The three wilayats corresponded to the three historic regions of Libya (Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan). In recent weeks there have been indications that the Libyan city of Sirte would become the new capital of the Islamic State should Raqqa fall to anti-Islamic State forces.” (Dec. 19)

Islamic State Build-up Coincides With Plans for Imperialist Occupation

Coinciding with this largely forced agreement was the announcement of the planned deployment of a 6,000-person military force commanded ostensibly by the former colonial power of Italy.

Britain has also stated that it will supply 1,000 troops to this operation which would enforce the agreement brokered by UN envoy Kobler. Both imperialist states participated in the air war and blockade against the Jamahiriya in 2011.

Since the Pentagon and NATO-led war of regime-change in 2011, oil production within Libya has declined from approximately 1.5 million barrels per day down to 350,000 to 400,000 at present. Estimates suggest that IS has control of 10 percent of oil production. The Huffington Post article says that IS earns profits of $20-25 million a month from oil it controls and markets from the North African state.

In addition to the proposed intervention of Britain, France has deployed 3,500 troops to a new base just 45 miles from the southern border with Libya for supposed counterinsurgency operations. The government of President Francois Hollande has entered the bombing campaign in Syria in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris during November where 130 people were killed in various locations.

A leading British-based newspaper, the Guardian, revealed on December 19 that “Western officials are scrambling to get authorization for Libyan airstrikes in the coming days before Islamic State captures the strategically important town of Ajdabiya, gateway to the country’s oil wealth. Fierce fighting is raging in the town, which sits on a rocky plateau dominating the eastern oil ports. Its capture will give Isis command of the Sirte basin, home to Libya’s largest collection of oilfields.”

This same report goes on to stress that “British, American and French jets are on standby for strikes from bases across the Mediterranean, with drones and reconnaissance planes already in the air. U.S. special forces are in the Libyan desert, with one unit inadvertently photographed at the western Wattiya airbase last week.”

U.S. special forces entered the country but were exposed by the Libyan Airforce in a Facebook posting on December 17. There were reports that one 20-member unit was chased away by a local militia.

Illustrating the urgent character of imperialist policy towards Libya, the Guardian also says “A vast armada of aircraft is on standby. American F-15s, which bombed an al-Qaida gathering in the town (Adjabiya) in July, are at bases in Italy. RAF Typhoons and Tornados based in Cyprus, detailed for Syria bombing, can be switched south with the use of mid-air refueling tankers. French reconnaissance planes are making passes over Isis bases and U.S. special forces are criss-crossing the region.”

Obama in a press conference on December 18 said that the U.S. should have occupied Libya in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Gaddafi government. Nonetheless, the president refused to acknowledge the degree of destabilization and impoverishment which has characterized Africa’s once most prosperous state since the western intervention of 2011.

Such an occupation and bombing campaign will inevitably create even greater levels of disruption and dislocation. European participation derives in part from the desire to halt the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing Africa, the Middle East and Asia stemming from the series of wars of destabilization and regime-change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

The U.S. is following through on its efforts to enhance the military presence of the Africa Command (AFRICOM) which has thousands of troops on the continent and off its shores. Pentagon forces and contractors are building temporary bases, airstrips, intelligence gathering operations and forming partnerships with neo-colonial dominated regimes.

In Somalia, the U.S. provides substantial funding and coordination for the 22,000-member African Union Mission (AMISOM), along with the maintenance of drone operations and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) field station. Flotillas of Pentagon warships are patrolling the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia, right across from Yemen, where it is waging a proxy war against the Islamic Republic of Iran through supporting an alliance led by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

These developments indicate that the militarism of Washington and Wall Street will continue throughout the remaining year of the Obama administration and into the reign of whoever takes control of the U.S. government in 2017.

President Obama has infuriated Official Washington’s neocons by accepting the Russian stance that the Syrian people should select their own future leaders through free elections, rather than the neocon insistence on a foreign-imposed “regime change,” reports Robert Parry.

The Washington Post’s editorial board is livid that President Barack Obama appears to have accepted the Russian position that the Syrian people should decide for themselves who their future leaders should be – when the Post seems to prefer that the choice be made by neoconservative think tanks in Washington or other outsiders.

So, in a furious editorial on Friday, the Post castigated Secretary of State John Kerry for saying – after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow – that the Obama administration and Russia see the political solution to Syria “in fundamentally the same way,” meaning that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could stand for election in the future.

Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Secretary of State John Kerry before meetings at the Kremlin on Dec. 15, 2015. (State Department photo)

The Post wrote: “Unfortunately, that increasingly appears to be the case — and not because Mr. Putin has altered his position. For four years, President Obama demanded the departure of Mr. Assad, who has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons, ‘barrel bombs,’ torture and other hideous acts. Yet in its zeal to come to terms with Mr. Putin, the Obama administration has been slowly retreating from that position.”

The Russian position, which Obama finally seems to be accepting, is that the Syrian people should be allowed to choose their own leaders through fair, internationally organized elections, rather than have outside powers dictate who can and who can’t compete in a democratic process. Obama’s previous stance was that Assad must be prevented from running in an election.

But that meant the Syrian bloodshed and resulting chaos – now spreading across Europe and into the U.S. political process – would continue indefinitely as the United States took the curious position of opposing democracy in favor of an insistence that “Assad must go,” a demand favored by U.S. neocons and liberal interventionists, Israel and regional Sunni “allies,” such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

To the chagrin of the Post’s editors, Obama finally ceded to the more democratically defensible position that the Syrian people should pick their own leaders. After all, if Obama is right about how much the Syrian people hate Assad, elections would empower them to implement their own “regime change” through the ballot box. But that uncertain outcome is not what the Post’s editors want. They want a predetermined result — Assad’s ouster — regardless of the Syrian people’s wishes.

And regarding the editorial, you also should note the reference to Assad killing “his own people with chemical weapons,” an apparent allusion to the now-discredited – but still widely accepted (inside Official Washington at least) – claim that Assad was behind a lethal sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.

To this day, the U.S. government (or, for that matter, the Washington Post) has not presented any verifiable evidence to support the Assad-did-it allegation, but it nevertheless has become an Everyone-Knows-It-To-Be-True “group think” based on endless repetition, much as Official Washington concluded that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had WMD stockpiles, based on the fact that it was stated as flat fact by lots of Important People, including the Post’s editorial writers.

Official Washington’s epistemology seems to be that if enough Important People say something is true, then it becomes true – regardless of where the actual evidence leads. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]

Hypocritical Outrage

Other parts of the Post’s attacks are equally dubious in that the Post’s editors — who were all-in for the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq and wouldn’t think of sharing blame for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed as a result of President George W. Bush’s Washington Post-endorsed invasion — are now outraged over Syria’s homemade “barrel bombs” and blame Assad for all the deaths, even though many of the dead were Syrian soldiers killed by Islamic jihadists, armed and financed by U.S. “allies,” Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others.

And, by the way, some torture blamed on Syria was carried out in coordination with the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program as part of the “global war on terror.” For instance, Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was seized by the U.S. government at New York’s Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 while  on his way home to Canada, was shipped to Syria as a suspected Al Qaeda member. Arar was tortured in Syria before being cleared of suspicions by both Syria and Canada, according to a later Canadian investigation.

But, hey, you don’t expect The Washington Post’s neocon editors to give you any honest context, do you?

The more immediate issue is the Post’s fury over the prospect that the Syrian people would be allowed to vote on Assad’s future rather than have it dictated by neocon think tanks, Islamic jihadist rebels and their Turkish-Saudi-Qatari-Israeli-CIA backers.

The Post’s editors wrote, “On Tuesday in Moscow, Mr. Kerry took another big step backward: ‘The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change,’ he said. He added that a demand by a broad opposition front that Mr. Assad step down immediately was a ‘non-starting position’ — because the United States already agreed that Mr. Assad could stay at least for the first few months of a ‘transition process.’”

