Global Research

Following nearly eight years of negotiations, 12 Pacific Rim countries – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam – have agreed to take part in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a sweeping trade deal that affects some 40 percent of the global economy.

The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) has closely monitored the TPPA throughout the negotiation period and regards several aspects of the draft text as deeply troubling from the perspective of regional stability, economic feasibility, social justice, and national sovereignty. While advocates of the deal have attempted to allay public criticism, there is a need to reaffirm concerns shared by wide segments of society across all the participating nations.

The TPPA aims to enforce a common regulatory framework structured around the norms of American trade policies that govern rules for tariffs and trade disputes, patents and intellectual property, foreign investment, and other areas such as environmental regulations and internet governance.

Despite a level of secrecy that barred even elected public representatives of participating countries from access to the deal’s draft text during the negotiating process, advisors from major multinational corporations played a consistent, key role in forming the deal’s proposed measures.

This is no ordinary trade deal – it is a fundamental aspect of Washington’s pivot-to-Asia policy, involving the large-scale refocusing of American corporate and military muscle within the heart of the ASEAN region.

The TPPA aims at nothing less than formulating new rules for international trade around core US strategic interests, and in the process overshadowing key functions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a comparatively more even platform for discussing issue of global trade.

The agreement does not include China. The exclusion of the region’s largest economy and world’s second-largest (and by some measures largest) economy is no accident. It is a central aspect of the TPPA’s strategic policy function: harnessing the power of the developing nations throughout ASEAN as an economic counterweight to Beijing for the benefit of the United States.

As the TPPA is implemented, it is possible that friction could occur between Washington and Beijing, as the former reaps preferential treatment from the agreement, which in turn could affect relations between China and certain ASEAN states to the detriment of peace and stability in the region.

Only 4 out of 10 ASEAN states are party to the agreement’s founding group; the trade ties that will emerge from the TPPA, which will reflect the inclusion of some ASEAN states and the exclusion of others, could be inimical to intra-ASEAN harmony.

The most egregious aspect of the trade deal is the Investor-State-Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which would allow corporations to seek restitution against states in an international arbitration court for the contraction of their potential future profits as a result of government regulations.

ISDS-enforced agreements effectively put global multinational companies on a level legal playing field with national governments, thereby limiting the scope of domestic policies that governments can undertake without potentially being challenged for impinging on investor rights.

Acquiescing to ISDS provisions systematically undermines the integrity of public institutions in participating countries and their domestic arbitration instruments while significantly lowering the bargaining power of domestic labour and rights advocacy groups.

The agreement encompasses numerous areas of concern that intimately relate to human health and well-being – from unimpeded entry of genetically modified products into domestic markets, the gradual elimination of tariffs on alcoholic beverages and tobacco, the neglect of any measures to combat climate-disrupting emissions spurred on increased shipping and mass consumption, to the drastic extension of patents on pharmaceutical products that will impede access to affordable medicines. Furthermore, proposed regulations of the internet will require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to more actively monitor users to enforce copyright protections at the expense of individual privacy.

In actuality, the TPPA obliges signatory countries to reshape their national laws and economic policies to conform to a neo-liberal agenda set by giant multinational corporations, to the benefit of local elites at the expense of the region’s working classes and poor.

The agreement’s political undercurrents are apparent in view of the unprecedented measures that the US is attempting to push through that codify legislation to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel – essentially designed to discourage governments around the world from participating in BDS activities by leveraging the incentive of free trade with the US.

The economic policies pushed by the US and its allies – backed to the hilt by multinational corporate interests ­– are demonstrably against the public good and show disregard for national sovereignty and political independence.

Facing notable domestic opposition, each country must now assess its own situation and decide whether or not to agree to the deal’s terms. It should not be forgotten that Malaysia withdrew from a Malaysia-US Free Trade Agreement negotiation in 2009 because the deal being negotiated was perceived to be against national interests.

JUST believes that Malaysia would be better off showing similar courage in the face of the TPPA. It isn’t a question of ‘losing out’ or being ‘left behind’. ASEAN itself has initiated its own vision for free trade, the Regional Cooperation for Economic Partnership (RCEP), with negotiations expected to be completed next year.

ASEAN and the region as a whole would be better positioned to throw its weight behind a trade architecture that is inclusive, formulated on a truly level playing field and capable of demonstrating greater respect for national sovereignty and social priorities.

We have forgotten that the sanctions preceding the illegal invasion of Iraq intentionally destroyed water treatment centers and directly killed 500,000 children under age five and about 1.2 million others.

The West’s on-going impunity as it continues to perpetrate genocide in Iraq should alert us to the dangers of repeated offenses elsewhere. Preliminary reports, for example, indicate that NATO is targeting water infrastructure as it illegally bombs Syria.

The illegal invasions of Iraq and Libya were sold to us through lies and deceptions. And yet we remain seemingly immune to reasonable, well-documented information that the war on Syria is also being perpetrated by means of lies and deception.

Strategies of deception are being perpetrated by warmongering imperialists in all of these wars, yet despite the on-going holocaust, and the real threat of nuclear war, the same genocidal strategies are being successfully employed again.  And the public remains remarkably oblivious to what is happening.

What are these strategies, and how can we counter them?

A “soft power complex” engineers domestic hatred towards perennially re-branded enemies, and consent for permanent, illegal warfare, beneath false banners of “democracy”, “freedom”, or “humanitarian intervention”.  It also engineers murderous chaos and destabilization in target countries.  Sometimes there are unforeseen consequences, but none of the strategies are mistakes, as apologists would have us believe.

Sources of the globalized deception are “Non-Governmental Agencies” (NGOs) — such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), — as well as oligarch–funded foundations, Public Relations (PR) companies, think tanks, and intelligence agencies.

Mainstream media (MSM) often uses PR-engineered sources for its stories – the “White Helmets” in Syria would be a good example – and it often tells its stories using commentators who have largely undisclosed links to the Military Industrial Complex (MIC).  For example, an October, 2013 analysis by the public accountability initiative, titled, “Conflicts of interest in the Syria debate|An analysis of the defense industry ties of experts and think tanks who commented on military intervention”, discloses widespread conflicts of interest involving 22 media commentators who offered ostensibly “objective” commentaries about a previously planned, illegal (future) invasion:

 Industry ties of commentators profiled:

Source: http://public-accountability.org/2013/10/conflicts-of-interest-in-the-syria-debate/

Not only are MSM stories rife with undisclosed prejudices and conflicts of interest, as listed above, but some transformative stories themselves are likely dramatic presentations masquerading as reality.   And it’s all legal.

According to an amendment to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the House Bill H.R 5736 (now law), the federal government of the United States can now legally propagandize the domestic public.

Arguably, this makes staged theatrical presentations, featuring crisis-actors, and purporting to be “reality”, legal.

Consequently, not only are we contending with false media source information, corporate media gatekeepers, and commentators with largely undisclosed conflicts of interest, but now we must also contend with fabricated dramas orchestrated to invoke primordial fears and unthinking reactions in mass populations. It’s a closed loop circuit of lies, deceptions, and behaviour modification writ large. Recent evidence demonstrates, moreover, that the matrix of deceptions works brilliantly to engineer consent for the most heinous crimes imaginable.

Democracy demands an informed population, yet governing agencies are working overtime to ensure that their “audience” remains deluded.  The degenerate “controllers” are winning. The dystopian future envisioned by Orwell has arrived.

In recent weeks one nation after another is falling over themselves, literally, to join the turkey shoot known, erroneously, as the war in Syria, ostensibly against the Islamic State or Daesh. The most wanted but most feared question is where will this war frenzy lead, and how can it be stopped short of dragging the entire planet into a world war of destruction?

On September 30, responding to a formal invitation or plea from the duly-elected President of the Syrian Arab Republic, the Russian Federation began what was an initially highly effective bombing campaign in support of the Syrian Government Army.

On 13 November following the terror attacks claimed by ISIS in Paris, the French President proclaimed France was “at war” and immediately sent her one and only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to Syria to join the battle. Then on December 4, the German Parliament approved sending 1,200 German soldiers and six Tornado jets to “help” France. Reports out of Germany say the Germans will not work with Russia or the Assad regime, but with CentCom command in Florida and coalition headquarters, not in Damascus, but in Kuwait. The same week the UK Parliament approved sending British planes and forces to “fight ISIS” in Syria. Again we can be sure it’s not to help Russia’s cause in cooperation with the Syrian Army of Assad to restore sovereignty to Syria.

Then Turkey’s hot-head President Recep Erdoğan, fresh from his criminal, premeditated downing of the Russian SU-24 in Syria, orders Turkish tanks into the oil-rich Mosul region of Iraq against the vehement protests of the Iraqi government. And added to this chaos, the United States claims that its planes have been surgically bombing ISIS sites for more than a year, yet the result has been only to expand the territories controlled by ISIS and other terror groups.

If we take a minute to step back and reflect, we can readily realize the world is literally going berzerk, with Syria as merely the ignition to a far uglier situation which has the potential to destroy our lovely, peaceful planet.

Something major missing

In recent weeks I have been increasingly unsatisfied by the general explanations about who is actually pulling the strings in the entire Middle East plot or, more precisely, plots, to the point of reexamining my earlier views on the role of Saudi Arabia. Since the June, 2015 surprise meeting in St Petersburg between Russian President Putin and Saudi Defense Minister Prince Salman, the Saudi monarchy gave a carefully cultivated impression of rapprochement with former arch-enemy Russia, even discussing purchase of up to $10 billion in Russian military equipment and nuclear plants, and possible “face time” for Putin with the Saudi King Salman.

The long procession of Arab leaders going to Moscow and Sochi in recent months to meet President Putin gave the impression of a modern version of the walk to Canossa in 1077 of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa Castle, to beg revocation of Henry’s ex-communication. This time it looked like it was the Gulf Arab monarchs in the role of Henry IV, and Vladimir Putin in the role of the Pope. Or so it seemed. I at least believed that at the time. Like many global political events, that, too, was soaked in deception and lies.

What is now emerging, especially clear since the Turkish deliberate ambush of the Russian SU-24 jet inside Syrian airspace, is that Russia is not fighting a war against merely ISIS terrorists, nor against the ISIS backers in Turkey. Russia is taking on, perhaps unknowingly, a vastly more dangerous plot. Behind that plot is the hidden role of Saudi Arabia and its new monarch, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, together with his son, the Defense Minister, Prince Salman.

Saudi ‘impulsive intervention policy’

German media has widely reported a leaked German BND intelligence estimate. The BND is Germany’s version of the CIA. The BND report, among other things, concentrates on the rising role of the King’s son, 30-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Referring to the child prince’s important role the BND states, “The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy.”

Prince Salman is Defense Minister and led the Kingdom, beginning last March, into a mad war, code-named by Salman as “Operation Decisive Storm,” in neighboring Yemen. Saudis headed a coalition of Arab states that includes Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. The Prince is also head of the Saudi Economic Council which he created.

The new King, Salman, is not the benign sweet guy his PR staff try to paint him.

As my soon-to-be-released book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy, documents in detail, ever since CIA Cairo Station Chief Miles Copeland organized the transfer of the Muslim Brotherhood, banned in Egypt for an alleged assassination attempt against Nasser, to Saudi Arabia in the early 1950’s, there has existed a perverse marriage of the Saudi monarchy and radical “Islamic” terrorist organizations. As described by John Loftus, a former US Justice Department official, by the joining of Egypt’s Muslim Brothers and Saudi strict Islam, “they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabism.”

Allen Dulles’ CIA secretly persuaded the Saudi monarchy in 1954 to help rebuild the banned Muslim Brotherhood, thereby creating a fusion of the Brotherhood with Saudi ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam and, of course, backed by the vast Saudi oil riches. The CIA planned to use the Saudi Muslim Brothers to wield a weapon across the entire Muslim world against feared Soviet incursions. A fanatical young terrorist named Osama bin Laden was later to arise out of this marriage in Hell between the Brotherhood and Wahhabite Saudi Islam.

King Salman was in the middle of creating Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda as it was later dubbed in the media. His involvement goes back to the late 1970’s when he, as Governor of Riyadh, was named head of major conservative Saudi charities later discovered financing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Bosnia. Salman worked intimately as the financial funding conduit for what became Al Qaeda together with bin Laden’s Saudi intelligence “handler,” then-head of Saudi Intelligence, Prince Turki Al-Faisal and the Saudi-financed Muslim World League.

King Salman in those days headed the Saudi High Commission for Relief to Bosnia-Herzegovina, a key front for al-Qaeda in the Balkans in the 1990s. According to a United Nations investigation, Salman in the 1990s transferred more than $120 million from commission accounts under his control — as well as his own personal accounts — to the Third World Relief Agency, an al-Qaida front and the main pipeline for illegal weapons shipments to al-Qaida fighters in the Balkans. Osama bin Laden was directly involved in those operations of Salman.

During the US invasion of Iraq in 2003-4, Al Qaeda entered that country, headed by Moroccan-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had pledged allegiance to bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, creating Al Qaeda in Iraq, later calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq, the Saudi-financed forerunner of ISIS. A declassified Pentagon DIA document shows that in August 2012, the DIA knew that the US-backed Syrian insurgency was dominated by Islamist militant groups including “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Iraq.” According to author Gerald Posner, Salman’s son, Ahmed bin Salman, who died in 2002, also had ties to al-Qaida.

A Saudi Oil Imperium

If we look at the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its transformation into the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), it all traces back to the Saudi operations going back to the late 1970’s involving now-King Salman, Saudi Osama bin Laden, together with Saudi intelligence head, Prince Turki Al-Faisal.

Washington and the CIA worked intimately with this Saudi network, bringing bin Laden and other key Saudis into Pakistan to train with the Pakistani ISI intelligence, creating what became the Afghan Mujahideen. The Mujahideen were created by Saudi, Pakistani and US intelligence to defeat the Soviet Red Army in the 1980’s Afghanistan war, the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone.” Cyclone was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan to lure Moscow into an Afghan “Bear Trap” and give the Soviet Union what he called their “Vietnam.”

The so-called ISIS today in Iraq and Syria, as well as the Al Qaeda Al-Nusra Front in Syria and various other Jihad terror splinter gangs under attack from Russia and the Damascus government of Assad, all have their origins in Saudi Arabia and the activities of King Salman.

Has the King undergone a Saul-to-Paul conversion to a pacific world view since becoming King, and his son, Prince Salman as well? Despite signals in recent months that the Saudis have ceased financing the anti-Assad terror organizations in Syria, the reality is the opposite.

The Saudis Behind Erdoğan

Much attention of late is given, understandably, to the Turkish dictatorship of the thug, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This is especially so since his Air Force deliberately shot down the Russian SU-24 jet over Syrian territory, an act of war. What few look at are the ties of Erdoğan and his AKP to the Saudi monarchy.

According to a well-informed Turkish political source I spoke with in 2014, who had been involved in attempts to broker a peace between Assad and Erdoğan, Erdoğan’s first Presidential election campaign in August 2014 was “greased” by a gift of $ 10 billion from the Saudis. After his victory in buying the presidential election, Erdoğan and his hand-picked Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu opened the doors wide to establish secret training centers for what was to be called ISIS. Under supervision of Hakan Fidan, Erdoğan’s hand-picked head of the Secret Services (MIT), Turkey organized camps for training ISIS and other terrorists in Turkey and also to provide their supplies in Syria. The financing for the Turkish ISIS operation was arranged apparently by a close personal friend of Erdoğan named Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi banker close to the Saudi Royal House, member of the Muslim Brotherhood, financier of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda since Afghanistan in the 1980’s. x

Erdoğan’s US-sanctioned and Saudi-financed terrorist training camps have brought an estimated 200,000 mercenary terrorists from all over the world, transited by Turkey in order to wage “jihad” in Syria.

But that jihad, it is now clear, is not about Allah but about Moola—money. The Saudi monarchy is determined to control the oil fields of Iraq and of Syria using ISIS to do it. They clearly want to control the entire world oil market, first bankrupting the recent challenge from US shale oil producers, then by controlling through Turkey the oil flows of Iraq and Syria.