Kerry “now agrees with Mr. Putin that the country’s future leadership must be left to Syrians to work out,” the Post’s outraged editors wrote. Yes, you read that correctly.

Though the Post predicted on Friday morning that the notion of the Syrian people being allowed to decide their future leaders was “a likely recipe for an impasse,” later on Friday the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously in favor of a roadmap for a cease-fire in Syria, negotiations on a transitional government and elections within 18 months after the start of talks.

The agreement makes no reference as to whether Assad can or cannot run in the new U.N.-organized elections, meaning apparently that he will be able to participate – surely to the additional dismay of the Post’s editors.

Many Obstacles

Obviously, the U.N. plan faces many obstacles, especially the continued insistence on “regime change” from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other Sunni-led regional governments, which disdain Assad who is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Further condemning Assad in their eyes, he seeks to maintain a secular government that protects Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other minorities.

The Saudis, Turks and Qataris have been among the leaders in supporting violent Sunni jihadists, including Ahrar al-Sham and Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which operate under the Saudi umbrella called the Army of Conquest, which has received hundreds of sophisticated U.S.-made TOW missiles that have proved devastating in killing Syrian government troops. Israel also has provided some support to these jihadists operating along the Golan Heights.

While Turkey, a member of NATO, denies assisting terrorists, its intelligence services have been implicated in helping Nusra Front operatives carry out the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack outside Damascus, with the goal of pinning the blame on Assad and tricking Obama into ordering a devastating series of air strikes against Syrian government forces. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Was Turkey Behind Syria Sarin Attack?”]

Turkey also has allowed the hyper-brutal Islamic State to transit through nearly 100 kilometers of openings on the Syrian-Turkish border, including passage of vast truck convoys of Islamic State oil into Turkey for resale, a reality that Obama recently raised with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has long promised but failed to seal the border. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Blind Eye Toward Turkey’s Crimes.”]

At home, President Obama also faces political difficulties from Israel and from Official Washington’s alliance of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who have made Assad’s ouster a cause célèbre despite the disastrous experiences overthrowing other secular regimes in Iraq and Libya.

In the past, Obama has been highly sensitive to criticism from this group, including nasty comments on the Post’s editorial page. But the Post’s ire on Friday suggests that – at least for the moment – Obama is putting pragmatism (i.e., the need to stop the Syrian killing and the global insecurity that it is causing) ahead of neocon/liberal-hawk ideological desires.

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).

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe yesterday in Tokyo expressed their “strong opposition” to China’s actions in the South China Sea and their “strong support” for the US military build-up or “rebalance” throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

While claiming to contribute to “peace and stability” in the region, the joint statement by two of Washington’s closest allies in Asia will only further inflame the region’s flashpoints and heighten the danger of conflict.

The two leaders met as the Wall Street Journal reported an American B-52 bomber last week flew within two nautical miles of Cuarteron Reef in the South China Sea. It is the second US military intrusion within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit surrounding a Chinese-administered islet in the South China Sea.

Pentagon spokesman Commander Bill Urban claimed that “for this mission, there was no intention of flying within 12 nautical miles.” However, whether intentional or not, the breach by nuclear-capable, strategic bombers directly into air space claimed by China is highly provocative.

The Chinese defence ministry said that two B-52 bombers had trespassed into its airspace on December 10, had been closely observed and told to leave. It branded this intrusion and others in the area as “serious military provocations” and warned that the Chinese military would take “all necessary measures” to protect China’s sovereignty.

In October, the guided missile destroyer, the USS Lassen, deliberately intruded within the 12-nautical-mile limit around two Chinese atolls in a so-called “freedom of navigation” operation. Last month, two B-52s flew close to Chinese islets in the South China Sea.

The Japanese and Australian governments have both backed Washington’s reckless provocations. In their joint statement yesterday, Turnbull and Abe declared “their strong opposition to any coercive or unilateral actions that could alter the status quo” in the East China and South China Seas.

While not named, the statement was obviously targeting China. The two leaders called for a halt to “large scale land reclamation or construction” in the South China Sea and to the use of “any land features for military purposes.” They urged all claimants to “exercise restraint,” “ease tensions” and “act in accordance with international law, including the principles of freedom of navigation and overflight.”

The comments are fully in line with Washington’s escalating campaign this year to demand that Beijing end its land reclamation. While condemning China for militarising the strategic waters, the US has exploited Chinese activities on a handful of small atolls as the pretext for stepped up naval and air patrols and encouraging its strategic partners to do the same.

Last week the BBC revealed that the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) had flown a P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft close to a Chinese-controlled islet in the South China Sea. The BBC news team overheard the crew telling the Chinese navy by radio that “we are an Australian aircraft exercising international freedom of navigation rights”. The Australian Defence Department later acknowledged the flight, saying it was “a routine patrol” that was part of Operation Gateway from November 25 to December 4.

There is nothing “routine” about these Australian air patrols. Since the USS Lassen incident in October, Washington has been pressing Canberra to take part in confrontational “freedom of navigation” actions in the South China Sea. Australian Defence Chief of Joint Operations David Johnston yesterday confirmed that the Chinese navy had repeatedly challenged the Australian aircraft and called on it to leave the area.

The repeated needling and humiliation of China by the US and its allies is putting growing pressure on Beijing to capitulate or respond. The Chinese-language version of an editorial in the hawkish, state-owned Global Timeswarned “Australian military aircraft” not to “test China’s patience by flying close to China’s islands… it would be a shame if one day a plane fell from sky and it happened to be Australian.”

The Australian government has already made clear that its “freedom of navigation” flights will continue. Based on Fairfax Media sources, the Sydney Morning Herald today stated that “the tempo of such flights had been deliberately increased to signal to Beijing that Australia does not accept China’s dubious territorial claims.”

In Tokyo, Australian Prime Minister Turnbull gave full support to Abe’s agenda of Japanese remilitarisation, declaring that Australia “welcomed and supported” the recent passage of Japan’s controversial security laws and “proactive contribution to peace.” The new legislation “reinterprets” the country’s constitution to allow the Japanese military to engage in so-called “collective self-defence”—that is, to take part in US-led wars of aggression in Asia and around the world.

Since coming to power in 2012, Abe has expanded Japan’s military budget, established a US-style National Security Council and sought to whitewash the war crimes of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s. Japan’s military strategy has been refocussed on so-called “island defence” in the country’s southern island chain, adjacent to China, where Tokyo and Beijing are engaged in a rancorous dispute over uninhabited islets in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

Encouraged by the US, the Abe government is boosting anti-ship and anti-aircraft batteries in the southern island chain and will increase the number of military personnel in the area by about a fifth to almost 10,000 in the next five years. The Guardian today reported that Japanese officials for the first time have openly confirmed that the military build-up is aimed against China. Once the missile batteries are in place, Chinese shipping passing from the mainland into the Western Pacific will be within their range.

The Abe government is also engaged in aggressive diplomatic efforts to strengthen its ties in the region and internationally. Prior to meeting with the Australian Prime Minister, Abe was in New Delhi last week for talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to boost economic and military relations directed against China. This week the Japanese and Indonesian foreign and defence ministers held their first ever “2 plus 2” meeting in Tokyo which again emphasised “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea.

In the space of five years, the Obama administration has transformed the long-running territorial disputes in the South China Sea into an explosive tinder box with the potential to spark a conflict between nuclear armed powers.

The recklessness of Washington’s actions is only underscored by the Pentagon’s declaration that the latest US intrusion into Chinese-claimed air space was “not intentional.” In the Middle East, the US wholeheartedly backed Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian bomber that apparently strayed briefly into Turkish air space last month. If China had done the same to last week’s B-52 flight, the world would now be on the brink of war.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s three-day (December 11 to 13) visit to India was seized upon by both sides to enhance their economic and burgeoning military-strategic ties, with a view to advancing their mutual interests across the broader Indo-Pacific region and, in particular, countering China’s growing influence.

Both countries are viewed by Washington as pillars of its aggressive drive to strategically isolate and encircle China, the so-called “Pivot to Asia.” Long the US’s most important Asian ally, Japan has, with Washington’s enthusiastic support, recently thrown off the remaining legal-constitutional constraints on the deployment of its military overseas and foreign arms sales.

India, especially since Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in May 2014, has integrated itself ever more deeply into the US’s anti-China offensive. Although not a formal US treaty ally, India is now procuring much of its weaponry from the US, is pursuing closer military-strategic ties with both Japan and Australia (the US’s most important regional allies), and has repeatedly parroted Washington’s claims that Beijing is threatening the “freedom of the seas” in the South China Sea.

While currently proceeding under the aegis of the US “pivot,” Abe’s push for a closer partnership with India is driven by Japanese imperialism’s own substantial military-strategic and economic ambitions. Abe has long emphasized the purported strategic synergies between Japan and India, including the opportunity for Japan to exploit India’s abundant supplies of cheap labour and transform India into an alternative global production-chain hub to China.

During his visit, Abe met with Modi and Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and signed upwards of 16 bilateral agreements on a wide range of issues, including defence, strategic cooperation, energy, railways, tax matters and health care.

Highlighting the expansive character of their countries’ strategic partnership, Abe and Modi issued a statement titled “India and Japan Vision 2025: Special Strategic and Global Partnership, Working Together for Peace and Prosperity of the Indo-Pacific Region and the World.”

In strategic terms, the most significant agreement was the signing of a civil nuclear pact, after more than five years of protracted negotiations. The Indo-Japanese nuclear deal clears the way for India to purchase civilian nuclear technology not just from Japanese companies, but from several major US and French firms, like GE, Westinghouse and Areva, in which Japan has significant stakes.

Emphasizing the pact’s strategic character, Modi declared it “more than just an agreement for commerce and clean energy.” It is “a shining symbol of a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership in the cause of a peaceful and secure world.”

As is the case with India’s civil nuclear deal with the US, Indo-Japanese civilian nuclear cooperation will further boost India’s military prowess by allowing New Delhi to concentrate its indigenous civilian nuclear program and fuel supply on its nuclear weapons program.

Because of the devastation caused by the US atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, there has been great popular opposition in Japan to any action by Tokyo that could contribute to nuclear proliferation.

Previously Tokyo demanded that New Delhi sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which outlaws all nuclear explosions. But it has now dropped the issue, saying it is satisfied with India’s “voluntary” moratorium on nuclear tests.

Top Japanese officials told the Times of India that their fear that China could emerge as a supplier of civil nuclear technology to India was a major factor in Tokyo’s decision to drop its CTBT demand. In explaining the shift, Abe reportedly told his senior officials, “economic choices are security choices.”

India and Japan also signed two military agreements, one concerning the transfer of defence technology for joint research, development and/or production and the other the protection of classified military information. It had been expected that during Abe’s visit, the two countries would ink an agreement for India to buy 15 or more US-2 amphibious aircraft from Japan at a cost of more than $1.5 billion. However, according to Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, a final decision on that purchase has yet to be made. A complicating factor is India’s demand that Japan enter into a coproduction deal with one or more Indian defence manufacturers.

Abe and Modi did announce that Japan would now be a permanent participant in the Malabar Indo-US naval exercise, making it an annual trilateral event.

The US has been strongly encouraging India to enter into trilateral and quadrilateral military-security cooperation, along with Japan and Australia—a development that Beijing views as particularly threatening. In September India agreed that regular trilateral meetings with US and Japanese diplomats, started at the joint secretary level in December 2011, should be upgraded to foreign ministers.

Commenting on these developments, Ashley Tellis, a George W. Bush administration official who played a key role in negotiating the US-India civil nuclear deal, told the Economist, “The geopolitical rapprochement between India and Japan has been nothing short of spectacular.”

During his visit, Abe also reiterated Japan’s support for India’s “Act East” policy, that is, New Delhi’s drive to develop economic and military-strategic ties with Southeast Asia. In their joint statement, Abe and Modi committed their governments to ‘seeking the synergy between India’s ‘Act East’ policy and Japan’s ‘Partnership for Quality Infrastructure’,” Tokyo’s name for the infrastructure program it is promoting in opposition to Beijing’s “Maritime Silk Route” and “Silk Road Economic Belt.”

The Obama administration has also repeatedly promised to help India realize its “Act East” policy. Both Washington and Tokyo are eager to undermine China’s influence in Southeast Asia, as the region remains a crucial supplier of natural resources and cheap labour for Japanese industry and is pivotal to the Pentagon’s plans to impose an economic blockade on China in the event of open conflict.

The Indian elite has also turned to Japan in the hopes of securing desperately needed investments, especially in infrastructure projects. During Abe’s visit, it was announced that Japan has agreed to lend New Delhi US $12 billion at concessionary rates to build the country’s first bullet train. It will connect Mumbai, India’s financial capital, with Ahmedabad, a manufacturing center in Modi’s home state, Gujarat.

India’s national security establishment is eager to pursue closer ties with Tokyo. Writing in the Indian Express on December 15, strategic analyst Raja Mohan noted that New Delhi had not known how to respond to Beijing’s repeated offers to include it in its Asian infrastructure initiative, which has as one of its principal goals countering US military-strategic pressure.

However, continued Mohan, “The unfolding development partnership with Abe…allows Modi to respond more effectively to China… That Abe has his own reasons to compete with China on infrastructure exports has brought the interests of Delhi and Tokyo in alignment on promoting regional connectivity.” Mohan emphasized that Tokyo is offering to help India develop transport links within South Asia, helping New Delhi to realize its goal of dominating the region, as well as with Southeast Asia.

China has responded cautiously to India’s ever-deeper military-security integration with its more powerful rivals, clearly fearing that an aggressive response would only serve to push New Delhi still closer to them. This was similarly true of Beijing’s response to Abe’s visit to India.

Adverse Chinese reaction has focused on Japan, with the official media accusing Tokyo of “trying to contain” Beijing. An article published in the state-run Global Times as Abe began his India visit said that the Japanese prime minster “will not miss any chance to draw Modi over to his side to counter China,” but then claimed, “The Indian government has no intention to take sides between China and Japan, aware that setting itself against Beijing will bring no good to New Delhi.”

Saudi Arabia’s Yemen has a fascist whiff of Franco’s Spain circa 1936

The first lie about Yemen’s dirty war in the world of official journalism is that the fighting there has been a “nine-month conflict” and that “the conflict started in March,” as the New York Times put it on December 17. This is simply not true in any meaningful sense. What started in March was a savage, one-sided air war backed by the US, all too similar to the Nazi-backed one-sided air war in Spain in the thirties that gave the world “Guernica” .

Yemen’s civil war has already lasted decades, on and off. And Yemen has an even longer history of conflict (all of which the Times knows, without letting perspective clarify its reporting). For decades at least, Yemen has suffered from chronic foreign interventions and manipulations, none of which have brought much peace to the Yemeni people, who live in one of the oldest civilized regions of the world.

The illegal, brutal war that goes unspoken (except as a “nine-month conflict that started in March”) is the genocidal bombing of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies. This is essentially a rolling war crime of unending dimension, all supported materially, tactically, and unjustly by the US. The US is at war (the naval blockade alone is an act of war) with Yemen, on the side of the aggressors, and Congress doesn’t seem to know about it, presidential candidates fail to talk about it, the media report it little but dishonestly, and the nation stumbles on in bloody silence as its moral numbness deepens.