Saudi TOW missiles to ISIS

In May 2014, the MIT transferred to ISIS terrorists in Syria, by special train, a quantity of heavy weapons and new Toyota pick-ups offered by Saudi Arabia.

Now a detailed investigation of the Turkish shoot down of the Russian SU-24 jet reveals that the Turkish F-16 jet that shot down the jet was supported by two AWACS reconnaissance planes that enabled the Turkish F-16 exact hit, a very difficult if not impossible feat against a jet as agile as the SU-24. One of the AWACS planes was a Boeing AWACS E-3A of the Saudi Arabian air force which took off from the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia airbase.

Then, as a Russian rescue helicopter rushed to the scene of the SU-24 crash, Saudi TOW anti-aircraft missiles shot the Russian helicopter down. The Saudis had sent 500 of the highly-effective TOW missiles to anti-Assad terror groups in Syria on October 9.

What we have, then, is not an isolated Russian war against ISIS in Syria. What lies behind ISIS is not just Erdoğan’s criminal regime, but far more significant, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and her Wahhabite allies Kuwait, UAE, Qatar.

In the true sense, ISIS is simply a “Saudi army in disguise.”

If we strip away the phony religious cover, what emerges is a Saudi move to grab some of the world’s largest oil reserves, those of the Sunni parts of Iraq, and of Syria, using the criminal Turkish regime in the role of thug to do the rough work, like a bouncer in a brothel. If Moscow is not conscious of this larger dimension, she runs the risk of getting caught in a deadly “bear trap” which will more and more remind them of Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

What stinks in Saudi Arabia ain’t the camel dung. It’s the monarchy of King Salman and his hot-headed son, Prince Salman. For decades they have financed terrorism under a fake religious disguise, to advance their private plutocratic agenda. It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with money and oil. A look at the ISIS map from Iraq to Syria shows that they precisely targeted the oil riches of those two sovereign states. Saudi control of that oil wealth via their ISIS agents, along with her clear plan to take out the US shale oil competition, or so Riyadh reckons, would make the Saudi monarchy a vastly richer state, one, perhaps because of that money, finally respected by white western rich men and their society. That is clearly bovine thinking.

Don’t bet on that Salman.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Thomas Friedman doesn’t like threats of massive bombing when they’re made by someone else.

Thomas Friedman has some harsh words in his New York Times column (12/9/15) for Donald Trump and his unsophisticated grasp of the complexities of foreign policy:

As for Trump, well, he may be a deal maker, but he’s no poker player ready for the Middle East five-card stud sharks. His xenophobic rhetoric and unrealistic, infantile threats of massive bombing make up the kind of simplistic hand you’d play in “Go Fish” — not in this high-stakes game.

Where could Trump have gotten the idea that his “infantile threats of massive bombing” would be taken seriously as foreign policy proposals? Well, as a resident of New York City, maybe he reads the New York Times:

There is only Option 2 — bombing Iraq (pictured right), over and over and over again, until either Saddam says uncle, and agrees to let the UN back in on US terms, or the Iraqi people eliminate him….  Given the problems with the other options, we may have no choice but to go down this road. Once we do, however, we better have the stomach to stay the course.

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 1/31/98)

Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.”

–Friedman (New York Times, 1/19/99)

Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted…. (pictured left)

Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 4/23/99) on Serbia

People tend to change their minds and adjust their goals as they see the price they are paying mount. Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around. Let’s see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance.

–Thomasa Friedman (New York Times, 4/6/99)

My motto is very simple: Give war a chance.

–Thomas Friedman (ABC News, 10/29/01) on Afghanistan

Let’s all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war a chance. This is Afghanistan we’re talking about. (pictured right)

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 11/2/01)

I was a critic of [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld before, but there’s one thing…that I do like about Rumsfeld. He’s just a little bit crazy, OK? He’s just a little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us, and I’m glad we got some guy on our bench that our quarterback — who’s just a little bit crazy, not totally, but you never know what that guy’s going to do, and I say that’s my guy.”

–Thomas Friedman (CNBC, 10/13/01)

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 2/13/02)

We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick… and there was only one way to do it…. What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well: Suck. On. This.” That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

–Thomas Friedman (Charlie Rose, 5/30/03)

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its air force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians–the families and employers of the militants–to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (1/13/09) on why Israel needed to kill civilians in Gaza

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected], or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan: [email protected] (Twitter: @NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Among the 223 MPs in Westminster who opposed the British government’s dangerous fuelling of the Syrian inferno were 57 of the 59 members returned from Scotland.

All but one were from the Scottish National Party (SNP), the ruling party in the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh. The final vote came from Ian Murray, the Labour Party’s sole surviving MP north of the border.

The SNP’s position should not be confused with principled opposition to the escalating war in Syria or imperialist militarism in general. Still less should it be considered to be articulating the mass opposition to war among working people across Britain.

Rather, the party’s position combines parliamentary manoeuvring with the real concerns in sections of the Scottish and British establishment that Cameron’s Syrian adventure has no “exit” strategy, and threatens to embroil the British military in an uncharted calamity.

That the SNP felt able to oppose the government at all testifies primarily to the deep divisions within the Labour Party and the free vote given to Labour’s right wing by “left” Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Had Corbyn imposed a whip on Labour’s MPs, threatened the right-wing “rebels” with expulsion, de-selection or any of the many sanctions which, as party leader, he had available—in short launched a serious parliamentary fight to defeat the government—there is every likelihood that the SNP would have supported Prime Minister David Cameron in return for some token concession or other.

Prior to the vote, and before it was clear that the Labour right wing would be given free rein by Corbyn, Scottish First Minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon made clear she was open to persuasion. She was “not yet convinced the case for air strikes has been made,” she said. “That is not to say I will not listen to the case that David Cameron will make.”

Sturgeon added that to respond to the “threat that is posed by ISIL [Islamic State, IS] … there are some tests that require to be passed in order for air strikes to be made.”

Asked about her attitude to the Royal Air Force’s current bombing campaign in Iraq, she made clear she had no problem with it since “there are differences with Iraq in that the government requested airstrikes, that’s not the same situation in Syria.”

Alex Salmond, now the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesman, further clarified the basis of the Scottish nationalists’ opposition to the Syrian war. He told the BBC,

“We’d like to hear far, far more about diplomatic initiatives through the United Nations and also the real practical things like interrupting the financial flows into Daesh …”

For his part, SNP Defence spokesman Angus Robertson complained that the UK had “spent 14 times more bombing Libya than in post-conflict stability and reconstruction.”

This is of course the purest hypocrisy. Since coming to power in Edinburgh in 2007, the party has repeatedly made clear it is willing to support British military actions, particularly if a UN flag is flying over the slaughter of the day—including in Libya.

In 2011, the SNP voted with the Cameron government and the Labour opposition for the British bombing campaign against the Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Robertson said at the time, “I think Libya needs to get rid of Gaddafi. But in the end we are responsible for trying to enforce this Security Council resolution.”

Robertson used the occasion to deepen links with the British military. He urged the government to “think long and hard about considering the closure of important bases like RAF Lossiemouth and RAF Leuchars in Scotland.”

Both bases were used for launching raids against Libya, under cover of a UN resolution enforcing “no fly zones”. At the time, the main concern of First Minister Alex Salmond, the SNP’s then leader, was that the SNP was not invited into the COBRA emergency meetings with the British government.

In 2013, MPs at Westminster were obliged by massive public opposition and disagreements within the military over a lack of planning to reject Cameron’s first demand for a military intervention in Syria—explicitly targeting the regime of Bashir al-Assad.

The SNP introduced an amendment, with the Labour Party, proposing that a United Nations resolution should be sought as cover for any military role. Salmond explained at the time that this amendment “gave an indication of the sort of role an independent Scotland will be able to play on the international stage.” He called for “constitutional guarantees” against military action without UN backing.

In 2014, the SNP voted against the British government launching a new bombing campaign in Iraq against Islamic State. But Angus Robertson made clear once again that this was on a tactical basis. Speaking in Westminster, he explained that he supported the Iraqi government, supported “our armed forces” and insisted, “It would be far better if there were an express United Nations motion covering all of this.”

For Robertson to now complain that not enough has been spent on Libyan reconstruction is rank hypocrisy. Having destroyed the Gaddafi government, triggered and stoked a raging and ongoing civil war, the only means whereby British imperialism could impose “stability and reconstruction” in Libya is by an invasion by tens, if not hundreds of thousands of troops. The same applies in Syria.

The SNP’s position is one of militarism and war, but under slightly differing terms. This is in line with their perspective for the creation of an independent Scotland—a goal to which the SNP remain committed despite their 2014 referendum defeat. The SNP has repeatedly made clear that they support NATO, the European Union, a struggle against Russia, and increased spending on frigates, fast jets and long-range reconnaissance aircraft.

Commenting on their manoeuvres, right-wing political analyst Stephen Daisley noted approvingly on Scottish Television,

“A breakaway Scotland run by the nationalists could pursue a less assertive foreign policy but independence supporters have to quell the notion we would be a global pushover.”

He continued, “The SNP is beginning to carve a feasible pro-peace, pro-security defence position.” In another column he described the SNP as “conservative revolutionaries, out not to smash the status quo but to maintain it on a smaller scale.”

A further component of the SNP’s political calculation will rest on the hope that, by posturing as opponents of the Syrian war with the help of the pseudo-lefts, next year’s elections to Holyrood will result in a further overwhelming SNP landslide at the expense of the Labour Party. Commenting on what this might mean, Labour candidate Barrie Cunning noted, “I don’t see how it cannot be a trigger for a second independence referendum, which I personally do not want to see.”

Opposition to the war drive of British imperialism cannot be contracted out to any section of the capitalist class, no matter how much their role has been obscured by the pseudo left. Everything depends on the rejection of all forms of nationalism, and the unified political mobilisation of the British working class as part of a global antiwar movement seeking an end to imperialist militarism through the struggle for world socialism.

National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi met with the most senior members of Myanmar’s military last week in the capital Naypyidaw. The purpose of the closed-door talks was to cement a power-sharing arrangement between the two factions of the ruling elite when the NLD forms the new government early next year.

The NLD won an overwhelming majority in national elections last month allowing it to install its nominee as president in late March. Suu Kyi is excluded from holding the top office by a provision of the military’s 2008 Constitution but has declared that she will nevertheless determine the new government’s policies.

Suu Kyi met separately on December 2 with outgoing President Thein Sein, who is an ex-general, and with military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Last Friday she had talks with former military chief and State Peace and Development Council chairman, Than Shwe, who was the junta’s strongman from 1992 to 2011 and still wields considerable influence behind the scenes.

Both sides have remained silent on the substance of the talks, in order to keep the population in the dark over the close collaboration between Suu Kyi and the military. The vast majority of voters repudiated the military-backed party at the polls and supported the NLD in the hope of a better life, democratic rights and justice for the decades of abuses suffered under military rule.

Having raised expectations, the NLD, as well as the military, is concerned over the potential for social unrest. A senior NLD official who was in the meeting with Thein Sein told the media that the emphasis was on maintaining “stability between now and [the] time when the current government’s term is over.”

After the meeting between Suu Kyi and Than Shwe, the former dictator’s grandson released minutes quoting his grandfather as saying “after winning the election, it’s the reality we have to accept—that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will be Burma’s future leader.”

The military’s embrace of Suu Kyi and the NLD follows decades of enmity and distrust in the wake of the brutal military crackdown on mass protests and strikes in 1988. In those tumultuous events, Suu Kyi and the NLD played the critical role in blocking a revolutionary settling of accounts with the military. As the junta was tottering, Suu Kyi stepped in to call off the protests and urge people to accept the military’s bogus offer of elections.

Suu Kyi and the NLD were just as terrified of the 1988 mass movement as the military. The junta restabilised its rule and repudiated NLD’s victory in the 1990 election. Even though Suu Kyi did not challenge the junta’s actions, she was kept under house arrest out of fear that she would become the focus of another social upheaval that the NLD could not control.

In the wake of the 1990 election, the junta has confronted a virtual economic blockade by the US and its allies and was compelled to rely heavily on Chinese investment and aid. While posing as the champion of democratic rights, the NLD, which was banned, represented sections of the ruling elite whose interests were marginalised by the military’s domination of economic life.

The junta’s shift in orientation was driven by the country’s deepening economic crisis in the wake of the 2008 global financial breakdown, and the threat posed by the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” directed against China. The junta was acutely aware that its close ties with Beijing and its status as a “rogue state” could become the pretext for US provocations and interventions.

Moreover, the large inflows of Chinese capital, mainly directed to resource extraction and infrastructure projects, had caused major imbalances, compounding the impact of the country’s economic isolation. The currency appreciated, adversely affecting the economy overall. Unable to sell on the international markets, agricultural products were dumped locally, driving down prices and bankrupting farmers.

Having suppressed opposition protests led by monks in 2007, the junta was increasingly fearful of social unrest getting out of control. Suu Kyi shared that fear, warning in September 2011 of an “Arab-style” uprising and offering to work with the military to “manage change… through negotiation.”

As part of its carrot and stick approach to the junta, the Obama administration had already been putting out diplomatic feelers. Its concern was not with the democratic rights of the Burmese people, but to take Burma out of China’s orbit.

When the junta signalled its willingness to shift foreign policy by shutting down a major Chinese dam project in September 2011, the US rapidly moved to normalise relations. Shortly after Obama formally announced the “pivot” in November 2011, Hillary Clinton became the first US Secretary of State to visit Burma in decades.

Overnight, as corporations lined up to take advantage of investment opportunities, Burma ceased being a pariah state, and was hailed in the West as “a developing democracy.” While retaining control of key levers of power, the military and the NLD came together to economically open up the country and re-orient foreign policy to Washington. The junta found Suu Kyi very useful as an unofficial ambassador at large, burnishing the country’s new “democratic” image.

Differences nevertheless remain and were undoubtedly the subject of haggling in last week’s talks between Suu Kyi and top military figures. While the military is prepared to concede a leading role to the NLD, it retains control of the key security ministries and has an effective veto over constitutional changes. The top brass has no intention of allowing a civilian government to meddle in military affairs and will seek to ensure immunity from prosecution for the junta’s many crimes.

The military also wants to protect and expand its vast business empires. From 2009 to 2012, the military prepared for pro-market reforms by privatising assets and allowed the establishment of private banks. But it ensured that the state assets largely ended up in the hands of the military or its associates. For its part, the NLD will want to rein in the army’s economic power and open up business opportunities for entrepreneurs not connected to the army.

Both factions of the Burmese ruling class want to prevent the emergence of popular opposition to the deepening social polarisation that will inevitably be produced by the transformation of Burma into a new cheap labour platform.

In the name of “national reconciliation,” Suu Kyi has already made abundantly clear that she will not challenge the military’s prerogatives. Explaining why she had met with her former jailer Than Shwe, she declared that she wanted “all-inclusive collaboration, including with the Tatadaw [army].”

The Philippines Supreme Court permanently halted the field testing for genetically modified eggplant, Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), upholding the decision of the Court of Appeals (CA) which stopped the field trials for the GM plant.

Not only did the High Court deny the petition to continue cultivation of the GM eggplant, but the appeals court’s May 2013 decision was also amended.

Aside from permanently stopping field testing for Bt talong (eggplant), the Supreme Court also declared null and void the Department of Agriculture’s (DA’s) Administrative Order No. 08, series of 2002.

Additionally, the court ruled that any application for field testing, contained use, propagation, and importation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is temporarily stopped pending the promulgation of a new administrative order.

In its ruling, the High Tribunal also explained its application of the precautionary principle, which maintains that “lack of scientific certainty is no reason for inaction at the risk of potentially serious or irreversible harm to the environment.” This principal has been explained at length in a paper by Nassim Taleb et al. (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf)

In May 2013, the court stopped the nationwide field testing of the Bt eggplant following a petition filed by Greenpeace and farmers’ group Masipag against respondents UP Los Baños Foundation Inc, UP Mindanao Foundation Inc, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The cautionary principle was also used in this case.

Moreover, the court announced that existing regulations of the DA and the Department of Science and Technology were not enough to ensure the safety of the environment and health of the people.