A Houthi Shiite fighter stands guard on Thursday as people search for survivors under the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi airstrikes near Sanaa Airport. (photo: AP)

The sides in Yemen (there are at least four) are complicated, but the main axis of conflict is between the Houthis (and elements of the Yemeni government) and the remnants of the Yemeni government driven into exile by the Houthis, triggering the Saudi bombing campaign. The Houthis are an indigenous, tribal, Zaidi Shia Muslim population in northwest Yemen that has been in rebellion since 2004. They live in a region where people have lived continuously for more than 7,000 years. The Yemeni government in exile has only a veneer of legitimacy, having been installed by a foreign alliance (including Saudi Arabia) and confirmed in an election without opposition. Neither side is particularly savory. A purported Houthi logo reads: “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Saudi Arabia is an intolerant police state that has promoted fundamentalist Sunni jihad and counts ISIS among its allies in Yemen. These people, one way and another, have been at each other’s throats for centuries.

Periodic peace talks put off mass starvation among Yemeni civilians       

The possibility of good news recently was that peace talks began on December 15 at an undisclosed location in Switzerland, mediated by the UN special envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed. He reportedly facilitated an exchange by shuttling back and forth between the parties, working on issues as a middleman as long as the parties remain unwilling to talk directly. The talks are “aimed at establishing a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire,” according to the UN. Previous talks in June and September have produced only marginal benefits, mostly allowing humanitarian aid to be distributed to a population close to starvation and without a medical system (the Saudis have bombed hospitals). Whether the talks can do more than minimally relieve some suffering is doubtful, since the Saudi side has shown no willingness to negotiate anything but the terms of Houthi surrender.

The role of the UN is self-contradictory in Yemen. UN aid agencies are trying to save as many civilian lives as possible (about 6,000 have died in the conflict so far, roughly half of them civilians) and the UN special envoy is trying to find a negotiated settlement. The UN Security Council has made a negotiated settlement all but impossible by passing in April, in the midst of the Saudi-led war in violation of international law, a resolution that virtually calls for the Houthis to surrender and disarm, with no provision for their security. Resolution 2216 in effect applauds the Saudi-led indiscriminate bombing of Yemen (the exact, Orwellian language is “commending its engagement” [emphasis in original]). Resolution 2216 essentially blames the Houthis for everything:

such actions taken by the Houthis [that] undermine the political transition process in Yemen, and jeopardize the security, stability, sovereignty and unity of Yemen.

Unity of Yemen is a fantasy. Sovereignty of Yemen has been violated by anyone who wants to, including the Saudis, al Qaeda, ISIS (the Islamic State), and the US, first with drone assassinations, now with the Saudi-led war.  Security in Yemen has been little more than a random hope for years, not least because of US civilian-killing drones. If the political transition process in Yemen had been more than political myth-making, the Houthis’ interests would have been respected and peace preserved. Resolution 2216:

Calls on all parties to comply with their obligations under international law, including applicable international humanitarian law and human rights law.

The resolution passed without dissent (Russia abstained) with some countries voting for compliance with laws they were openly violating in their participation in the Saudi-led war. While singling out the Houthis for blame, US Representative to the UN Samantha Power omitted mention of US participation in the bombing campaign and naval blockade. She managed to express the full absurdity of a resolution divorced from reality, when she said that:

The resolution also recognized the costs of the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis. A consensus agreement of all political parties was the only way forward; the United Nations must continue its efforts in that light.

Continuing to talk about talking allows bombing to go on unimpeded

The most obvious way to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, even back in April, was to stop bombing and lift the blockade. It wasn’t going to happen. It hasn’t happened.

Those who might do most to quell the carnage aren’t about to do so. The apparent reason for their collective murderousness is a belief that the Houthis, as Shia Muslims, are some sort of advance strike force for Iran. They don’t often say this out loud, and they have so far offered no compelling evidence that Iran’s involvement in Yemen is any more than a tiny fraction of their own almost unlimited warfare. Basically, the attacks on the Houthis and their allies are little more than internationally sanctioned gang rape. That ugly reality gives the Saudi aggressors and their Yemeni puppet government little incentive even to acknowledge just claims on the other side, much less to make concessions to them. In Qatar (whose planes also bomb Yemen), the Yemeni Prime-Minister-in exile recently made his side’s intransigence and willingness to rely on force clear, as far as any talks go:

Despite the optimism, and based on our experience, the talks won’t be easy….  We are seeking to reach peaceful solutions but the stick will remain to achieve what could not be achieved in the talks.

At the same time the talks began in Switzerland, the parties had agreed to start a seven-day ceasefire in Yemen on December 15. So far, the ceasefire has held, sort of, with both sides reporting violations on the ground. The Saudi side has continued some air strikes (killing at least 15) but says Houthi violationsmay cause the talks to collapse. An exchange of several hundred prisoners on each side in Yemen was held up by al-Baydah tribesmen and then apparently carried out. The Houthis continue to hold members and relatives of the government-in-exile in Saudi Arabia. Saudi planes and gunboats have attacked targets in the north daily since the ceasefire began. By the time anyone reads this, the ceasefire may be over in principle as well as in fact.

It’s not a ceasefire for everybody in Yemen anyway. ISIS continues to fight for control of Aden. On December 17, ISIS claimed credit for the suicide car-bomb that killed the governor of Aden, installed by the Saudi-backed Yemeni government after the Saudi-coalition re-took Aden from the Houthis last July. ISIS referred to the Saudi-back governor as a “tyrant.” Not far from Aden, al Qaeda recently took over two other cities. Both ISIS and al Qaeda have benefitted from the US-back Saudi obsession with the Shia Houthis. As the crazies in and out of US government call for more and more war in the Middle East, the pointlessness and incoherence of American policy becomes so stark it’s a wonder so few people seem to notice. Killing people by the millions failed for 20 years in Indo-China, why does anyone expect it to work in the Middle East?

Like Spain in 1936, Yemen has a civil war in which foreign countries, especially the US, have intervened militarily against no effective military opposition. US military officers meet daily with Saudi military officers in Riyadh, where together they plan the next massacre in the defenseless killing ground. Yemen was the poorest country in the region even before the richest country in the region (Saudi Arabia) joined with the richest country in the world (US) in an all too literal war on poverty. And mostly, except for organizations like Democracy NOW, this unrelenting horror goes unreported in the gaseous media cloud of promoting and tut-tutting Donald Trump and other distracting irrelevancies.

Yemen today resembles Spain in the thirties in another respect: it is a real-world test zone for advanced Western weaponry. Amnesty International and other human rights groups have documented how the UK government’s illegal sale of advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia end up killing civilians in Yemen (like the British cruise missile that destroyed a ceramics factory). And it’s hardly limited to the UK. Saudis buy billions of dollars of weapons from the US and anyone else who’s selling. The US and others sell the Saudis internationally-banned cluster bombs. The Saudis drop them on Yemen. Business is booming.

And Saudi Arabia says it has pledges from 34 governments to join a new Islamic coalition to fight terrorism. How many of these governments, like Saudi Arabia, rule their countries by terror? Think about it. The leader of the coalition carrying out massive terror-bombing in Yemen is going to lead another coalition in counterterrorism.

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

Iranian Supreme Leader’s top adviser for international affairs Ali Akbar Velayati warned that Washington plans to disintegrate regional states into smaller countries to make them weak and guarantee Israel’s security.

“The US is after implementing its plot to create a Greater Middle-East whose aim is disintegrating Iraq into three countries and dividing Syria into five states in a bid to downsize countries to provide security to the Zionist regime,” Velayati said on Saturday.

He also referred to the regional developments, and said,

“What we are witnessing today, including the creation of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the ISIL, is aimed at confronting the Islamic Awakening and annihilating the chain of resistance.”

“Today, Syria is the golden chain of resistance and the US, the western states and their allies in the region are attempting to destroy this chain,” Velayati said.

His remarks came as General Vincent Stewart, the head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, claimed in September that Iraq and Syria were unlikely to emerge intact from years of war and sectarian violence.

In Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency boss indicated that he believes it unlikely that a government in Baghdad could hold authority over the disparate regions within the country’s official borders;

Stewart claimed that he is “wrestling with the idea that the Kurds will come back to a central government of Iraq”.

Also in the same month, CIA Director John Brennan echoed Stewart’s idea that the borders of the Middle-Eastern countries have irreparably broken down as a result of war and sectarianism.

“I think the Middle East is going to be seeing change over the coming decade or two that is going to make it look unlike it did,” said Brennan, remarking that Iraqis and Syrians now identify themselves more by their tribe or religious sect, than by nationality.

After the comments, Iraqi Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ahmad Jamal lashed out at the US intelligence officials for their comments about disintegration of Iraq and Syria.

“The US officials’ remarks on the possible disintegration of Iraq and the zero chance for the country’s return to its past conditions are strongly rejected,” Jamal told FNA.

Noting that the terrorists active in Iraq today have come from 80 different world states, he said, “The westerners had better prevent the flow of terrorists from their countries to Iraq instead of raising doubt about Iraq’s unity.”

Saudi-allied ground forces press towards capital of Sanaa while attacking position in the north

A Saudi-led United States supported coalition continued to bomb Yemen on Dec. 17 amid the announcements of a ceasefire.

Talks between the various political parties and alliances inside the country agreed on a seven-day cessation of hostilities in mid-December. Nonetheless, there has been no easing of tensions on the ground or airstrikes carried out by the Saudi Arabian and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) supported coalition carrying out its deadly bombardments utilizing Pentagon intelligence and re-fueling technology.

Meanwhile ground forces composed of the same Saudi-led alliance has launched an offensive near the capital city of Sanaa. Ansurallah (Houthi) forces have controlled the capital of the impoverished Middle Eastern state since September 2014.

The Ansurallah Movement has its origins among the Shiite population in the north of Yemen which has been waging a protracted struggle against neighboring Saudi Arabia for many years.

Opponents of the Houthis say that they are backed financially, politically and militarily by the Islamic Republic of Iran and therefore seek to frame the escalating conflict as a proxy war between Riyadh and Tehran.

Military units fighting under the banner of the ousted President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi who are supported by the United States backed Saudi-led coalition were engaging Ansurallah-controlled areas in the Nihm district, Sanaa province, after claiming significant advancements in Marib province, just east of the capital. Forces loyal to Hadi, and its allies in the area, attacked Nihm’s Fardha military base, located northeast of the capital.

The area between the Fardha military base and the capital, approximately 40 kilometres, is largely rugged mountainous terrain. On December 18, Saudi-allied forces seized Hazm, the capital of Jawf province, northeast of Sanaa.

Later on December 19, the Hadi-allied Saudi-backed units had moved to Jawf, taking over Al-Ghayl and Al-Maton districts, said sources in the western-backed Popular Resistance militia.

It was estimated that at least 68 people died on December 19 in clashes between pro-Saudi fighters and Ansurallah units in northern Yemen, local residents reported, prompting additional warnings by the United Nations of a total breakdown in the negotiations in Switzerland. The casualties included 28 fighters allied with Hadi and the Saudi-GCC coalition.

Sources in the northern region reported that the Ansurallah units lost 40 people in heavy battles near the northwestern town of Haradh, which was attacked earlier in the week by Hadi loyalists. Approximately 50 Ansurallah and 40 Saudi-backed fighters were wounded in the clashes.

Fighting intensified during the early morning hours on December 19 when Saudi-GCC allied forces sought to move towards the Red Sea port of Midi. Hadi and Saudi-allied forces trained in nearby Saudi Arabia invaded northern Yemen from the monarchy on December 17 attacking Haradh.

Ansurallah forces are fighting alongside Yemeni soldiers remaining loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh who left office after mass demonstrations in 2011. The escalation of conflict in Yemen since late March has resulted in the deaths of 7,500 people, the wounding and injuring of 14,000 more and the displacement of millions. Fighting has spilled over into eastern Saudi Arabia where the population is Shiite.

Washington Has Central Role in the Yemen War

The Saudi-GCC coalition which uses Pentagon provided warplanes, bombs and intelligence resources, is obviously escalating its attacks on several regions of the country accusing the Ansurallah (Houthis) of violations of the ceasefire. However, the Houthis-allied armed forces have no air power and are fighting on the ground against well-armed units of the Saudi-backed militias along with special forces and troops from Riyadh, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Sudan.

In addition to these foreign forces involved in the efforts to drive back the Ansurallah from the areas they have seized over the last fifteen months, the UAE has recruited and deployed troops from the U.S.-backed South American state of Colombia. This government is the third largest recipient of Washington’s direct aid falling right under the State of Israel and Egypt.

According to Press TV in a report published on December 19, “The United Arab Emirates has secretly dispatched some 300 Colombian mercenaries to Yemen to fight on its behalf alongside Saudi-led militants, the French news agency AFP says. Citing informed sources, the agency said about 300 of the 3,000 Colombians recruited so far by the UAE have been sent to fight as full-fledged mercenaries in southern Yemen. Emirati military officials initially decided to deploy 800 Colombians to Yemen, but had to rethink their plans after recruits complained that fighting in Yemen was not included in their contracts.”

This decision to contract Colombian troops was made in part as a result of the killing of 30 Emarati troops during fighting in September in the south of Yemen. The arrangement for the deployment of the Colombians was carried out by Blackwater, the so-called military services firm which has trained special forces in the UAE.

Blackwater military contractors played a significant role during the initial U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003-2004 when some of their employees were accused of committing atrocities against people in this Middle Eastern state.

Press TV in the same above-mentioned article claims “Sources in Colombia have also confirmed the presence of Colombian nationals in Yemen, saying the mercenaries have been promised a weekly salary of USD 1,000 and UAE citizenship. On November 25, the New York Times said the UAE had ‘secretly’ deployed 450 Latin American troops, most of them from Colombia, as well as Panamanian, Salvadoran and Chilean soldiers, to fight in the war on Yemen.”

The humanitarian crisis inside the country has reached catastrophic proportions since the Saudi-GCC coalition has prevented food supplies, medicines and water from reaching affected areas in the conflict. Hospitals, schools and residential districts have not been spared in the bombing explaining the high rate of civilian casualties.

Ports on the Yemeni coast have been bombed repeatedly since March. Yemenis have taken refuge in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa which hosts a military base of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) at Camp Lemonier.

Nonetheless, it was reported that a decline in fighting on the ground in some areas provided hope for the immediate future, although many are concerned that it could erupt again soon with the same ferocity. The Saudi-GCC coalition has been bombing Yemen since late March and also providing arms and coordination for a ground war designed to force the Ansurallah and its allies out of Southern and Central Yemen.

The prisoners swap was also halted in the Bayda province after local leaders blocked the transfer saying that their fighters were not included in the operations.

The supply of arms to Saudi Arabia by Britain has also received criticism inside the UK by a leading newspapers as well as Amnesty International for fueling the conflict that has killed thousands. Newspapers such as the Independent and the Guardian suggest that the supply of arms from London is creating an even more deadly situation on the ground in Yemen.

Talks are scheduled to continue in Switzerland. Although it remains to be seen what real impact the discussions will have considering the escalation of fighting in the central and northern regions of the country.

Yemen is yet another example of the failed imperialist war policy towards numerous Middle Eastern and North African states. At present, 60 million people have been displaced both internally and externally as a direct result of the Pentagon wars throughout various geo-political regions of the world. This crisis of displacement is the largest in history even exceeding figures from the conclusion of World War II.