The High Court agreed with the appellate court, mentioning the lack of consensus among scientists regarding the safety of Bt crops.

It also found the DA’s administrative order lacking in the minimum safety requirements under Executive Order 514, which established the National Biosafety Framework (NBF).

More transparent, meaningful and participatory consultation of scientists and the public was called for.

Three conditions were noted in the case that warranted the application of the principle:

• Settings in which the risks of harm are uncertain

• Settings in which harm might be irreversible and what is lost is irreplaceable

• Settings in which the harm that might result would be serious

The court stated:

When these features – uncertainty, the possibility of irreversible harm, and the possibility of serious harm – coincide, the case for the precautionary principle is strongest. When in doubt, cases must be resolved in favor of the constitutional right to a balanced and healthful ecology.

Notes:

SustainablePulse

 

Many situations around the world now look to be coming to a head. 

Geopolitically the East/West push and pull has heated up in the Middle East.  Iraq now looks to be pivoting toward Mr. Putin and Russia and away from the U.S..  Turkey’s recent shoot down of a Russian plane also turned up the heat.  Economically, the price of oil breaking through $40 has shone a spotlight on a weak global economy and confirms weakness. 

Trade, whether international or internal is collapsing.  Freight rates are at decade lows and even internally, trucking has collapsed.

Financially speaking, FOREX markets are experiencing daily volatility unseen before.  The credit markets have become illiquid as spreads have blown out.  This “illiquidity” has traders terrified because they know they have no exit door.  Even the Treasury market has begun to display the “locked in” feeling of thin markets.  We should not forget about the Fed meeting next week, raise rates or hold rates …traders are in fear of the aftermath. 

Let’s take a look at what just happened yesterday in COMEX gold since we are talking “crunch time”. 

The December contract added 881 net contracts standing for delivery.  This is another 88,100 ounces of gold that someone just stepped up for and is asking delivery.  Some ground work first …we have watched for over two years as COMEX gold contracts outstanding would dwarf deliverable inventory coming into first notice day and decline in a huge way just prior.  Then, many of those standing for delivery would just “evaporate”.  I have said many times that this did not make any sense.  Why would anyone FULLY FUND their account by FND to pay cash for their contracted gold …only to vanish?  It is obvious in my opinion these contracts were cash settled at a premium or bribe to entice these buyers not to take physical delivery because of strained inventory.

I can only remember one month in the past where contracts “standing” actually increased after the first notice day.  As I recall there were two days in a row where the open interest increased (after the OI had already declined as it has this month).  First, anyone who opens a contract after FND truly wants the gold.  Better said, they probably “need” the gold for whatever reason.  These buyers will not be bribed into FRN settlement, only “weight” will do.

COMEX truly has a problem this month.  As it stands, there are roughly 11.5 tons standing for delivery while COMEX holds just over 4 tons for delivery.  In ounces we are looking at 370,000 versus 130,000.  Yesterday’s increase was 88,100 ounces or roughly 2/3rds of deliverable inventory.  For well over two months, COMEX has had almost ZERO gold enter the “registered” category.  In fact, even the eligible (customer) inventory has been bleeding down and hemorrhaged yesterday with over four tons being withdrawn.  The obvious question is “where will the gold come from for delivery”?  Yes I know, “don’t worry because they always deliver” …  

The additional 88,100 ounces yesterday should really OPEN SOME EYES for several reasons!  First, someone obviously NEEDS nearly three tons of gold.  Secondly and most importantly, this should display just how tenuous the inventory really is.  In just one day, someone stepped up and is demanding TWO THIRD’s of deliverable gold.  As I have said all along, with any type of black swan event (not one that is “created” and of the false flag variety) has the ability to clean out what COMEX can supply!  What then?

Please think to yourself “what if?”.  What if we wake up one day and a big bank somewhere in the world defaults?  Or even a sovereign nation?  What if we wake up to find Russian and U.S. forces going at it somewhere?  The list of potential black swans is long (plus the trolls will go wild saying “it can never happen in our lifetime) so I won’t list them.  I would simply ask, what if “something unscripted” happens?

The answer is simple.  When something, whatever it may be that is “unscripted” happens …life as we have known it for so many years is over! 

Everything will change. 

Markets, valuations, beliefs, customs, economics/finance and distribution, etc.  The title of “crunch time” is not meant to be U.S. centric or even about the post war “American age”. 

We are living “crunch time” for a 300 year plus fractional reserve Ponzi banking and monetary scheme. 

We are at the end of a 300 year plus “credit cycle” where The Great Depression was merely a large and painful belch leading up to a final heart attack. 
 
Standing watch,

Bill Holter, Holter-Sinclair collaboration

Comments welcome  [email protected]

Mark Twain once said history doesn’t repeat. It rhymes – more dangerously today than ever. 

US-instigated events ominously resemble things preceding both world wars – with super-weapons on hair triggers able to end life on earth, and bipartisan policymakers in Washington perhaps willing to use them recklessly.

Once in motion, things have a momentum of their own, heading toward what may be unstoppable. Washington’s grand strategy calls for replacing all independent governments with Western-controlled ones – mainly Russia and China, the main obstacles to achieving its hegemonic objectives.

Middle East tinderbox conditions rage, Washington determined to achieve regional control, waging one war of aggression after another, endless ones in multiple theaters , challenging Russia recklessly.

Will World War III follow? Will the unthinkable become reality? Will nuclear war erupt for the first time ever?

Nukes were used against Japan in August 1945 after Nazi Germany surrendered months earlier. and the war in the Pacific was won.

Tokyo’s high command was negotiating surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were gratuitously attacked – so Pentagon commanders could test the destructive power of their new weapons in real time, while showing off for Soviet Russia what Stalin already knew, close to developing his own atomic capability.

Ongoing events should scare everyone. Washington bears full responsibility. NATO and other partners share it.

Ukraine remains the epicenter of a possible European war, Syria its Middle East flashpoint counterpart.

A US/Russian showdown may be building in plain sight. Putin is waging an effective war on ISIS and other terrorists in Syria – elements Washington supports, using them to achieve its imperial objectives, a policy heading recklessly toward a frightening showdown.

The possibility of global war with nuclear weapons should focus all world leaders on preventing it at all costs. The threat of ending life on earth should be countered with all-out peace efforts.

Everything comes down to a simple equation. Do we want to live in peace or perish in a mushroom-shaped cloud? There’s no in-between.

The risk of annihilation perhaps was never greater – given Washington’s rage for global dominance and its permanent war agenda. No nation ever threatened humanity’s survival more than now.

Its madness is supported by all duopoly presidential aspirants, some openly advocating use of nuclear weapons, unchallenged by the media.

Truman was the only world leader ever authorizing the use of nuclear weapons in combat. He later sacked Douglas MacArthur for wanting them used during Washington’s aggression on North Korea, along with urging a land war on China.

In 1961, US General Curtis Lemay believed nuclear war with Soviet Russia was inevitable. He wanted thousands of warheads launched preemptively.

He called retaliation against major US cities a small price to pay. At the same time, General Lyman Lemnitzer urged a surprise nuclear attack strategy.

Jack Kennedy stormed out of a National Security Council meeting discussing it. He wanted none of it. “And we call ourselves the human race,” he said.

Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex’s “acquisition of unwarranted influence. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” he stressed.

Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asked former Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell “(w)hat’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we (don’t) use it?”

Mass annihilation may follow this type thinking, virulent today in Washington with bipartisan lunatics in charge.

Obama intends accelerating war in Syria and Iraq on the phony pretext of battling ISIS. He’s recklessly challenging Russia’s effective intervention, Putin committed to combatting a scourge too dangerous to tolerate.

A US-instigated belligerent clash of civilizations may follow – Washington the ally of terrorism, using its elements to advance its imperium.

Russia is its sworn enemy, most concerned about defending its homeland, battling ISIS and other terrorists in Syria, perhaps Iraq to follow if Baghdad requests help, wanting its scourge prevented from spreading – an objective all world nations should support, not Washington, its NATO partners, Israel, and other rogue regional allies.

Things are escalating toward US policymakers initiating military confrontation with Russia. The unthinkable possibility of nuclear war may become reality – the vast majority of Americans mindless about the clear and present danger they face.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Turkey is a NATO member, a close US ally in its regional war OF terror, battling Kurds in northern Syria and Iraq on the phony pretext of combating ISIS. 

Erdogan long coveted annexing Aleppo and other northern Syrian areas, as well as bordering Iraqi territory – the latter objective to seize and control valued Mosul area oil fields.

Hundreds of its troops, tanks and artillery operate from positions near Mosul – on the phony pretext of combating ISIS and training Iraqi forces, never authorized by Baghdad. Ankara intends sending more heavily armed commandos and other combat troops.

ISIS forces controlled Mosul since June 2014, the largest regional city it holds, a key oil producing area. Ankara’s aim is to seize control, perhaps complicit with ISIS, a first step toward annexation, a scheme Baghdad will challenge.

Russia’s effective anti-terrorist intervention foiled Erdogan’s objective in Syria. Its air power and ground-based S-400 missile defense systems control Syrian airspace – able to counter any threat to its operations with devastating effectiveness.

If tested beyond Erdogan’s downing a Russian Su-24 bomber complicit with Washington, more US airstrikes on Syrian ground forces or other provocations, it will respond as conditions warrant, increasing the danger of expanding regional conflicts to a global one – including possible use of nuclear weapons.

Turkish troops operate illegally in northern Iraq. Baghdad gave Ankara 48 hours to withdraw. Prime Minister Abadi stressed they’re “present without the knowledge and consent of” his government.

The deadline for them to leave expired. They remain in place. Erdogan refuses to withdraw them. Russia called their presence illegal.

So far, Baghdad and Ankara are trying to resolve things diplomatically, short of requesting UN Security Council action. Abadi asked NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to “use (his) authority to (demand) Turkey withdraw immediately from Iraqi territory.”

Russia raised the issue during a closed-door Security Council session to no avail. Washington blocked responsible action. Moscow’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin  expressed disappointment, saying:

“We believe that Turkey has acted recklessly and inexplicably, carrying out additional deployments on the territory of Iraq without the consent of the Iraqi government.”

Washington’s so-called security agreement with Baghdad harms what it purports to support. On Wednesday, Iraq’s parliamentary Security and Defense Committee called for reviewing terms agreed on.

Committee member Hamid Mutlaq told RT International their “negative points” harm Iraqi security. “We have demanded to review some of those points, for them to comply with Iraq’s interests and the region as a whole in light of the changed situation,” he said.

“The majority of Iraqi politicians and MPs fear that an international conflict may develop on the territory of Iraq, as a result of which blood of its people will be spilt.” The nation “already (is) suffering” hugely from US-instigated imperial wars.

Mutlaq was blunt telling Sputnik News:

“The (Iraqi) government and parliament need to review (the) security agreement with the US, because (it’s) not serious about its implementation.”

If not changed to Baghdad’s satisfaction, “(w)e will demand its cancellation.” In criticizing Turkish troops in northern Iraq, Abadi said “Iraq does not need foreign ground forces, and the Iraqi government is committed not to allow the presence of any ground force on Iraqi land.”

Apparently he was objecting both to the presence of Turkish and US troops – as well as Defense Secretary Carter saying more are coming.

Baghdad’s Security and Defense Committee intends meeting with Abadi on requesting Russia conduct airstrikes on ISIS targets in Iraq, expanding its Syrian operations cross-border – vital to let ground forces of both countries wage effective war on terrorism, polar opposite Washington’s phony campaign.

Obama upped the stakes in challenging Moscow’s effective anti-terrorism campaign. Likely greater regional intervention is coming than already announced.

Iraq’s security and perhaps survival as a nation-state depends on requesting Russia help against ISIS. Its airpower working cooperatively with Syrian ground forces changed the dynamic dramatically, permitting recapture of lost territory. Iraq’s reliance on Washington is obviously counterproductive – at odds with its interests.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Last weekend, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Tomasz Szatkowski said that Poland is considering asking for access to nuclear weapons through a NATO program allowing non-nuclear states “to borrow” the warheads from the US.

This is a reverberation from the intensified debates within alliances regarding the nuclear support of NATO’s operations.

There are significant issues involving the increased scope and number of military exercises that simulate the use of mock bombs in conventional nuclear warheads, the military’s utilization of computer-based war games that test the use of nuclear weapons on the European continent, and the formulation of specific scenarios about the transformation of hypothetical conflicts using general-purpose forces into conflicts that involve nuclear weapons. NATO scientists and specialists take part in these discussions, as well as the current representatives of the alliance’s military and political leaders.

On June 25, 2015, during a hearing in the House Armed Services Committee, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work called for using nuclear forces to deter the “Russian threat.”

Commenting on the debates that took place during an Oct. 8 meeting in Brussels between the defense ministers of NATO countries, Adam Thomson, the UK Permanent Representative to NATO, publicly bemoaned the fact that the alliance “has done conventional exercising and nuclear exercising” but has not conducted exercises on “the transition from one to the other.” He claimed that such a recommendation is being looked at within the North Atlantic alliance.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also supports strengthening the nuclear component in the military planning of this alliance that has identified Russia as its primary enemy.

In their analyses, military-political and academic insiders in the West typically do not distinguish between the strategic and tactical nuclear weapons belonging to the three Western nuclear powers: the UK, US, and France. As they calculate how best to defend “the entire territory of NATO,” they begin with the assumption that all those nuclear weapons can be commanded en masse. And because those weapons must be used “as a means to deter aggression, along with conventional weapons,” their special status should once again be recognized, as it was during the height of the Cold War during the 1960s-1980s.

In his statement Tomasz Szatkowski emphasized the need for the Polish armed forces to have access to the same American nuclear weapons as those entrusted to five of the member states of the North Atlantic pact: Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and Germany, all of which consented to stationing those weapons within their borders: “We want to see an end to the division of NATO members into two categories,” he said, explaining that he was referring to states that have long hosted American nuclear weapons vs. countries that still do not have them, meaning the allies that have only recently joined this military bloc, especially Poland.

The Polish Defense Ministry hastened to disavow their own colleague’s words, arguing that “within the defense ministry there is presently no work underway concerning the accession of our country to the NATO Nuclear Sharing program.”

But the further clarification that followed this message suggests otherwise, since the Polish defense ministry literally stated the following: “We have to consider various options, including some form of Poland’s participation in this program.” And as we all know, that program allows US nuclear weapons to be deployed within the borders of other states and to be used in military exercises that include the dropping of mock “nuclear bombs” from aircraft.

We must also look closely at how the first part of that answer is expressed: “there is presently no work underway …” Today. And perhaps that is true. But in the future?

Where are the guarantees that this will not happen? Especially when you consider that the NATO summit of May 2012 fused its nuclear, missile-defense, and conventional weapons into a single attack force. And when you consider that by mid-October Poland had already ratified a technical agreement to build a US missile-defense base in Redzikowo, the construction of which will begin next spring, with completion in 2018. Or, if we take into account another factor: NATO’s use of “dual-capable” aircraft that can potentially carry either nuclear or conventional bombs, and which have been used for 11 years by the alliance’s three nuclear powers that conduct the Baltic Air Policing operation in the skies over Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

The appearance of American nuclear weapons inside Poland – regardless of the rationale or explanation for that decision – will signal a radical and dramatic exacerbation of the military and political status quo in Europe, lowering the barriers to the use of nuclear weapons in this densely populated region of the world and, ultimately, precipitating a real return to the years of the Cold War, to years of military confrontation between NATO member states and countries that were not part of this militaristic bloc.

Vladimir Kozin is Head of Advisers’ Group at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and Professor of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation.

Li-Fi, 10mbitps Internet by Light Transforms any LED light into Internet bandwidth.

The light modulates at a very high frequency at up to 300 thousand times per second.

Connect your bulb to your ADSL/Fiber box, and anywhere the light reaches, a receiver can download that data at up to an up to 10mbitps speed.

For upload, the system can use infrared or something else.

They are just waiting for an investor, and all of the world may be using this technology for sending Internet data in the future.