After an initial rise following the decision by the US Federal Reserve to lift interest rates by 0.25 percentage points on Wednesday, stock markets around the world have experienced significant declines over the past two days.

The biggest falls were in the United States, where the Dow was down by 368 points at the close of trade on Friday, a drop of more than 2 percent, while the more broadly based S&P 500 fell by 1.8 percent. The CBOE VIX index, which measures market volatility and is often referred to as the “fear gauge,” went over 20, a level regarded as indicating a high degree of market stress.

Markets also fell around the world after rising in the immediate aftermath of the Fed decision. The Euro Stoxx index dropped by 1.4 percent on Friday after rising earlier in the week. In Japan, the Nikkei index closed 1.9 percent lower.

Underlying the volatility on share markets are a series of widening fault lines in the global economy produced by the deepening trend toward stagnation and slump. The increased turbulence in financial markets is an expression of the fact that massive financial speculation, fuelled by the Fed and other central banks’ pumping of trillions of dollars into the banking system since the 2008 Wall Street crash, is being overwhelmed by developments in the real economy, particularly the decline in industrial production.

So far, this interaction has found its sharpest expression in the market for high-yield, or “junk,” corporate bonds, particularly in the energy sector, because of the sharp fall in oil and other energy prices, coupled with the decline in basic industrial commodity prices to their lowest levels since the global financial crisis.

This week, the price of Brent crude oil hit a seven-year low of $36.33 per barrel, further heightening problems in the energy junk bond market, where money poured in to finance risky ventures when the price of oil was trading at around $100 per barrel less than two years ago.

But the turbulence is not confined to energy-related finance. According Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company that supplies information to financial markets, investors withdrew $5.1 billion from US mutual funds that purchase bonds rated as investment grade by credit-rating agencies—the largest such withdrawal since 1992. This was accompanied by a further withdrawal of $3 billion from junk bond funds. In the week to December 16, it is estimated that $15.4 billion was withdrawn from taxable bond funds.

In a report on the state of financial markets issued this week, the Office of Financial Research (OFR), set up by the US Treasury after the 2008 crisis, painted a picture of, in the words of Financial Times economic commentator Gill Tett, a “distinctly distorted American financial system” resulting from seven years of ultra-low interest rates.

The OFR said that “credit risk in the US non-financial business sector is elevated and rising.” It went on to warn that “higher base rates may create refinancing risks… and potentially precipitate a broader default cycle.”

In other words, a situation has been created where a default or a series of defaults in high risk areas could set off a chain reaction in the system as a whole, recalling the effects of the sub-prime mortgage collapse. When that crisis emerged in 2006 and 2007, then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke brushed it off as a relatively small problem that could be easily contained.

The worsening financial situation is compounded by the divergence in the policies of the world’s major central banks. While the Fed has moved towards tightening, although at a very gradual pace, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan are continuing with various forms of “quantitative easing” aimed at pumping more money into the financial system.

In the midst of growing financial turbulence, however, the official mantra is that the US is in the midst of an expanding economic recovery and is considered to be a “bright spot” in the world economy.

This soothing scenario is belied by both longer-term developments and the immediate situation. Since the US economy started growing in the June quarter of 2009, its gross domestic product has increased by only 2.2 percent per year, the lowest pace for any post-recession phase in post-World War II history. As a result, it took five years for the US economy just to make up for the loss of employment and economic output sustained as a result of the financial crisis.

Now figures from the industrial sector point to another downturn. US industrial production last month was down by a seasonally adjusted 0.6 percent from October, the biggest drop since March 2012 and the third straight month it has fallen. Manufacturing output, which comprises three quarters of industrial production, was flat. Mining output was down 1.1 percent for the month and is now 8.2 percent below the level of a year ago.

According to a report published in the Financial Times on Tuesday, a common theme of major companies supplying industry, such as Caterpillar and Deer & Co, is that “tough times are back,” with some even pointing to “the arrival of an industrial recession.”

The stagnation in US industry is part of an emerging global trend. Data on industrial employment in China—the world’s major manufacturing centre—shows that aggregate employment in manufacturing fell by 1.9 percent in the year ending in October. In the third quarter, employment growth in the sector was at its lowest rate on a quarterly basis since 2000. The biggest declines are in heavy industry, with iron ore mining and processing employment down by 12 percent, coal mining down 7 percent, and steel employment down 6 percent.

The slowdown in China is impacting on so-called emerging markets more generally. Of 22 big emerging markets tracked by JPMorgan Chase, 21 have had their growth forecasts for 2016 downgraded. Brazil, which is highly dependent on the Chinese economy, is the sharpest expression of this trend. Its economy is contracting by 4.5 percent according to the latest data. Brazil’s worsening situation was highlighted this week when Fitch became the second of the major credit rating agencies to downgrade the country’s debt to junk status.

The World Bank has warned of “the beginning of an era of weak growth for emerging markets.” This will have a significant impact, as these economies account for almost 40 percent of global output. They could also be hit by significant financial turbulence, with the International Monetary Fund warning that they have incurred $3 trillion more in debt than is warranted by commodity prices and global demand.

Two inescapable conclusions flow from the latest economic data and the growing turbulence in financial markets.

First, the supply of trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money by the Fed and other central banks has done nothing either to resolve the crisis which erupted in 2008 or bring about a genuine economic recovery.

It has, however, subsidized a vast transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, fuelling a tripling of stock prices, record corporate profits and CEO bonuses, and ever greater levels of social inequality. The vast sums handed to the banks and hedge funds have not, for the most part, been invested in production, but used instead to fund parasitic activities such as job-slashing corporate mergers, stock buybacks and dividend increases. To pay for the resulting bankrupting of state treasuries, governments around the world have imposed brutal austerity measures against the working class.

Second, these policies have only created the conditions for another financial crisis, whose consequences are potentially even more devastating than those triggered by the sub-prime mortgage collapse. The deepening decline in the real economy and the mounting signs of financial distress demonstrate that the source of the global economic crisis is the capitalist system itself, which cannot be reformed, but must be overthrown and replaced by the international working class in the fight for socialism.

The basic policy-difference on Syria has been between U.S. President Barack Obama’s insistence that Syria’s legal President must be ousted before any peace-process starts, versus Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence that no foreign power possesses the right to determine whom the leader of Syria or any other country will or won’t be — only the residents there do, via free and fair democratic elections. Putin proposes an internationally monitored and verified election in Syria to determine the identity of Syria’s President; Obama has rejected that proposal — until now.

The world’s most-reliably honest and accurate news-medium, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or German Economic News, reports, on December 19th, three major articles about the latest stages of Obama’s newfound verbal commitment to Putin’s policy. They are all summarized here, with factual corrections added by me, because no news-source is 100% reliable:

“UN-Sicherheitsrat verabschiedet Syrien-Resolution einstimmig” or “UN Security Council Adopts Syria-Resolution Unanimously,” reports that the U.N. Security Council has unanimously adopted a resolution that “essentially corresponds to the Russian proposals of the past few weeks”; and, so, “the international community concludes a combined joint action for a cessation of [Syrian] hostilities.” And:

“US Secretary of State John Kerry said after the Security Council meeting chaired by him, that the resolution will send ‘a clear message to all concerned that it is now time to stop the killing in Syria’.”

However, actually, it’s not merely “Russian proposals of the past few weeks,” because as far back as 6 June 2012, Bloomberg News had headlined, “Russia Open to Syria Transition in Shift Away From Assad,” and reported that,

“While Russia for the first time sees a change of government in Syria as possible via a series of steps, it remains adamant that the outcome not be imposed from outside, according to a Russian official not authorized to speak publicly on this matter. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said yesterday that his country has never insisted on Assad staying in power and a decision on his future must be taken by the Syrians themselves, state-run Rossiya 24 television said on its website.”