I have long maintained that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank defies the moral principle behind the creation of the state. Contrary to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion, the occupation erodes rather than buttresses Israel’s national security and cannot be justified on either security or moral grounds. Unless Israel embraces a new moral path, no one can prevent it from unravelling from within only to become a pariah state that has lost its soul, wantonly abandoning the cherished dreams of its founding fathers.

There are four ethical theories—Kantian, utilitarian, virtue-based, and religious—that demonstrate the lack of moral foundation in the continuing occupation, which imposes upon Israelis the responsibility to bring it to a decisive end.

The first moral theory is deontological ethics, whose greatest representative is Immanuel Kant. According to this theory, consequences are irrelevant to the moral rightness or wrongness of an action; what matters is whether the action is done for the sake of duty or out of respect for the moral law.

Kant provided several formulations of the moral law, which he refers to as the categorical imperative; for our purposes, what is most important are his first two formulations. The first is the principle that morality requires us to act only on those maxims we can universalize. As he puts it, “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” In short, never do anything that you couldn’t will everybody else do at the same time.

The question is whether the Israeli occupation is a policy that can be universalized and pass this test of moral reasoning. The answer is clearly no; the policy of occupation is rationally inconsistent, as it requires Israel to exempt itself from moral and political norms that the rest of the international community recognizes (and which serve to protect Israel itself). Israel is making an exception of itself – which is the capital sin, according to Kant, as in effect Israel is saying: ‘We don’t have to live by the same rules as everyone else.’ This is evident from the fact that Israel denies the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and justifies that in the name of national security, even though the achievement of absolute security would invariably render the Palestinians absolutely vulnerable.

Whereas Israel has agreed to a two-state solution, it continues to usurp Palestinian land, thereby violating international agreements which Israel is signatory to (UN Resolution 242, the Oslo Accords). In doing so, Israel is clearly defying the first formulation of the categorical imperative, which as Kant showed, requires us to honor our agreements and contracts. That is, Israel is acting on a maxim or policy of breaking its agreements to serve its self-interest, which cannot be universalized without contradiction because then the institution of reaching international agreements cannot be sustained.

Although many countries break international contracts, that does not affect Kant’s argument as he knew full well that people lie, cheat, and steal. His concern is with the principle of morality and what it requires regardless of whether these requirements are in fact met. By maintaining the occupation, Israel is flouting the moral law while expecting the Palestinians to uphold the same norms.

The second formulation is to never treat another person merely as a means, but always also as an end in themselves. In other words, what Kant is saying is that as free rational beings who can act in accordance with morality, each of us possesses intrinsic worth which implies that we must respect the inherent dignity of each individual.

In the case of the Palestinians who are under occupation, Israel is treating them as objects rather than persons who can rationally consent to the way they are being treated. Israel is coercing the Palestinians physically and psychologically by denying them human rights, through, for example, administrative detention, night raids, and expulsion, thereby robbing them of their dignity and denying them their autonomy.

The second moral theory is Utilitarianism, which in its modern form originated in England with the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In contrast to Kantianism, this theory places all emphasis on the consequences of our actions. It states that an action is morally right if it produces the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.

The moral evaluation of any policy depends on whether it maximizes utility. Utilitarianism agrees with Kant on one fundamental point, which is that morality prohibits making an exception of oneself.  For obvious reasons, governments give greater priority to their own people. But does the occupation maximize the security and well-being of all Israelis?

In spite of the fact that Israel takes extraordinary measures to enhance its security, the occupation is in fact undermining the security of the state, as is evident from the repeated bloody clashes. Moreover, if Israel were to extend its moral considerations beyond its own people to include the Palestinians, then the policy of occupation still fails on utilitarian grounds even more acutely.

To be sure, while Israel resorts to utilitarian arguments to justify its treatment of the Palestinians, in the process Israel reveals the classic pitfall of utilitarian thinking, which is that it ultimately does not provide sufficient protection and respect for human rights. This contempt for human rights in fact directly erodes Israel’s moral standing within the community of nations.

The third moral theory is virtue ethics, whose greatest advocate is still Aristotle. In virtue ethics, an act is moral if it is performed as a result of having a virtuous character. Virtue ethics is not primarily about codifying and applying moral principles, but developing the character from which moral actions arise. In this context, the Israeli occupation, while having a major adverse effect on the Palestinians, also has a morally corrupting influence on Israelis themselves.

Virtue ethics recognizes the importance of acquiring the habit to act ethically which involves moral upbringing; as Aristotle is to have said, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” The occupation is not educating Israeli youth towards moral virtues, but hardening their hearts as they can live with regular prejudices, discrimination, and dehumanization against the Palestinians. As such, the occupation fails to meet the principles of virtue ethics because it creates an environment which degrades the moral substance of the Israelis themselves. As a result, they continue to commit transgressions against the Palestinians without any sense of moral culpability.

One might argue from a certain Israeli perspective (i.e. the settlement movement) that the occupation engenders virtues such as national solidarity, social cohesiveness, loyalty, courage, and perseverance. While this may appear to be true on the surface, the occupation is in fact tearing the Israelis’ social and political fabric apart and undermining the conditions under which moral virtues such as caring, compassion, and magnanimity can grow and thrive.

Moreover, the longer the occupation persists, the greater the damage is to Israel’s moral character, and Israel will become increasingly disposed to compromising its fundamental values and ideals as a democracy committed to human rights.

Finally, we need to consider the moral theory which says morality is acting in accordance with what divinity commands from us. There are two basic theories, both of which can be traced back to Plato’s Euthyphro where Socrates raises the question: “…whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.”

The first is the divine command theory, which states that what makes an action moral or right is the fact that God commands it and nothing else. The second theory, defended by Socrates, is that God commands us to do what is right because it is the right thing to do. In other words, morality precedes God’s will and is irreducible to divine command.

In the context of this ancient debate, the usurpation and annexation of Palestinian land may appear to be defensible on the basis of the divine command theory because if God requires us to perform any set of actions, then by definition it would be the moral thing to do.

Many orthodox Jews hold to the divine command theory, as they interpret the concept of “mitzvah” (good deed) first and foremost as “command,” the goodness of which cannot even be contemplated apart from the fact that this is what God has commanded us to do.

As such, those who take the Bible as the revelation of God’s commands use it to justify the concept of Greater Israel. As a result, they view the Palestinian presence as an impediment God placed before them to test their resolve. Therefore, their harsh treatment of the Palestinians becomes morally permissible because it is consistent with divine decree.

By adopting the command theory, they are ascribing to a position which has and continues to be used to justify acts which are blatantly immoral. The defender of this theory may counter that because God is good, he does not command anything which is immoral.

However, this argument is hollow because if morality is simply what God approves of, to say that God is good is merely to assert that he approves of himself and his own will. In this case, there is still no safeguard against the extremists who use the command theory to justify even the most heinous crimes. Furthermore, if the command in question satisfies a deep seated psychological need—say, for a God-given Jewish homeland—then what humans ascribe to God eventually becomes ‘the will of God.’

Another problem with the divine command theory is that, as the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz observed, it turns God into a kind of Tyrant unworthy of our love and devotion: “For why praise him for what he has done, if he would be equally praiseworthy for doing just the opposite?”

Turning to the theory that God commands us to do the good because it is good, what becomes clear is that any action must derive its moral worth independently of God’s will. In that case, the Israeli policy toward the occupation will have to be morally justifiable without reference to some divine mandate. We have already examined, however briefly, Israel’s policy in light of deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics, and found that it comes up short and fails to meet the basic requirement of these theories. Therefore, it lacks independent moral justification on which God’s commands could possibly be based on.

Israel’s occupation cannot be defended on moral grounds or in terms of national security. Israel can defend itself and prevail over any of its enemies now and in the foreseeable future, but it is drowning in moral corruption that the continued occupation only deepens. It is that—the enemy from within—that poses the greatest danger Israel faces.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected]

Web: www.alonben-meir.com

There have been conflicting reports on the current state of ship traffic through the Bosphorus, with a number of sources claiming that Turkey has implemented a blockade in order to cut off Russia’s “Syria Express” which is the logistical lifeline providing Russian and Syrian forces with equipment, munitions, and other necessities of modern warfare.

Other sources, including the Russian Navy, have stated that the Russian naval vessels have not had problems transiting the straits, though there were also some reports of Turkish submarines making an appearance in close vicinity of the Russian ships.

Yet other reports indicate that what the Turks are doing is simply harassment in the form of greatly delaying the processing of ships through the straits that does not rise to the level of violating the Montreaux Convention which prohibits the Turkish government from unilaterally closing the Bosphorus to shipping, unless the country is in a state of war or an emergency. Neither Russia nor Turkey have issued any statements concerning this matter. Turkey has not officially announced any measures against Russian or other ships, and likewise Russia has not protested that its ships are being mishandled.

After the first wave of reports, there have not been additional dispatches from the Bosphorus suggesting the blockade is in effect and, even more crucially, no Russian “Syrian Express” ships has been reported as having been forced to return to Novorossiysk or Latakia due to its inability to cross the straits.

Thus, Erdogan is rattling the saber but has not decided to draw it just yet and actually close the straits. Indeed, considering that he has had that option ever since the Russian operation in Syria began and that the closing of the straits would actually hinder the Russian operation to a far greater extent than the attack on the Su-24 that killed one of its crew members and led to the loss of a search-and-rescue helicopter and the death of a Russian naval infantryman, it is odd that he had not made this move yet and opted instead to take the far riskier route of a military escalation. The fact that he had not done so suggests the act of closing the straits is not as easy or consequence-free for Turkey as it might appear.

Indeed, there would be significant political and economic costs for Turkey to do so. The country does collect a fair amount of revenue from the ships transiting the straits. If the straits are closed even once, it is highly that from now on these cargoes would no longer go by ship but by rail, after being offloaded in Greek ports. It would also damage Turkey’s reputation as a reliable economic partner if an element of political risk of this magnitude creeps into Turkey’s business partners’ calculations. Moreover, closing the straits now is actually more difficult to do politically than before the Su-24 incident. Not only had Erdogan not received the political support from NATO he evidently hoped for, Putin had gone on the offensive in the form of releasing a flood of Russian intelligence information implicating Turkey in collusion with ISIS and buying stolen Syrian and Iraqi petroleum from the Islamic State. Even the US is now calling on Turkey to finally secure its borders and stop allowing militants and oil to cross border to and from Syria.

The fact that the Su-24 incident backfired on Erdogan, as the Russian aircraft have made targeting border areas with Turkey a priority, and NATO failed to act in accordance with Erdogan’s expectations by coming to Turkey’s “defense” and pressuring Russia to ratchet down its Syria campaign means that he is rather constrained in his future responses. It is significant that whereas Western mainstream media wholly ignored the Russian MOD briefing on the MH17 shoot-down, they did report on its briefing detailing Turkey-ISIS oil trade. Likewise the perception that Russia is fighting ISIS while Turkey is supporting the terrorist organization has become more widespread in the West, so much so that additional moves against Russia by Turkey would only reinforce that perception and leave Turkey more isolated in the internal arena. Рaving said that, Erdogan has painted himself into a corner and, like a cornered rat, he is liable to lash out. However, that lashing out is only likely to make the situation worse for him and for Turkey.

The Russian leadership is no doubt taking that threat seriously and it does have a variety of measures to potentially counteract it, though none of them are highly efficient solutions. Military action against Turkey is out of the question, as NATO (i.e., US) would almost certainly come to Turkey’s aid. Shipping goods via the Caspian Sea or using an overland route to Syria does not appear plausible considering the current configuration of borders and the extent of territory controlled by the Islamic State.

A more promising solution would be to start supplying Syria using Baltic ports which would certainly make individual trips longer and therefore costlier, but also free from the interference of any NATO member as neither the Danish Straits nor Gibraltar can be closed in the way the Bosphorus can. Finally, Russia could attempt to negotiate an agreement with Iraq to establish an air base there, which could then be more easily supplied via the Caspian Sea and Iran and whose existence would allow the number of sorties generated by Hmeimim to be reduced. All of these are options open to the Russian leadership, Erdogan is clearly aware that even the Bosphorus blockade would likely not yield the desired result of crippling the Russian air campaign, which is probably the reason why so far he has not launched an all-out, official blockade of the Bosphorus.

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In a scathing attack on President Barack Obama’s drone war, four former operators of the remote-controlled killing machines declared that this kind of  warfare is actually fueling terrorism.

Meanwhile,  the soldiers who pull the triggers are cast aside when they break down under the incessant stress of long-distance killing.

“This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world,” the quartet of former Air Force service members wrote in a letter to Obama, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and CIA Director John Brennan.

“We came to the realization that the innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay.”

Staff Sergeant Brandon Bryant, Senior Airman Cian Westmoreland, Senior Airman Stephen Lewis and Senior Airman Michael Haas said they felt compelled to speak out because staying silent “would violate the very oaths we took to support and defend the Constitution.”

“We came to the realization that the innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay,” they wrote.

Nothing Surgical about Drone Strikes

An in-depth report by The Intercept, which relied on a “cache of secret slides,” found that the drone program fails miserably in its stated goal of of eliminating only the carefully selected targets.

The US military’s own records reveal that innocents die during the strikes — routinely. During one particular five-month stretch, 90% of the victims of drone attacks were not the intended target.

The public, however, has been led to believe that the drone program works with a high degree of precision.

President Obama certainly gave that impression in April, when he implied that two American hostages killed in a drone strike represented a sadly unavoidable if rare accident: “It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes — sometimes deadly mistakes — can occur,”

The four former drone operators painted a very different picture. “We witnessed gross waste, mismanagement, abuses of power, and our country’s leaders lying publicly about the effectiveness of the drone program,” they wrote. (For a devastating picture of the drone war in just one country, Pakistan, see here.)

The veterans explained why they chose to become whistleblowers: “We cannot sit silently by and witness tragedies like the attacks in Paris, knowing the devastating effects the drone program has overseas and at home.”

Killing the Innocent Leads to PTSD

Obama’s reputation as a reluctant warrior has remained largely intact despite the intensive drone campaign that has become an integral part of his anti-terrorism strategy. But the men and women pulling the trigger from thousands of miles away are paying a high price.

“When the guilt of our roles in facilitating this systematic loss of innocent life became too much, all of us succumbed to PTSD,” the drone operators wrote.

“We were cut loose by the same government we gave so much to — sent out in the world without adequate medical care, reliable public health services, or necessary benefits. Some of us are now homeless. Others of us barely make it.”

WhoWhatWhy contacted the Air Force to get a statement on the letter but did not hear back by the time this article was published. If the Air Force does reply, this report will be updated accordingly.

The quartet of former Air Force service members said they hoped that Obama, Carter and Brennan would pay attention to what they had to say.  But the veterans added that their insiders’ plea to reconsider drone warfare may be “in vain given the unprecedented prosecution of truth-tellers who came before us like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden.”

We will be watching carefully to see what happens with this plea, and to those who made it — and we will keep you informed.

The United States and its allies seem determined to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of World War I by starting World War III. Some of the same players are involved and their motives are as ignoble in the 21^st century as they were in the 20^th.

Nations like Iraq and Syria didn’t exist at all until after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in 1918. Britain and France carved up the region and established the boundaries which are still in use for these countries. The Europeans have returned to their imperialist past and want to resume their interventions but now as clients of the United States.

The United States is the world’s only true super power and it has used that position to wreak the most havoc. Every crisis in the region from the flight of desperate refugees to the creation of the Islamic State can be laid at America’s doorstep.

America had willing puppets as it destroyed Iraq and Libya and then assumed it could easily do the same to Syria. They plotted and spread propaganda that the Assad government would fall but instead it hung on for four years despite the aggressions waged against it. Russia finally stepped up as an ally and made good on its promise to support the government which asked for its assistance. Of all the players now pledging to bomb the Islamic State in Syria, only Russia does so while respecting international law and Syria’s sovereignty.

Of course these alliances create great risk and Turkey contributed to the danger on November 24, 2015 when it shot down a Russian fighter jet. Despite a claim of a 17-second incursion into Turkish airspace, the plane and its pilots who ejected all descended onto Syrian territory.

As the guilty party always does, the Turks screamed like scalded dogs. They asked NATO to defend them when it was they who did the attacking. They faced the wrath of Vladimir Putin and lost out on a gas pipeline and now face sanctions, but they decided it was worth while to toady for the United States and NATO. The Turks have been proven right as the European Union makes plans for a 3 billion euro payment in exchange for a promise to stem the refugee tide making its way through that country. Turkey has made good on its desire to be part of the European empire. Its troops now occupy the northern regions of Iraq and refuse to leave despite angry demands from the Iraqi government.

The world is now descending into a vicious cycle of war and terrorism. The United States and the U.K. invade and occupy Iraq, which leads to the creation of the Islamic State, which attacks Beirut, Ankara, Paris and a Russian passenger plane. Regime change in Libya makes that country a route for refugees who flood Europe. The attempt to do the same in Syria also sends people fleeing and makes Europeans fearful of a brown skinned, Muslim horde. Racist fears lead to rationales for more war and on it goes.

Syria is the epicenter of crisis but it isn’t the only country which may create the long dreaded global conflagration. That is because the imperialists have chosen other places to gain the control they so desperately crave. In 2014 Ukraine was the site of a successful U.S. backed regime change scheme. The ultimate goal was to destroy Russia as an energy exporting nation and make the world safe for U.S. hegemony. There may not be war planes over Ukraine, but it remains the tail that wags the dog and provocations are the order of the day. On November 21, 2015 saboteurs exploded transmission towers which plunged Crimea into a blackout. Members of the Ukrainian Right Sector neo-fascist group and Crimean Tartar “activists” then attacked repair crews and kept the peninsula in darkness for two more weeks.

While the world watches Syria and Turkey, the Ukrainians continue to fulfill their role as the west’s most important puppets. Vice President Joe Biden made an in person promise to continue American support for Ukraine’s government. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has already pledged to keep bailing out the nation which can’t repay its loans. This continued forgiveness is in direct violation of IMF rules. Obviously Ukraine is still very much an American trump card.

The only unknown is which provocation will act as the tipping point. It could be in Syria or Crimea or somewhere else. As long as president Obama shouts, “Assad must go,” the world is in great danger. Imperialism is persistent and it hasn’t changed very much in the past 100 years.

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

The Israeli occupation bulldozers launched on Wednesday morning a limited incursion into Palestinian lands in eastern al-Bureij refugee camp, in central Gaza Strip.

Local sources said four Israeli army bulldozers of the D9 brand moved into the border fence in eastern al-Bureij refugee camp.

The bulldozers raked through the area and leveled Palestinian lands amid intermittent discharge of gunfire.

Two Israeli military jeeps were, meanwhile, deployed in an adjacent area, near the border fence.

Earlier, on Tuesday evening, a similar incursion was carried out into northern Gaza Strip.

Army bulldozers moved some 100 meters into the Beit Hanun (Erez) border-crossing and leveled Palestinian lands in the western border fence.

The incursions are the latest in a series of Israeli violations of the Cairo-brokered ceasefire accord signed in the wake of the 2014 offensive on the besieged coastal enclave.

 And ISIS arrives in Afghanistan

Earlier this month, Anthony Loyd wrote from Kabul in Afghanistan about Pashtuns living in refugee camps or in remote villages of Helmand districts.

These Afghans, from the most heavily contested areas of Helmand, know at first hand the consequences of “precision targeting” and “smart bombs”.

A local farmer, Mir Alam Ghamgen said:

“The British said they never targeted civilians deliberately but they killed them anyway. Whether they meant to or not, all it takes is one mistake with a bomb, civilians die, and the whole loyalty of a tribe can change.”

He lost his two-year-old daughter and nine other family members, including two women and seven children, in an airstrike in the village of Turoba, just outside Sangin district centre, during heavy fighting between the British and Taliban in the summer of 2006.

“Until that bomb landed on my village, we had been pro-government and resented the Taliban. But then as we saw we were being killed by foreigners’ bombs for nothing, our support changed, and we thought we might as well die in the name of the Taliban.”

When asked about precision bombing: “We hated the Russians when they bombed us with artillery and missiles,” said Tufan, a farmer from another Helmand district that saw repeated airstrikes during the British fight against the Taliban:

“The Russians never claimed to kill people intelligently, so when the British came, with improved weapons, boasting of drones and jets and good intelligence, we hoped it might be different. They didn’t kill as many civilians as the Russians, but they killed civilians nevertheless, and we hated them for it.”

No sympathisers of Isis, these men were measured in their understanding of the need to confront the terrorist group.

“It is not easy when you have an armed group that will not listen to negotiation imposing itself upon the people and attacking everyone,” Mr Ghamgen said. “But the British must remember that when foreigners kill civilians, it affects the local people in the opposite way to what they wish.”

There is little positive legacy:

• Sangin and other districts, defended by the British with ground troops and airpower including drones, jets and helicopters, are again in danger of falling to the Taliban.
• Gunfire is now heard every night from the provincial governor’s offices in Helmand’s capital, Lashkar Gar.
• The Taliban fight with beleaguered Afghan troops in Babaji, which was cleared by British troops with heavy losses during Panther’s Claw, the notoriously bloody British offensive of 2009.

The latest Times report is that Islamic State fighters have captured swathes of eastern Afghanistan. How will they be received by such local people?

Mr Ghamgen said:

“It’s OK to kill Daesh, but if the foreigners do in Syria as they did here, it will work against them. All those bombs from drones and jets, all those lives, theirs and ours, for what? They made local people hate them. Helmand is still on fire now the British have gone, and we have no way of returning home.”

Muslim-Americans are living in a totalitarian police state with worsening harassment, profiling, and surveillance. The United States’ government may claim liberty and justice for all; however, in practice, towards Muslims, it exhibits all four major characteristics of a totalitarian state: a war on terror that targets Muslims abroad, a totalitarian police state at home, public executions by drones and gulags outside the rule of law, and a strong reliance on propaganda and political demagoguery.

The hallmark of fascism was state oppression of certain targeted non-privileged groups. Today, Muslims are bearing the brunt of America’s totalitarian police state.

Despite FBI records showing that since 9/11, Muslims have committed far less domestic terror attacks than white supremacists, it is the American-Muslim community that is under unprecedented levels of surveillance and government intrusion. Muslims in America are unquestionably experiencing a fascist system of surveillance, operating at the same level that East Germans faced under the Stasi spy agency. Researcher, Arun Kundnani, has shown how the FBI has one counterterrorism spy for every 94 Muslims in the U.S., which approaches Stasi’s ratio of one spy for every 66 citizens.

Clearly racism, as much as oil, fuels the War on Terror. White Christians rarely have to worry that an undercover agent or informant has infiltrated their churches, student organizations or neighborhoods. The simple fact that U.S. law enforcement has not infiltrated and spied on conservative Christian communities to disrupt violent rightwing extremism, which is the biggest terrorism threat in America, confirms what Muslims in American know in their bones: to worship Allah is to be suspect.

Federal judges recently ruled that suspicion-less surveillance of Muslims is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. The NYPD has admitted that Mosques, student groups, restaurants, even grade schools, have all been under surveillance. By rapidly increasing both government policies of secrecy and surveillance, Mr. Obama’s government is increasing its power to watch its citizens, while diminishing its citizens’ power to watch their government.

The threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism has been largely manufactured, so that the so-called War on Terror can promote multi-billion dollar, corporate-sponsored militarism abroad and the erosion of two hundred-year-old civil liberties at home.

Muslim-Americans are not only facing increasing oppression from the state, but they are also facing growing prejudice from their fellow countrymen, as hate crimes and civil liberty violations against Muslims continue to precipitously rise.

A recent Pew Forum Poll established that Muslims are by far the most disliked minority in America. According to FBI statistics, anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50 percent last year. Muslims constitute 1 percent of the U.S. population, but they are 13 percent of the victims of religious-based hate crimes. Islamophobia and xenophobia now seem as American as apple pie. Intolerance of Muslims is often inverted, depicting Muslim customs as an insult to Western customs.

One major aspect of American totalitarianism, shared by fascist regimes, is the nation’s enormous military budget. In 1933, Nazi Germany’s military spending was 2 percent of their national income; by 1940, it was 44 percent.

Today, America spends more on her military than the rest of the world combined. America has expanded its military into having 662 foreign military bases, according to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report.  The War on Terror has cost $6 trillion, the equivalent of $75,000 for every American household, calculates Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Another hallmark of totalitarianism is the creation of a prison system outside the rule of law that is largely designed to imprison and torture one minority group. The Guantanamo Bay gulag is unquestionably a crime against humanity. There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty.

In April 24, 1934, a People’s Court, just like Guantanamo was established, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely in isolation and were tortured and subjected to show trials. The People’s Court was signed into law by Adolf Hitler.

In 2007, a politician who was vehemently against the human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay, explained what he would do about the torture camp if he ever became President:

“When I am President, I will close Guantanamo. It is a moral outrage, a blight upon America’s conscience. It is the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years. From inception, Guantanamo was a laboratory for unlawful military interrogation, detention, and trials.”

The politician who uttered these words was Senator Barack Obama. Ironically, under President Obama’s tenure, conditions for Guantanamo detainees, from both a physical and legal standpoint, have become markedly worse.

Public executions are perhaps one of the most overt and odious symbols of totalitarianism. In totalitarian Spain, under General Franco, mass public executions were the norm, and were often carried out in bullrings or with band music and onlookers dancing in the victims’ blood. With Hitler and Mussolini supplying arms to Franco, some 200,000 men and women were publically executed during the war and bombed from overhead.

Nowadays, drones are the ultimate totalitarian technology. Washington both uses drones for what amount to public extra-judicial executions of Muslims abroad, and for spying on American Muslims at home.

Most Americans believe that drones are targeted and therefore humane. Nothing could be further from the truth. By all accounts, drones have killed more children than terrorists. According to a new report from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan are civilians.

By 2018, some privacy experts believe law enforcement will likely control over 35,000 drones that the government will use to monitor Americans from the skies.

Integral to the rise of the America Muslim Totalitarian State is propaganda. Sheldon Wolin has poignantly pointed out that, whereas the production of propaganda was crudely centralized in Nazi Germany, in the United States, it is left to highly concentrated media corporations, thus maintaining the illusion of a “free press”.

The American propaganda machine is highly sophisticated. It does not rely upon the radio addresses, speeches, and leaflets disseminated by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, nor does it rely on the crude censorship or harassment of free press ordered by a Politburo. The propaganda of America’s “one percent” is subtle yet pervasive; it relies not only on government diktats but also on the mass media, art, pop culture and Hollywood.

American cinema and music have always been a remarkably effective means of whipping up xenophobic wartime sentiment. For example, the highest grossing war film in history, American Sniper, and President Obama’s favorite television show, Homeland, both engage in an overly broad generalization of Islam, and depict Muslims and terrorists in a way that is indicative of widespread Islamophobia in American culture.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee reported a spike in Islamophobia and hate crimes after the release of American Sniper, which culminated in the recent slaying of three young Muslims in North Carolina, who were shot in the head sniper execution style. American Islamophobia operates in the service of American militarism and American militarism abroad, and in turn, ratchets up Islamophobia against minorities at home.

The media determines our language, our language shapes our thoughts, and our thoughts determine our actions. Language is the fulcrum of a society’s perception. Whosoever controls the public’s language, controls the public’s perception.

The corporate elites who sit on media editorial boards control said language. In 1983, fifty companies owned ninety percent of U.S. media. Today, only six media giants control a staggering ninety percent of what the American public listens to, reads, and watches. “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play,” once remarked Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda.

For Muslim-Americans the media’s Orwellian totalitarian language is clear: Drones are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Torture is Enhanced Interrogation. Occupation is Liberation.

Donald Trump’s recent call to ban Muslims from entry into the U.S. is not without precedent. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively banned all Chinese immigration to the US. This racist law remained in place for five decades and required all Chinese to carry identification certificates or face deportation. When Trump endorsed identification cards to be worn at all times by American Muslims, his popularity jumped almost 3 percentage points. If Donald Trump’s policies are viewed by Americans as odious and un-American, then why has he consistently gained popularity after every anti-Muslim outburst?

America’s history is stock full of totalitarianism and popularized, irrational fear of “the other”. It began when the settler pioneers feared Native Americans and united against them by slaughtering millions in order to quell that fear. As settlers began to unite around a common identity they feared the British Monarchy and rebelled against it. Americans then fought against Mexico, France and various other countries for vast land control. Five hundred documented revolts on slave ships and the fact that plantation owners were greatly outnumbered by slaves, cemented the role of fear that perpetuated slavery for centuries. With greater fear comes greater violence, and with greater violence comes a greater need to justify that violence by ratcheting up the fear.

After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were forced into interment camps on American soil. Vietnamese Americans were then targets of xenophobia in America during the Vietnam War, and then there was the “Red Scare”, which targeted Russian-Americans throughout the Cold War.

From the ashes of the Soviet Union arose the terrorists from the oil-rich Middle East, who became America’s new number one enemy and so the legacy of American xenophobia continues. Today, as the deliberately unending war on terror rumbles on abroad, Muslim, Arab, and Sikh Americans fear that they are living in a totalitarian state.

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

Since the 1990s, Australia has underscored itself as an alternative to the climate change junta, as its officials often seem to suggest it is, focusing instead on the life of immediate gain. It is a code of living with undeniable, selfish benefits, a sort of fossil-fuel Objectivism, as Ayn Rand would have termed it. Be infuriatingly, dangerously selfish; you know you want to.  Forget the others; you have to.

This was in evidence with the Kyoto Protocol, which Canberra stubbornly refused to go along with any vaguely communitarian notion about environment and matters of climate disruption.  Despite being signed in April 1998, the protocol was only ratified on Dec 12 2007.   Even then, it was noted that the document “does not specify the mechanism by which Parties to the Protocol must meet their emission target, thus providing an Annex I country such as Australia reasonable amount of discretion as to the policies and measures it implements domestically to meet its target.”[1]

The Umbrella Group of industrialised states, as it came to be known, has been stalking the climate change scene for some time, stalling and restricting various measures in pursuit of a decarbonized economy. The group, not always harmoniously, comprises Japan, US, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Canada, Australia, Norway and New Zealand.  Given that exports in oil, gas and coal amounts stemming from the group are only growing, some forces of attraction were bound to be felt.

It is one that has proven fractious within its own limits, a front that has been fraying since 2009 when the White House decided to adopt a greener side in a post-Bush world.  Ditto a post-Harper Canada.  Disagreements have arisen over the issue of compliance, as they always tend to.

The spoiling agents in the group have varied in terms of force and effect.  Japan, while not possessing the fossil fuel deposits in the group, has importing ties to three which do. It has been one of the strongest voices to push back G7 commitments on climate change targets.

Australia, however, as it has done in previous rounds, has shown itself to be the problematic child in the climate change classroom, despite dutifully scribbling in its note book a target well below 2°C in terms of temperature rises.  In many instances, its delegates give the impression of not wanting to be there. Failing students, of course, rarely do.

In an assessment by Germanwatch and the Climate Action Network Europe, released at the Paris climate summit, Australia joined Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan at the bottom of a list of 58 nations in its ranking on the Climate Change Performance Index.

The report conducts a range of measures, focusing on actual per capital emissions, emission trends, the use of renewable energy, energy intensity in the economy, and an overall assessment of climate policies.  Australia was bound to get a good serving on this, given its abolition of the carbon emissions scheme, scaling down of the renewable energy target (RET) in June 2015 and such ineffective measures as the Emission Reduction Fund.