(More recently, the Guardian on September 15th reported that former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari went public saying that the West’s “failure to consider the Russian [2012] offer had led to a ‘self-made disaster’.” So: this has been Russia’s position consistently since that time (not only “the past few weeks”), and it is only now being accepted (at least verbally) by the regime in Washington, and their toadies in other ‘Western’ countries. (I had first reported on Obama’s change of position on this November 15th, and reported further on it December 15th.)

“UN-Friedensplan für Syrien: Das Verdienst der viel geschmähten Russen” or “UN peace plan for Syria: The merit of the much maligned Russians,” opines that

“It speaks [favorably] for the US government [i.e., Obama] that it [he, via his subordinate John Kerry] has listened to Vladimir Putin” in this matter. This article summarizes the history by saying that “the Russians have said from the outset that they will not compete against the USA, but want to fight alongside the Western alliance against Islamist terrorism. The plan for an 18-month transitional period, as it has now been decided by the UN, comes from the Russians. They also have, contrary to the Western popular fiction, from the very beginning said that they do not want to hold on to Assad.” However, that slightly misstates Putin’s position, which has instead been: Russia will insist upon the next Syrian President’s being selected only by the Syrian population, regardless of what their choice might happen to be. To say that “they [the Russian government] do not want to hold on to Assad” is to imply that Putin wouldn’t prefer that the outcome of a democratic election in Syria result in the election of Assad or someone like him (i.e., non-sectarian, and especially not pro-Sunni, which would mean anti-Shiite, which would include anti-Iranian, pro-Arabic, meaning here also being pro-U.S.-aristocracy, a pawn of Washington), which is to make a misleading, and even false, statement. (Even the best news-medium isn’t perfect, as these examples clearly show. But at leastDWN  tries its best to be truthful, whereas the norm in the Western press is instead to lie whenever necessary in order to keep up the Western — basically America’s — aristocracy’s anti-Russian propaganda-line.)

“Trotz Friedens-Plan: Nato schickt Kriegsschiffe in das Mittelmeer” or “Despite peace plan: NATO sends warships into the Mediterranean Sea,” reports that,

“Despite the UN peace plan for Syria, NATO stepped up its military presence in the Mediterranean area. NATO announced that it would support Turkey in the monitoring of the airspace at the border with Syria. Given the uncertain situation, the representatives of the alliance had decided to help, said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday. NATO would provide, inter alia, AWACS aircraft. In addition, the monitoring on the Mediterranean Sea will be increased by German and Danish military vessels.” Along with that comes their editorial opinion, which is unwarranted: this article opines that the NATO move somehow “shows that the US government is only partially able to control the alliance. NATO has now opened so many fronts that it is possible for the government in Washington barely to make informed decisions.” The editors’ inference and implication there, that Obama couldn’t have prevented NATO from doing this, is almost certainly false. I therefore shall here engage in my own editorializing, by asserting that progressives throughout the world (such as the owners of DWNseem to be) almost consistently exhibit an unstated underlying assumption that Obama isn’t really set upon the U.S. aristocracy’s decades-long effort and intention to conquer, to take control of, Russia. That assumption flies in the face of Obama’s actual record.

“Linkspartei: Nach UN-Einigung Bundeswehr-Einsatz in Syrien stoppen” or “Left Party says UN agreement requires Germany’s military mission in Syria to stop,” reports that Germany’s Party of the Left asserts: “New troops would run counter to the peace plan.” Here is the rest of that brief article:

The chairman of the Left Party, Bernd Riexinger, said:

I very much welcome that after nearly five years we finally take concrete steps toward peace negotiations in Syria. The federal government must now immediately stop with all its might the Bundeswehr war deployment. Hundreds of millions would be tax money now spent for a German war effort to thwart the peace plan of the United Nations. Federal Foreign Minister Steinmeier also must speak out for an internationally supervised arms embargo.

Apart from peace negotiations and cease-fire agreements in Syria and an internationally monitored arms embargo strengthening nonviolent working organizations, humanitarian assistance to the civilian population and reconstruction assistance by armed groups, free regions and self-government structures are necessary. Everyone knows that there is no quick solution to the existing conflicts in the Middle East. Above all, there is no military solution.

So: Germany’s right-wing Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is receiving pressure from a marginal leftist Party, to abandon the American anti-Assad war. Both Merkel and her master, Obama, are, in their decisions of action and of inaction, trying to do whatever they can to carry out the U.S. aristocracy’s objectives, even if they can’t say publicly that they still are trying to find some way to defeat Putin, and, in Syria, to block the Syrian election that Putin has been pressing for. Because, as every knowledgeable person knows, but the Western ‘news’ media prefer to ignore when they don’t come right out with lies denying it: any free and fair internationally monitored and verified election in Syria will almost certainly choose Bashar al-Assad by a huge margin, to lead the country. Most Syrians — even many Syrian Sunnis — prefer a non-sectarian leader, not the type that the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies want to impose there to defeat Russia.

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.

First published by Global Research on December, 15  2013, this article confirms the insidious role of US-NATO in the recruitment of terrorists. According to Israeli intelligence sources, the recruitment of “Islamic fighters” was launched in 2011 by NATO and the Turkish High Command. The following countries have supported Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists in Syria: US, UK, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Jordan

*      *      *

From the outset, the Western military alliance has (covertly) supported the terrorists with a view to destabilizing Syria as a nation state.

Lest we forget, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA. 

The US, NATO, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have channeled most of their support to the Al Qaeda brigades, which are also integrated by Western Special Forces.

British and French Special Forces have been actively training opposition rebels from a base in Turkey.

Israel has provided a safe have to Al Qaeda affiliated rebels in the occupied Golan Heights.

Western special forces have been training the rebels in the use of chemical weapons in Jordan.

NATO and the Turkish High command have been involved in the development of a jihad involving the recruitment of thousands of “freedom fighters”, reminiscent of  the enlistment of  the Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war:

Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (Debkafile, August 31, 2011). Debka, August 2011 emphasis added)

This is a war of aggression. It is not a civil war.

The New Islamic Front

The Al Qaeda fighters integrated by mercenaries, trained in Saudi Arabia and Qatar constitute the mainstay of so-called opposition forces, which have been involved in countless atrocities and  terrorist acts directed against the civilian population from the outset in March 2011.

The existence of “more moderate opposition brigades” supported by the West is a myth. They exist in name, they do not constitute a meaningful military force. They are not the object of significant support by their Western handlers, who prefer to channel their aid to the Al Qaeda affiliated brigades.

The FSA and its Supreme Military Command essentially serve as a front organization. The SMC under the helm of General Salim Idriss has largely been used to channel support to the terrorists.

In recent developments, fighting has broke out between the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels covertly supported by the West and the more moderate FSA brigades, officially supported by the West.

Having “expressed their concern”, US officials have announced the holding of talks with the rebel commanders of the New Islamic Front (created in November).

The objective, however,  is not to mediate between opposing factions. What is contemplated are new procedures for channeling support to the Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists, through the newly created Islamic Front umbrella organization.

The New Islamic Front regroups six or seven major rebel entities, including the former  Syrian Islamic Front ( الجبهة الإسلامية السورية‎ al-Jabhah al-Islāmiyya as-Sūriyyah) which constituted a Salafist umbrella organisation. The Salafist Ahrar al-Sham was the lead entity of the (defunct) SIF. The latter  has been disbanded and integrated (under a new label) into the New Islamic Front, which is working hand in glove with Washington.

The expected contacts between Washington and the radical fighters reflect the extent to which the [New] Islamic Front alliance has eclipsed the more moderate Free Syrian Army brigades — which Western and Arab powers tried in vain to build into a force able to topple President Bashar Al Assad. The talks could also decide the future direction of the Islamic Front, which is engaged in a standoff with yet more radical Sunni Muslim fighters from the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

 A rebel fighter with the Islamic Front said he expected the talks in Turkey to discuss whether the United States would help arm the front and assign to it responsibility for maintaining order in the rebel-held areas of northern Syria.