It provides a parallel universe to that created by the Turnbull government, which has attempted to sneak in, and out, without much consequence.  “This report,” explained Kelly O’Shannassy of the Australian Conservation Foundation, “cuts through the government’s spin to show we are a climate change laggard.”[2]

Admittedly, many of the policies constitute a burdensome inheritance for Turnbull, one fashioned by that most ardent of climate sceptics, Tony Abbott.   And Foreign Minister Julie Bishop did surprise some by signing up to a New Zealand-led declaration supporting international carbon markets.[3]

Overall, Canberra’s anti-environment resume won the country the award of fossil of the day, an anti-gong not alien to its diplomats.  Bishop, before a forum hosted by Indonesia titled “Pathways to a Sustainable Low Carbon and Climate Resilient Economy” embraced the long held plunderer’s line that fossil fuels remained good.  “Traditional energy sources, fossil fuels like coal, will remain a significant part of the global energy mix for the foreseeable future.”[4]

Such language retains its euphemistic flavour, but becomes exceedingly crude as an apologia for white knight antics. Yes, mining, exporting and burning fossil fuels will be good for the poor, even as the process lines the deep pockets of mining companies.  “Barring some technological breakthrough fossil fuels will remain critical to promoting prosperity, growing economies and alleviating hunger for years to come.”

This standing flies well in the face of such documents as the Declaration to Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground, one arrived at by a group of 163 non-governmental organisations led by environment groups and indigenous leaders from 28 countries.[5]

Australia’s lead negotiator at Paris, Peter Woolcott, fears “the weakening of several provisions.”  Motivating countries to combat targets was one thing; making them binding quite another. Keep such goals, and the means to achieve them, flexible.

Australia is by no means the only state to be the laggard at the show.  Some members of the G77 – Malaysia, Cuba and Venezuela – have made less than subtle efforts to stifle the procedural elements of the summit.  On Monday, the delegates wished for the text to be worked on through a big screen. Endorsing such a measure would have kept the negotiators at work for years.

Other threats have also manifested, not least of all Saudi Arabia, who persists in cultivating a Janus-sensibility to environmental reform.  Therein lies a formidably aggressive opponent, one who, in advance of COP21 intentionally manipulated the oil price to produce a surge in demand.[6]

On Friday, the OPEC Minister meeting in Vienna, egged on by Riyadh, concluded that there would be no reduction in current levels of oil production.[7]  In the words of Saudi Oil Minister, Ali Al-Naimi, uttered in May, ending the use of fossil fuels was something that had to be put “in the back of our heads for a while.”

There are reasons to assume that much of COP21 will be the customary dross one has come to expect from climate change fests.  Some momentum, centred around the so-called “high energy coalition” comprising the EU, the US and almost 80 African and island states, has gathered.  But the state parties seem less relevant to this show than the giant, technology coalitions and energy deals that are being done on the side.[8]  Clean energy initiatives have been, and will take place irrespective of whether states wish to take up a seat on the train of reform.

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

Notes:

GR Editor’s Note:

This article was originally posted in December 2012. It is of utmost relevance in assessing the present situation. It documents the fact that the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels (including the ISIS) operating in Syria are directly supported by Washington.

The Lies of London’s  Sunday Times regarding Obama’s counter-terrorism campaign against the ISIS is refuted by an earlier Sunday Times report. The Sunday Times report quoted below confirms that Obama has been arming the terrorists for the last three years, since 2012. 

M. Ch, GR Editor, December 10, 2015

*      *     *

The Obama administration has decided to launch a covert operation to send heavy weapons to Syrian rebels [December 2012], Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times of London reports.

Diplomatic sources told the Sunday Times that the U.S. “bought weapons from the stockpiles of Libya’s former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.”

The heavy arms include mortars, rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and the controversial anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles, which are integral to countering Bashar Al-Assad’s bombing campaign.

Many have suspected that the US was already involved in sending heavy arms.

The administration has said that the previously hidden CIA operation in Benghazi involved finding, repurchasing and destroying heavy weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, but in October we reported evidence indicating that U.S. agents — particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens — were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.

There have been several possible SA-7 spottings in Syria dating as far back as early summer 2012, and there are indications that at least some of Gaddafi’s 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles were shipped before now.

On Sept. 6 a Libyan ship carrying 400 tons of weapons for Syrian rebels docked in southern Turkey. The ship’s captain was “a Libyan from Benghazi” who worked for the new Libyan government. The man who organized that shipment, Tripoli Military Council head Abdelhakim Belhadj, worked directly with Stevens during the Libyan revolution.

Stevens’ last meeting on Sept. 11 was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and a source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi “to negotiate a weapons transfer in an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists.”

Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that the State Department presence in Benghazi “provided diplomatic cover” for the now-exposed CIA annex. It follows that the “weapons transfer” that Stevens negotiated may have involved sending heavy weapons recovered by the CIA to the revolutionaries in Syria.

The newest report comes days before the U.S. is expected to recognize the newest Syrian coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people. The State Department has also indicated it will soon name the opposition’s highly effective al-Nusra Front a “terrorist organization” for its ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Both of these stipulations — recognition of a unified opposition and creation of distance from extremists — are pivotal in order for the Obama administration to openly acknowledge supporting Syrian rebels with heavy weapons.

On the day of the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony at Oslo City Hall, Alfred Nobel decided to give one fifth of his fortune for a prize to promote disarmament and resolution of all conflicts through negotiations and legal means, never through violence.

It should go to “champions of peace” – to reducing or abolishing standing armies, promoting peace congresses and creating fraternity between nations…

Here is the full text of Nobel’s will of 1895 here.

The Nobel Committee in Oslo has, over the years, awarded this prize to several people whose activities are in clear violation of those goals, even with a broader, updated interpretation.

Can such a prize, with a so clearly stated goal, be changed to serve the opposite idea and be given again and again to recipients who promote arms races and believe in militarism and war?

This question will soon be answered, after Mairead Maguire, Jan Oberg, David Swanson, and Lay Down Your Arms took the case to the Stockholm District Court on Friday 4th of December 2015.

The specific case to be tested is the 2012 award to the European Union.

Here is the full text of the summons.

All other relevant information is available at the Nobel Peace Prize Watch.

Norwegian lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl and Jan Oberg took the initiative in 2007 to reclaim the Prize to its original purposes.

Since then Fredrik Heffermehl has done research on its history and decision-making processes. One of the main results is his internationally acclaimed 2010 book The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted, 239 pages.

More information here.

Syria is an energy war. With the heart of the matter featuring a vicious geopolitical competition between two proposed gas pipelines, it is the ultimate Pipelinestan  war, the term I coined long ago for the 21st century imperial energy battlefields.

It all started in 2009, when Qatar proposed to Damascus the construction of a pipeline from its own North Field – contiguous with the South Pars field, which belongs to Iran – traversing Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria all the way to Turkey, to supply the EU.

Damascus, instead, chose in 2010 to privilege a competing project, the $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria, also know as «Islamic pipeline». The deal was formally announced in July 2011, when the Syrian tragedy was already in motion. In 2012, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with Iran.

Until then, Syria was dismissed, geo-strategically, as not having as much oil and gas compared to the GCC petrodollar club. But insiders already knew about its importance as a regional energy corridor. Later on, this was enhanced with the discovery of serious offshore oil and gas potential.

Iran for its part is an established oil and gas powerhouse. Persistent rumblings in Brussels – still unable to come up with a unified European energy policy after over 10 years – did account for barely contained excitement over the Islamic pipeline; that would be the ideal strategy to diversify from Gazprom. But Iran was under US and EU nuclear-related sanctions.

That ended up turning into a key strategic reason, at least for the Europeans, for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier; a «rehabilitated» (to the West) Iran is able to become a key source of energy to the EU.

Yet, from the point of view of Washington, a geostrategic problem lingered: how to break the Tehran-Damascus alliance. And ultimately, how to break the Tehran-Moscow alliance.

The «Assad must go» obsession in Washington is a multi-headed hydra. It includes breaking a Russia-Iran-Iraq-Syria alliance (now very much in effect as the «4+1» alliance, including Hezbollah, actively fighting all strands of Salafi Jihadism in Syria). But it also includes isolating energy coordination among them, to the benefit of the Gulf petrodollar clients/vassals linked to US energy giants.

Thus Washington’s strategy so far of injecting the proverbial Empire of Chaos logic into Syria; feeding the flames of internal chaos, a pre-planed op by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the endgame being regime change in Damascus.

An Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is unacceptable in the Beltway not only because US vassals lose, but most of all because in currency war terms it would bypass the petrodollar. Iranian gas from South Pars would be traded in an alternative basket of currencies.

Compound it with the warped notion, widely held in the Beltway, that this pipeline would mean Russia further controlling the gas flow from Iran, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. Nonsense. Gazprom already said it would be interested in some aspects of the deal, but this is essentially an Iranian project. In fact, this pipeline would represent an alternative to Gazprom.

Still, the Obama administration’s position was always to «support» the Qatar pipeline «as a way to balance Iran» and at the same time «diversify Europe’s gas supplies away from Russia.» So both Iran and Russia were configured as «the enemy».

Turkey at crossroads

Qatar’s project, led by Qatar Petroleum, predictably managed to seduce assorted Europeans, taking account of vast US pressure and Qatar’s powerful lobbies in major European capitals. The pipeline would ply some of the route of a notorious Pipelineistan opera, the now defunct Nabucco, a project formerly headquartered in Vienna.

So implicitly, from the beginning, the EU was actually supporting the push towards regime change in Damascus – which so far may have cost Saudi Arabia and Qatar at least $4 billion (and counting). It was a scheme very similar to the 1980s Afghan jihad; Arabs financing/weaponizing a multinational bunch of jihadis/mercenaries, helped by a strategic go-between (Pakistan in the case of Afghanistan, Turkey in the case of Syria), but now directly fighting a secular Arab republic.

It got much rougher, of course, with the US, UK, France and Israel progressively turbo-charging all manner of covert ops privileging «moderate» rebels and otherwise, always targeting regime change.

The game now has expanded even more, with the recently discovered offshore gas wealth across the Eastern Mediterranean –  in offshore Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. This whole area may hold as much as 1.7 billion barrels of oil and up to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And that could be a mere third of the total undiscovered fossil fuel wealth in the Levant.

From Washington’s point of view, the game is clear: to try to isolate Russia, Iran and a «regime-unchanged» Syria as much as possible from the new Eastern Mediterranean energy bonanza.

And that brings us to Turkey – now in the line of fire from Moscow after the downing of the Su-24.

Ankara’s ambition, actually obsession, is to position Turkey as the major energy crossroads for the whole of the EU. 1) As a transit hub for gas from Iran, Central Asia and, up to now, Russia (the Turkish  Stream gas pipeline is suspended, not cancelled). 2) As a hub for major gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean. 3) And as a hub for gas imported from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.

Turkey plays the role of key energy crossroads in the Qatar pipeline project. But it’s always important to remember that Qatar’s pipeline does not need to go through Syria and Turkey. It could easily cross Saudi Arabia, the Red Sea, Egypt and reach the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, in the Big Picture, from Washington’s point of view, what matters most of all, once again, is «isolating» Iran from Europe. Washington’s game is to privilege Qatar as a source, not Iran, and Turkey as the hub, for the EU to diversify from Gazprom.

This is the same logic behind the construction of the costly Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, facilitated in Azerbaijan by Zbigniew «Grand Chessboard» Brzezinski in person.

As it stands, prospects for both pipelines are less than dismal. The Vienna peace process concerning Syria will go nowhere as long as Riyadh insists on keeping its weaponized outfits in the «non-terrorist» list, and Ankara keeps allowing free border flow of jihadis while engaging in dodgy business with stolen Syrian oil.

What’s certain is that, geo-economically, Syria goes way beyond a civil war; it’s a vicious Pipelineistan power play in a dizzying complex chessboard where the Big Prize will represent a major win in the 21st century energy wars.

Pepe ESCOBAR is an independent geopolitical analyst

Iraqi sources confirm to Elijah J. Magnier that Turkey is indeed blackmailing Baghdad to get a Qatar-Turkey pipeline. The blackmail also has a water resource component. I wrote on that here back in August. I recommend to read the above linked Magnier piece together with my speculations below.

The Turkish move to annex Mosul is further developing into a serious conflict. Iraq has demanded that Turkey removes its soldiers and heavy weapons from the “training base” near Mosul within 48 hours. It asserts that these were put there without asking or informing the sovereign Iraqi government.

Turkey first denied that any new troops arrived in Iraq. It then said that the troops were only a replacement of the existing training force. Then it claimed that the new troops were there to protect the training force:

Turkish sources say the reinforcement plans were discussed in detail with Brett McGurk, U.S. President Barack Obama’s counter-ISIL fight coordinator, during his latest visit to Ankara on Nov. 5-6. “The Americans are telling the truth,” one high-rank source said. “This is not a U.S.-led coalition operation, but we are informing them about every single detail. This is not a secret operation.”

The U.S. was informed but Iraq was not? That makes it look as if the U.S. is behind this. Brett McGurk has also said that this is not a “U.S.-led coalition” operation but is otherwise playing “neutral” on the issue.

But Reuters now stenographed some other Turkish source which suddenly claims that the tanks and artillery are part of the coalition:

Turkey said on Monday it would not withdraw hundreds of soldiers who arrived last week at a base in northern Iraq, despite being ordered by Baghdad to pull them out within 48 hours.The sudden arrival of such a large and heavily armed Turkish contingent in a camp near the frontline in northern Iraq has added yet another controversial deployment to a war against Islamic State fighters that has drawn in most of the world’s major powers.

Ankara says the troops are there as part of an international mission to train and equip Iraqi forces to fight against Islamic State. The Iraqi government says it never invited such a force, and will take its case to the United Nations if they are not pulled out.

The force to be trained is under control of a former Iraqi state governor who is, like the Kurdish ex-president Barzani, a Turkish tool:

The camp occupied by the Turkish troops is being used by a force called Hashid Watani, or national mobilization, made up of mainly Sunni Arab former Iraqi police and volunteers from Mosul.It is seen as a counterweight to Shi’ite militias that have grown in clout elsewhere in Iraq with Iranian backing, and was formed by former Nineveh governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, who has close relations with Turkey. A small number of Turkish trainers were already there before the latest deployment.

The former policemen who ran away when the Islamic State took over Mosul are not and will not be a serious fighting force against their Islamic State brethren in Mosul. They are just a fig leave for the Turkish occupation.

There are rumors, not confirmed yet, that Turkey now uses the presence of its force to blackmail the Iraqi government. Turkey, it is said, wants agreement from Baghdad for a gas pipeline from Qatar through Iraq to Turkey.

Map via Fer G

The original plan was to have such a pipeline run through Syrian desert flatland to Turkey and on to Europe. The gas from Qatar would be sold there in competition with gas from Russia. President Assad had rejected that pipeline and preferred one from Iran through Iraq to the Syrian coast. Qatar and Iran collectively own a huge gas field in the Persian Gulf. Whoever gets his pipeline going first will have a big advantage in extracting from the field and selling its gas. The rejection of the original pipeline project was one reason why Qatar engaged heavily in the regime change project in Syria. The Plan B would have the pipeline go through the rather rough east Anatolia – more expensive than the Syria route but feasible. The U.S. supports the Qatar project. Anything that would make Europeans dependent on gas from a U.S. controlled regime is preferable to Europeans who do independent business with Russia.

Erdogan visited Qatar on December 1 for two days and the two countries signed a number of “strategic agreements”. The Turkish troops moved to Mosul on December 4 and 5. This makes the pipeline extortion that Turkey is said to try with Iraq at least plausible.

But Iraq and its Prime Minister Abadi can not agree to the pipeline project. Its allies in Iran, Russia and Syria are all against the Qatar-Turkey-(U.S.) project and would see that as treason. Shia militia in Iraq, especially the Badr brigade, have threatened to destroy the Turkish force near Mosul. They would remove Abadi from his office if he would fold under the Turkish-Qatari-(U.S.) extortion scheme.

Possibly related to the Turkish escalation is today’s attack on a Syrian government position near Deir Ezzour:

Syria’s government said the U.S.-led military coalition has carried out a deadly airstrike on a Syrian army camp, but officials from the alliance said the report was false.Syria said four coalition jets killed three soldiers and wounded 13 in the eastern Deir al-Zor province on Sunday evening, calling it an act of aggression, the first time it has made such an accusation.
…
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported earlier that jets likely to be from the coalition hit part of the Saeqa military camp near the town of Ayyash in Deir al-Zor province, killing four Syrian army personnel.

But a U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States is certain that Russia was responsible for the deadly strike on the Syrian army camp .

The official flatly dismissed claims that U.S.-led coalition jets were responsible.

Brett McGurk, U.S. President Barack Obama’s envoy to the coalition, also denied claims of coalition responsibility, saying on his Twitter account: “Reports of coalition involvement are false.”

Damascus insists that four jets entered Syria from Al-Bukamal, Iraq and fired 9 missiles against al-Saeqa military base in Ayyash near Deir Ezzour.

The U.S. accuses Russia to have committed the strike. I very much doubt that. There have been accidental “friendly fire” strikes by the Russian air force against Syrian troops and against Hizbullah. But those accidents were always immediately admitted and investigated within the 4+1 alliance. The Russians say they did not do this strike and Damascus agrees.

But notice the weasel word in the U.S. statements: “U.S.-led coalition”. The Turks in Mosul are not part of the “U.S.-led coalition” even if they first claimed to be. If the air strike in Syria today were not done by the “U.S.-led coalition” it could mean that some country committed these air strikes on its own without the strike being officially within the “U.S.-led coalition” framework. Could that country’s name start with a Q?

The U.S. will know who really launched this strike. In both, the Turkish aggression on Iraq and the airstrike in Syria today and even with the earlier mountain ambush on the Russian jet, the U.S. is likely “leading from behind” the curtain. All these events are, like the now forming new alliance with Jihadis, part of Obama’s bigger plans and designs for Syria and the Middle East.

After politicians tabled a  weak draft climate deal in Paris today, hundreds of protestors including Friends of the Earth International activists staged a loud protest inside the climate summit to expose the fact that politicians are failing to provide a fair and just climate deal in Paris.

Free images of the protest are available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/foei/

“Our governments  must not settle for the draft text as it stands. People on the frontline of climate change, who are already suffering as a result of climate change, demand that rich countries to do their fair share of emissions reductions and provide necessary finance for an energy transformation in Southern countries. The draft deal fails these frontline communities,” said Friends of the Earth International climate justice and energy coordinator Sara Shaw.

Friends of the Earth International alongside civil society organisations, trade unions, and grassroots movements use a set of demands called ‘the People’s Test on Climate’ as a yardstick to assess the Paris climate deal.

The demands in the People’s Test on Climate cover the key pillars of what would constitute a just deal: a commitment to keeping us well below 1.5 and dividing the carbon budget using the fairshares principle; finance and support in line with rich nations’ climate debt; a just, systemic transformation; and justice for impacted communities, including compensation for irreparable climate damage.

Today’s text shows no progress on crucial issues, including ambition, differentiation, equity, finance, loss and damage. Many of the most important issues remain in brackets.

A short negotiations update is available below.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Friends of the Earth International climate justice and energy coordinator Sara Shaw: + 33 6 71 71 38 31 (until 12 Dec) or + 44 79 74 00 82 70 or email [email protected]

Friends of the Earth International media line: +31 6 51 00 56 30 or +33 6 07 10 45 09  (until 12 Dec) or email [email protected]


NEGOTIATIONS UPDATE

As of December 9 at 7pm, much of the climate agreement text remains in brackets or options, despite assurances by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who is working as chair, that as much as 75% had been removed.

To prevent runaway climate change we need urgent action based on historic responsibility and capacity to act, based on a fair shares approach, according to Friends of the Earth International.

But instead of agreeing ways to implement the existing UN climate convention, we are witnessing attempts to dismantle it by developed countries who are looking for ways to escape their responsibilities by pushing strategies such as “self- differentiating”.

Key demands like reparations for those who suffer irreparable losses and damages because of climate change are still highly contested in this draft. There is no agreement on finance. Developed countries are still planning to use a disproportionally large carbon budget, shirking their responsibilities and pushing the burden onto developing countries.

This draft means that the Paris deal could just pay lip service to the  goal of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees, endangering even more millions of vulnerable people already affected by the climate crisis.

To mention 1.5 degrees maximum average global warming as a possible goal in the draft Paris agreement is just empty words if it not coupled with ambitious pre-2020 action and adequate finance for both adaptation and mitigation in the global South, according to Friends of the Earth International.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Back in June 2015 an unprecedented statement by social movements of climate- impacted communities from the global South as well as faith, labour, environmental, and anti-poverty groups representing tens of millions of people from around the world was delivered to ministers from around the world gathered at the UN General Assembly to discuss climate change.

The People’s Test on Climate 2015, is available in English, French and Spanish at http://peoplestestonclimate.org

If the Paris agreement fails this test, politicians will have failed to follow the people’s lead, warned Friends of the Earth International.

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Niccolo' Sarno
Friends of the Earth International Media Coordinator
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @FoEint_press
Website: http://www.foei.org/press/
Tel: +31 6 51 00 56 30 or + 33 6 07 10 45 09 (29/11-12/12)
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Friends of the Earth International is the world's largest
grassroots environmental federation with 75 national member groups
in 73 countries and more than 2 million members and supporters
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Why is a hate campaign being waged against Muslims? 

Why are Muslims increasingly categorized as terrorists? 

Why is this hate campaign  part of the US  presidential election campaign? 

Why is Donald Trump calling for police state measures directed against American Muslims?  

Why are Muslims the object of ethnic profiling and job discrimination? 

Why has France’s president Francois Hollande suspended civil rights coupled with a hate campaign directed against France’s Muslims, which represent 7.5 percent of the country’s population?

Why is the West waging a war against Muslim countries?  

Why is Islam regarded as evil?

The answer to all these questions is both simple and complex.   

It just so happens that more than 60% of the World’s reserves of crude oil lie in Muslim lands. 

Muslims are the inhabitants of the countries which possess the oil.  And America’s imperial agenda consists in acquiring ownership and control over the World’s oil reserves.

If these lands had been inhabited by Buddhists, Western politicians –with the support of the mainstream media– would be demonizing the Buddhists.

Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess more than 60 percent of the World’s crude oil reserves.

With regard to conventional crude oil (excluding tar sands in Venezuela and Canada), the percentage of global (conventional crude) oil reserves in Muslim countries is much larger.

Countries which possess large reserves of crude oil are slated for destabilization.

More than 50 percent of the World’s crude oil reserves lies between the tip of the Arabian peninsula and the Caspian Sea basin: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Azerbaijan.

Map: copyright Eric Waddell, Global Research 2003

The above region is America’s war theater. That is where the battle for oil under the banner of the “war on terrorism” is being fought. Those are the Muslim lands which have been slated for conquest or regime change. Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies and emirates are US proxy states, firmly under US control.

The collective demonization of Muslims, including the vilification of the tenets of Islam, applied Worldwide, constitutes at an ideological level, an instrument of conquest of the World’s energy resources. It is part of the broader economic, political mechanisms underlying the New World Order.

This vilification is carried out by actually creating terrorist organizations integrated by Muslims, as part of a longstanding intelligence operation going back to the Soviet-Afghan war.

Al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations are creations of the CIA. They are not the product of Muslim society. Terrorist attacks are undertaken by jihadist entities which are CIA intelligence assets.

The Islamic State (ISIS) is an intelligence construct which is used essentially for two related purposes.

1. They are the foot soldiers of the Western military alliance, the instruments of destabilization, recruited, trained, financed by the Western military alliance. The various al Qaeda entities are the instruments of destabilization in US-NATO sponsored proxy wars (AQIM in Mali, Boko Haram in Nigeria, ISIS in Syria and Iraq). At the same time, they constitute a pretext and a justification to intervene under the banner of a “counter-terrorism” bombing campaign.

2. On the home front, the various Al Qaeda/ ISIS terrorist cells –supported covertly by Western intelligence–  are the  instruments of a diabolical and criminal propaganda operation which consists in killing innocent civilians with a view to providing legitimacy to the instatement of  police state measures allegedly in support of democracy. These false flag attacks allegedly perpetrated by terrorist organization are then used to harness Western public against Muslims.

The underlying objective is to wage a an illegal war of conquest in the Middle East and beyond under the banner of the “global war on terrorism”. According to Western politicians, “we are defending ourselves against the terrorists”. According to our governments, the bombing raids allegedly directed against the terrorists in Syria are “not an act of war”, they are presented to Western public opinion as an “act of self-defense”. “The West is under attack by the ISIS terrorists”, the ISIS is based in Raqqa, Northern Syria, “we must defend ourselves” by bombing ISIS.

We are told that this is not an act of war, it is an act of retribution and self-defense. The only problem with this propaganda op is that “The Terrorists R US”,  our governments and intelligence services have been supporting ISIS from the very outset.  

In the eyes of public opinion, possessing a “just cause” for waging war is central. A war is said to be Just if it is waged on moral, religious or ethical grounds. Muslims within Western countries are being vilified as part of an imperial agenda, as a means to justify the destabilization of Muslim countries on humanitarian grounds (e.g. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Yemen).

America is waging a holy crusade against Muslims and Muslim countries.  The “war on terrorism” purports to defend the American Homeland and protect the “civilized world”. It is upheld as a “war of religion”, a “clash of civilizations”, when in fact the main objective of this war is to secure control and corporate ownership over the region’s extensive oil wealth.

Throughout history, vilification of the enemy has been applied time and again. The Crusades of the Middle Age consisted in demonizing the Turks as infidels and heretics, with a view to justifying military action.

Demonization serves geopolitical and economic objectives. Likewise, the campaign against “Islamic terrorism” (which is supported covertly by US intelligence) supports the conquest of oil wealth.

Muslims are equated with terrorists: Islamophobia serves to wage nationwide campaigns against Muslims in Europe and North America.

It is an instrument of war propaganda used to degrade the history, institutions, values and social fabric of Muslim countries, while upholding the tenets of “Western democracy” and the “free market” as the only alternative for these countries.

 

 

France’s Former Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, had stated in a televised program on LCP that UK government officials had told him about preparations for war in Syria two years prior to the start of the 2011 protests and conflict.

The reason given for this war is the Syrian government’s anti-Israel stance that made Syria a target for Western-backed regime change.

Note: the video below was originally published on youtube in 2013.

Eccentricity in the British sense is often a behavioural code for apologetics. If the man is totally off scale, somewhat dotty, he can be forgiven for being, well, eccentric. Never mind that he ignores the science, or regards the earth as flat. There is room for all of us on this peculiar earth, masked by that oft abused term reason.

Which brings us to that curious cat by the name of Lord Christopher Monckton, or the 3^rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. He reached prominence with his creation of a board game known as the eternity puzzle. Deeming it so demanding, he offered 1 million euros to the first person to solve it. It was done so within 16 months.[1] His other hat, however, has been worn as a science policy advisor to the UK Independence Party.

For years, Monckton has been going about claiming that he is a Peer with gravitas, a worthy critic of what he calls “consensus” science. Fine aristocratically puffy stuff, until you realise that he is rather guilty of the very things he himself claims. Make-believe, for one, is everywhere.

For one, he is not the Lord he claims to be. In July 2011, the House of Lords took the unusual step of publishing a so-called “cease and desist” letter on its website demanding that Monckton stop claiming to be a member of that body. David Beamish, as Clerk of the Parliaments, decided to go public with the letter to the Viscount, stating unequivocally that “you are not and have never been a Member of the House of Lords. Your assertion that you are a Member, but without the right to sit or vote, is a contradiction in terms.”[2] A Peer, yes, but not a member of the House with requisite voting rights.

In a sense, his relevance is minimal. He is the self-appointed voice in the wilderness, a climate sceptic Cassandra. This is not, in itself, a problem. Science is prone to its own ideologies and abuses. Militant convictions prevail on all sides, and there is a reluctance to often question what are taken to be obvious truths. But Monckton, having shown a sceptical side, proceeds ever so often to move into a delusionary one.

The delusion is often laced with a good deal of political paranoia. On Greenpeace, he was convinced that, “Goofy teenagers are giving it money and going about collecting money, not realising that what they are actually collecting money for is not an environmental organisation any more. It is a communist front.”[3]

This is his leitmotif: environmentalists are out to establish a global tyranny that is bound to shove the green is good notion down everybody’s throats. “Let’s not forget,” he has suggested, “it was Hitler who first founded the green movement and first used the environmental movement, not for the basis of genuine concern about the environment, but as a basis for getting control over every detail over people’s lives so they couldn’t argue back.”

The flipside of this is also important. When he speaks, those in the fossil fuel lobby, not to mention a good number of GOP members, listen. They might regard him as a charming toff of a fool – but he is a supremely useful one. In his attempts to regard the green movement as little storm troopers with Hitlerite foliage, mining magnates can happily go about renting the earth and defecating in its cavities for all its worth.

Monckton’s presence was one of several at the Hotel California, near the Champs-Elysees in Paris. Various groups of climate change sceptics had gathered to compare ever diminishing notes. Their situation was one of noisy adversity, much of it the outcome of protest groups distributing “wanted” posters and slogans. “Arrayed against them [the sceptics],” noted Richard Valdmanis of Reuters, “are thousands of environmentalists, scientists and even big business leaders”.[4] Only a handful of the 70 seats were filled.

According to communications director of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, Jim Lakey, “This is the only group essentially that has had to make their own space and their own time to get heard.” Heartland spokesman James Taylor was determined to make this a human rights issue. “The environmental movement doesn’t want to have a debate; they just want to put forward a single message that everyone must adhere to.”

Monckton’s latest theory, one bamboozling in its nature, is the ultimate reverse conspiracy, a nod of respect for a political casualty of like mind. Those dirty sods in the United Nations, he suggests, were out to get Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott from the start. Abbott, as readers will be aware, was as great a patron of coal as Henry the Navigator was of enterprising sailors. His adolescent love of blood, his pugilistic mania, were the sort to get any public school boy’s heart pumping.

Abbott was so indifferent to the woes of climate catastrophe he won fans among such figures as the former Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper. Being a commodity bumpkin, Abbott was perfect for an industry that, by its very nature, is finite. It lives for the moment, assumes that the future is for others. Trash the room, and someone is bound to clean it up for you.

Monckton’s suggestion was that such entities as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the main scientific research body, the CSIRO, were behind a fraudulent scheme to manipulate climate data. Abbott, unheralded genius that he is, was aware of it, and rightly ignored them. As for Abbott’s knifing successor, Malcolm Turnbull, Monckton suggested that it was “naïve to assume that he has not been in contact with the UN.”

Such fears are the sort to come out of the pen of Dan Brown, and do Monkton no favours. Abbott, the Viscount suggested, had been urged to run for the leadership of his party by another climate change sceptic Ian Plimer, a current emeritus professor of geology at the University of Melbourne.

The other main contender at that point? Malcolm Turnbull, of course. “I am quite sure that without Turnbull and his own faction, the UN would have found it harder [to topple Abbott].”[5] Conspiracies are rather curious creatures.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.desmogblog.com/christopher-monckton

[2] http://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2011/july/letter-to-viscount-monckton/

[3] http://usawatchdog.com/climate-change-is-global-communist-tyranny-lord-christopher-monckton/

[4] http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKBN0TQ2F320151208

[5] http://www.smh.com.au/environment/un-climate-conference/paris-un-climate-conference-2015-tony-abbott-was-brought-down-by-the-un-christopher-monckton-says-20151207-glhtco.html

 

Beijing and African Union states to enhance ‘win-win’ partnerships

A recently-held gathering on December 5-6 of African Union (AU) member-states and the People’s Republic of China under the banner of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has placed strong emphasis on greater collaboration between the two regions based on mutual benefit. This meeting was held in Johannesburg, South Africa under the theme “China-Africa Progressing Together: Win-Win Cooperation for Common Development.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized during his speech before the FOCAC Summit that Beijing has become Africa’s principal cooperation partner in several significant areas. By the conclusion of 2014, the volume of Chinese investment in Africa reached $101 billion U.S. dollars, represented by more than 3,100 Africa-based enterprises. During 2014, bilateral trade reached $221.9 billion. (Xinhua, Dec. 5)

It was announced by Xi that China was offering $60 billion in funding, including $5 billion of grant assistance and interest-free loans, $35 billion in preferential loans and export credits on more favorable terms, $5 billion in additional capital for the China-Africa Development Fund and the Special Loan for the Development of African SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) each, and a China-Africa production capacity cooperation fund with an initial capital fund of $10 billion.