The Islamic Front rebel told reporters that rivalry with the ISIL had already led to a spate of hostage-taking between the two sides, and that the Front’s decision to talk to the Americans had further escalated tension. Although he described the two Islamist forces as ideologically close, he said ISIL appeared set on confrontation, perhaps encouraged by some of their backers in Saudi Arabia. (Gulf Today, December 13, 2013)

Former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Stephen Ford  has been involved in negotiations with the Islamic Front. Ford had established contact with New Islamic Front leaders in November.

The involvement of Ambassador Ford should come as no surprise. He was one of the main architects of the death squad brigades sent into Syria, starting in March 2011. He has, no doubt, been in permanent liaison with Al Qaeda rebel commanders from the outset of the insurgency.

Robert S. Ford had previously worked at the US embassy in Baghdad (2004-2005) under the helm of Ambassador John D. Negroponte. He played a key role in implementing the Pentagon’s “Iraq Salvador Option”. The latter consisted in supporting Iraqi death squadrons and paramilitary forces modeled on the experience of  Central America. With regard to Syria, the US State Department has been collaborating with several US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon is overseeing US support to rebel forces in Syria.

A Syria policy committee was created in 2012. It involved the participation of Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford, former  CIA director David Petraeus, Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and Derek Chollet, Principal Deputy Director of Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff at the State Department.

Under Jeffrey Feltman’s supervision, the actual recruitment of terrorist mercenaries, however, is carried out in Qatar and Saudi Arabia in liaison with senior intelligence officials from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya and NATO. The former Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar, who remains a key member of Saudi intelligence, is said to be working with the Feltman group in Doha. (Michel Chossudovsky, “The Salvador Option For Syria”: US-NATO Sponsored Death Squads Integrate “Opposition Forces”, Global Research, 28 May 2012)

Expanded US Support to Al Qaeda Affiliated Rebels in Syria

What the US and its allies are establishing are new effective “direct channels” for increasing their support to their Al Qaeda foot soldiers, essentially using the new Islamic Front as a “Go Between”. This procedure is  contemplated following the apparent demise of the Supreme Military Command of the FSA.

Until recently US and allied support to Al Qaeda was channeled to the rebels through an indirect route, namely through Supreme military Command (SMC) commander General Salim Idriss.

General Idriss is reported to have fled Syria for Doha,  “as a result of the Islamic Front taking over his headquarters.” The takeover of SMC headquarters has, according to reports

“prompted the United States and Britain to announce [December 11] that they were suspending non-lethal aid to northern Syria, due to fears of equipment ending up in the wrong hands.”

This again is a smokescreen: the New Islamic Front which attacked the SMC headquarters is working in close liaison with its Western handlers including Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford.

Washington intends to use the Islamic Front to channel its support to the more radical Al Qaeda factions including Al Nusrah which, according to reports, has established ties to the New Islamic Front.

The Obama Administration has committed itself to “an expanded Syrian insurgency that includes the recently-formed Islamic Front”:

The Front has been pressing for inclusion in the SMC, and wants to be represented at the Geneva talks, according to rebel commanders. … Ex-Ambassador Ford is traveling to London on Friday to meet other international backers of the opposition, and then to Turkey for discussions with the Syrian National Coalition. He may also meet there with the Islamic Front, said the senior official. (EA World View, December 13, 2013

The propaganda ploy is to portray the new Islamic Front as “moderate”.  With the FSA Supreme Military Command in disarray, Washington’s objective is to provide a semblance of legitimacy to the insurrection largely integrated by the Western military alliance’s Al Qaeda foot soldiers.

The creation of a pro-US Islamic Front serves that purpose, namely to channel money and weapons directly to the rebels via the new Islamic Front umbrella organization.

Kerry made the comment during his Tuesday Moscow visit – at Washington’s request. 

Both countries are unable to square the circle on their differing views on Syria, despite their diplomatic rhetoric suggesting otherwise.

Two major issues separate both sides. Washington won’t agree to recognize certain indisputable terrorist groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate, responsible for gruesome atrocities against civilians. 

Russia maintains they all must be called what they are, nations worldwide united against them.

The second sticking point is over who should lead Syria, including its president and majority parliamentarians. Washington wants a pro-Western puppet of its choosing, supported by likeminded legislators. Russia insists it’s up to Syrians alone – with clear core international law backing.

No nation may interfere in the internal affairs of any others for any reason except self-defense if attacked – even then only if Security Council authorized.

No Security Council resolution or Damascus permission authorized Washington and coalition allies to bomb Syrian territory and invade with small numbers of combat troops – on the phony pretext of combating ISIS.

Assad is fighting to keep what the vast majority of Syrians want, namely their sovereign independence, putting them at odds with US imperial objectives.

Syria is Obama’s war, launched in March 2011, ongoing for nearly five years, along with other US imperial wars fully responsible for the severest refugee crisis since WW II – besides the millions of corpses and dismembered bodies, a stark testimony to US barbarity.

Kerry came to Moscow for another try at getting Putin to bend to America’s will, a futile mission.

Washington escalated its military operations in Syria, exclusively bombing infrastructure and government targets along with coalition allies – supporting, not opposing ISIS.

Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mikdad blasted US-led intervention in his country, saying:

“We doubt (it’s) sincere in their fight against terrorism. They do not coordinate their actions with the Syrian Army.”

“This makes those forces illegal in Syria’s territory. One cannot say they are fighting terrorism. (It) must be a practical task, not this advertising gig that the West is engaged in.”

Mikdad blasted Saudi Arabia for forming a pro-ISIS bloc, comprised of terrorists wanting Assad forcibly ousted.

“Syria does not negotiate with terrorists,” Mikdad stressed. The only place we meet them is (on) the battlefield. He welcomed support from any groups dedicated to combating ISIS and other terrorist groups – at the same time praising Russia for achieving “significant successes.”

A Final Comment:

Iraqi parliamentarians want Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to request Russian aid in combating ISIS. Washington is going all-out to prevent it.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter arrived in Baghdad to warn him against accepting Putin’s help. He’s stopped short of asking so far – for how long remains to be seen. Iraq has no chance to defeat its scourge without it.

US-led NATO war on Libya ravaged and destroyed the country, creating a continuing cauldron of violence in a divided country.

The West recognizes the Tobruk-based regime, led Abdullah al-Thani. A rival power headed by Prime Minister Khalifa al-Ghawi operates from Tripoli, the nation’s capital.

Days earlier, both sides agreed to a UN-brokered deal to form a unity government based in Tripoli. Earlier diplomatic efforts failed – perhaps this one as well.

General Khalifa Hafter was involved in US-led NATO’s war to oust Muammar Gaddafi. He’s now al-Thani’s armed forces commander.

On Friday, he said “(w)e welcome support from Russia in fighting terrorism.” ISIS has a foothold in Libya. Hafter commented after meeting with UNSMIL (UN peacekeeping) head Martin Kobler.

“(E)very day we wait, that you wait, is a gain for Daesh in this country,” said Kobler. “(I) am very glad to see that the general agrees on the urgency of the matter.”

Whether Russia will be asked to help (and if Putin will agree) remains to be seen. Washington will exert extreme pressure to prevent it.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

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Another UN Security Council Resolution on Syria: Hold the Cheers

By Stephen Lendman, December 19 2015

On Friday, Security Council members unanimously adopted SC Res. 2254 on Syria. It calls for a ceasefire and diplomatic settlement to the long-running conflict – launched by Obama in March 2011 for regime change, using ISIS and other terrorist groups as imperial foot soldiers..