AU Commission Chairperson Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, said of the address delivered by the Chinese leader at the FOCAC Summit that “President Xi Jinping’s speech was great in the sense that it identified areas where Africa is interested in and which are in our agenda 2063. Those are areas we are going to cooperate on and take this relationship to new heights.” (Xinhua, Dec. 7)

Dlamini-Zuma was referring to the fifty year plan (2063) of development and unification outlined at the 2013 AU Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia which commemorated the five decades anniversary of the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the AU. The state-of-the-art AU headquarters in Addis Ababa was actually constructed by the Chinese in recent years.

The AU chair also said “We are going to cooperate with China whether in modernizing agriculture, infrastructure, energy, training of the young people and culture. The cooperation with China will enable us to implement the three network projects which include highways, railways and aviation.”

Over the course of the Africa tour of Chinese President Xi Jinping to both Zimbabwe and neighboring South Africa earlier in the week, some twenty-six agreements were signed. The thrust of these projects center around the construction and strengthening of infrastructural development that will result in what Xi called “win-win cooperation.”

Held in Johannesburg, South Africa and hosted by the African National Congress (ANC) ruling party President Jacob Zuma, the gathering represented a continuation of a decades-long relationship dating back to the early years of the Chinese Revolution which paralleled the emergence of the national independence movements on the continent. During the course of various political and military struggles against colonialism, China under the leadership of the Communist Party has provided material and political support.

In the current period, China through its role as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has blocked the imposition of even more draconian western sanctions against the states of Sudan and Zimbabwe. Beijing also deploys its troops as participants in peacekeeping operations in the Darfur region of Sudan and in the Horn of Africa state of Djibouti.

FOCAC Continues Strong Over Fifteen Years

The South African gathering is the latest in a series of such meetings since 2000. There have been five other ministerial conferences with the first being held in Beijing.

Subsequent ministerial conferences were held in 2003 in Beijing, 2006 also in Beijing which was the third ministerial conference and the first FOCAC Summit, 2009 in Egypt, and 2012 in Beijing.

This meeting was officially described as the second FOCAC Summit and was treated as a major event in both geo-political regions. Deliberations over the two days and its preliminary meetings leading up to the gathering, placed the Summit within the context of the world economic crisis which has impacted both China and the African continent.

Xi Jinping visited Zimbabwe, led by the AU rotating Chair President Robert Mugabe, prior to the FOCAC Summit where he signed additional agreements with the leadership of that country still undergoing sanctions by the U.S. and other imperialist countries. Zimbabwe’s state media gave lead coverage to the visit of President Xi and his large delegation which spent two days inside the country prior to crossing over into South Africa.

The Zimbabwe Herald reported on the “Landmark deals worth $4 billion signed between Zimbabwe and China on Tuesday (Dec. 1) which will convert provisions of the Government’s economic blueprint, Zim-Asset, into programs of action. The two nations signed 12 investment agreements covering different sectors of the economy. The deals include financing for the expansion of the Hwange Power Station, construction of a new parliament building and a pharmaceutical warehouse, expansion of a national fiber optic broadband project and provisions of wildlife monitoring equipment.” (Dec. 2)

These agreements are being signed between Beijing and Harare while Zimbabwe is still overwhelmed with debts to the global capitalist financial institutions. An attempt to re-schedule the obligations to the western banks and their subservient lending agencies will prove to be formidable in light of the declining commodity prices which the Southern African state depends upon to earn foreign exchange revenue known as hard currency.

This same above-mentioned article in the Herald says “Zimbabwe has, for over 15 years, been unable to secure long-term loans to fund infrastructure because it is in arrears with global lenders — the IMF and the World Bank. However, the multi-lateral institutions might resume financial support to Zimbabwe after a deal was struck with international creditors on how the country intends to repay its arrears. Zimbabwe intends to clear its arrears to the three multinational institutions, the IMF, ($110 million), the World Bank ($1.15 billion) and the AfDB ($601 million) by the end of April 2016.”

In South Africa, Xi signed agreements worth $6.5 billion with the ANC-led government. These agreements are mainly designed to build infrastructure in the continent’s most industrialized nation.

Also during this visit, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma championed the relations between South Africa and China as being at there “best ever” after the two leaders held discussions concentrating on the boosting of investments.

“China and South Africa relations are at a new historical level. We want to build it into a model for relationships between China and other emerging economies,” Xi told media representatives after the initial talks. (TVC, Dec. 3)

In response to the criticism leveled by the western imperialist states including the U.S. over allegations that Africa-China relations represent a new form of “colonialism”, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta rejected this categorization saying that both regions are benefiting from the burgeoning partnerships. “China is ready to help us develop and meet our socio-economic objectives without imposing its agenda on us. This is the outstanding aspect of our cooperation with China,” Kenyatta said at the FOCAC Summit.

Xinhua news agency noted in Kenyatta remarks that “China is doing what the colonialists failed to do in the past: help Africa out of poverty, the president said. This marked a strong contrast with what colonialists were doing before, he stressed. Relations between African countries and China are entering a critical phase as both sides focus attention on areas that generate real benefits to citizens,” Kenyatta said. (Dec. 5)

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man (or nation) who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle. –– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

So it seems that all the Republicans running for president (and their supporters) are ignorant about the root causes of “radicalization” and ‘terrorism”. These xenophobic (“the fear of foreigners”) politicians are, perhaps unwittingly, following the politics and punitive theologies of many other extremist right-wing notables from history, including Adolf Hitler.

Donald Trump is the GOP candidate that is currently the most popular with Republican voters, but he is in a close tie with every other front-runner when it comes to ignorance about what motivates “terrorism”. Trump says: “…the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from [and why] we will have to [wait to] determine…until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Trump isn’t the only one guilty of willful ignorance. The two major political parties, along with the mainstream media are equally guilty. One of the problems is that nobody is asking the “terrorists” what motivates them and why they feel as they do. Doing so and then listening to their answers would be too hard to handle for uber-patriotic Americans who have been indoctrinated into the cult of American Exceptionalism.

Understanding “radicalization” isn’t rocket science, but in order to understand it, one needs more information than what is spoon-fed to us consumers of inadequate, censored, canned and often fake (“faux”) news. It seems that any information that might cause cognitive dissonance in us “sheeple” is carefully kept away from our fragile souls for political, economic or national security reasons.

And thus we are deprived of the true facts of any case that is usually exaggerated by the propagandists in charge of “public enlightenment”. Therefore we consumers are forced to either adopt the approved story line or are left to develop our own theories based on inadequate information, and cunning campaign speech-writers or their ignorant presidential candidates do the same and are tempted to inflame their voters with conspiratorial versions of what will soon become the “conventional wisdom”. So, being too busy to do the time-consuming searches for the real truth, most of us accept the propagandist’s version that is then spread about on Fox News, CNN, or even NPR, MPR, PBS or at the local watering hole.

Indeed, the issues can be complex and hard to understand, but the mainstream media has, for far too long, gotten its viewers to depend on 20 second sound bites for their news, so that they have made reporting on complex stories undoable. When even the controlled demolition of World Trade Center # 7 (at 5:20 pm on the afternoon of September 11, 2001) went totally unreported by the vast majority of news outlets and then was also totally unmentioned in the 911 Commission report, one knows that there is something rotten going on. (Of course, most patriotic Americans don’t want to hear about what really happened on 9/11 because they don’t want to know that the White House lied to them and lied all of us into endless wars. The media has either been instructed to lie or it doesn’t know how to tell complicated stories to brain-washed consumers who have rapidly shortening attention spans.) (For more go to: http://www.truthmove.org/content/demolition-wtc-7/.)

There Must be 50 Ways to Create a Terrorist

At any rate, there has been a lot of irrelevant drivel published about the supposedly “elusive” and “incomprehensible” motivations of the many so-called “radicalized”, homicidal, religious extremists. Although the politicians want American voters to focus on Muslim terrorists, the problem of mass shootings isn’t limited to that religious group. Here is a short list of some of the many religion-based “terrorist” groups that need to be understood:

1) Fundamentalist Islamists [committing violence in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Paris or San Bernadino],

2) Fundamentalist Christians [killing “unbelievers” or “heretics” at Planned Parenthood clinics, black churches, Unitarian churches, Sikh churches and Jewish synagogues or burning of Black churches in the Bible Belt],

3) Aryan Nation/KKK-type racist Christians [terrorizing and lynching blacks all over the fascist South for the last 300 years],

4) Zionist Israelis [homicidally displacing Palestinians from their ancestral homes in 1948 and their over-the-top mass bombings and killings of innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in reprisals for the ineffectual missile attacks and the irritating stone-throwing at Israeli tanks], or

5) Radical right-wing Hindus and Muslims [destroying each other and each other’s shrines in India since 1948]).

(Note that I did not mention 9/11 and the 3,000 innocent lives lost on that date as an example of terrorism by radical Muslims. The reason for that is because whatever caused the momentary kerosene fires in WTC # 1 and# 2 only caused a few hundred lives to be lost, whereas the controlled demolitions that followed were responsible for the vast majority of the 3,000. Most importantly, no Muslim group in the world was capable of planting the perfectly timed controlled demolitions of the three steel-reinforced skyscrapers on that fateful day. Any sane person with normal intelligence that has done their due diligence on 9/11 knows that the explosives that demolished the three World Trade Center towers in mere seconds had to have been planted by a group of demolition experts that had months of approved access to the towers – and that could not have been done by Osama bin Laden or any group of incompetents like the fingered 19 Arabian “hi-jackers”. (See www.ae911truth.org for the whole story.)

Is Religion Killing Us?

“Is Religion Killing Us: Violence in the Bible and the Quran” is the title of a book written by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer (2003). In the introduction to the book, Pallmeyer says:

Religion is used to justify killing precisely because issues of ultimate consequence and meaning are understood to be at stake. People frequently use God and religion to justify killing when conflicts escalate between individuals, groups, or nations. In the midst of problems rooted in land, oppression, discrimination, or any number of other historical grievances, religion is often called on the justify human violence with…reference to “sacred” tests, divine mission, or moral purpose.

Listen to the Sociologists for a Change

Sociologists, psychologists and social workers have long understood what radicalizes normally non-violent people into committing acts of terror. However, experts in those fields are never asked by mainstream interviewers so that the rest of us might come to understand the people and issues involved. Instead, the media can’t seem to resist spending valuable air time doing human interest stories rather than using the latest violent act as a teachable moment to get at the real truth – and thus possibly prevent the next shooting.

Too often, the media goes all simplistic by broadcasting the opinions of 1) people on the street, 2) poorly-informed law-makers, 3) thought-leaders who have undisclosed conflicts of interest, or 4) punitive law enforcement or military types.

Often the talking heads even resort to interviewing fellow journalists who had just been assigned to cover mass shootings and therefore may have done some internet searches to prepare their stories. Sometimes spokespersons for for-profit companies that have an anti-terrorism product to sell are interviewed (disaster capitalism). Retired generals who spent their careers in the military, and are now living on comfortable pensions, are commonly interviewed after shootings. And of course, Neoconservative and Neoliberal politicians who have conservative or industry constituents in their contributor and voter base to mollify, find themselves throwing fuel on the fire of fear and hate, thus justifying their support for short-sighted reactionary policies that fail to address the real issues.

Why Some Terrorists Justify Their Use of Retaliatory Violence

Racial fear and hatred, of course, must be taught from an early age. Both are alive and well in the United States of America that has committed some of the world’s worst crimes against humanity. One only has to consider the mass killings, starvation and genocide of the Native Americans over the last 500 years, starting with Columbus in 1492 and getting a boost at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and one can understand why there were so many indigenous resistance movements against the White European land-stealers, treaty-breakers and oppressors, why there was an AIM movement (the American Indian Movement), why there was a Sioux Uprising and why Custer and his blood-thirsty killing soldiers probably deserved what they got at Little Big Horn.

One only has to consider the forced enslavement, deaths, torture, lynchings, police brutality and discrimination against millions of innocent Africans and African-Americans over the past 300 years, and one can understand why Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the Council of Racial Equality, and the Black Power movements did what they did and why the Black Lives Matter movement is doing what they do.

One only has to consider the illegal invasions and occupations of Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iraq (among many other militarily weak nations) and the CIA’s part in overthrowing the democratically-elected leaders of Iran, Chile and Guatemala in the 1950s (among dozens of other examples of CIA plotting and American military invasions and occupations), the widespread US government support of many pro-corporate, fascist dictatorships around the world, the indiscriminate drone killings with many innocent lives lost, cluster bombings, use of radioactive (depleted) uranium weapons (and the hideous epidemic of fetal anomalies and still-births in Iraqi babies that resulted), the “Turkey Shoot” in Kuwait, the wanton destruction (twice) of Fallujah and its innocent inhabitants, the torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the CIA “black sites”, the atrocious “Collateral Murder” tape (google it) and the fact that America refuses to comply with the International Criminal Court (and thus its war criminals will suffer no punishment for their acts of criminality) and one can easily understand why some Asians, South and Central Americans, Africans, Iranians and assorted Muslims might want some payback.

”You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”

Where do “terrorists” come from? Rogers and Hammerstein provided one answer in their powerful song “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” from the hit musical “South Pacific”. The producers, knowing that it might anger white racist audiences, tried to censor-out the song. Fortunately, the song-writers refused to change the lyrics.

Rogers and Hamerstein wrote:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear; you’ve got to be taught from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And of people whose skin is a different shade. You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught!

Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence

In 1980, Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller wrote “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence”. In that seminal book and the other fine books that followed, she wrote about the roots of mental ill health and criminality, and, in retrospect, terrorism.

Despite writing long before the start of America’s unique epidemics of 1) mass drugging with brain-altering drugs, 2) easy access to highly lethal weapons that are made mainly for mass murder, 3) mass brain-altering vaccinations of children (with toxic ingredients), 4) mass entertainment addictions, 5) mass militarization, 6) mass indifference to human suffering, 7) mass historical illiteracy, and 8) mass malnutrition, Dr Miller could have been writing about perhaps the most significant factor contributing to America’s epidemic of mass murder.

She wrote

People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected and treated with honesty by their parents, will be – both in their youth and adulthood – intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. (Ed note: and they therefore would be well-nourished, un-poisoned, un-drugged and not prone to violence or terrorism.)

They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves but not to attack others. They will respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their own children.

If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials and nurses to support the child and to believe her or him.

In my study of the roots of violence and mental ill health, I have found no exceptions to Miller’s precepts. Most of the patients in my holistic mental health practice had previously been given mental illness labels by psychiatrists and well-meaning physicians and then immediately drugged up. According to my patients none of those practitioners had taken the time to do a thorough prenatal, personal or family history into family abuse or neglect, societal abuse or neglect or brain malnutrition. In the extended workups that I did on my patients, I found that virtually 100% had been subjected to any or all of the victimizations listed above, including psychological, spiritual, physical, and/or sexual violence.

Most of my patients had not realized that they were actually not, in fact, mentally ill, but rather they had been victims of some aspect of posttraumatic stress disorder, which is actually a mixture of neurological/psychological trauma and brain malnutrition that is, unfortunately, usually followed by illicit or prescription drug-induced neurological impairment that further complicates the symptomatology and is one of the main root causes of the multiple diagnoses and the cocktails of drugs that are often given to such patients. There have been many examples in the history of psychiatry of victimized patients (or their family members) trying to get revenge (sometimes with the use of terroristic acts) on the prescribing physician who may have sickened them with powerful drugs.

It has been shown repeatedly that at least 90% of the known American school shooters have been taking or withdrawing from brain-altering drugs which are well-known to provoke homicidal or suicidal violence, and it is likely that many of the supposedly “irrational” suicides (like the celebrity suicide of Robin Williams) or the accidental prescription drug overdoses also fit the definition of iatrogenic (doctor or drug-induced) injury.

Spree shooters, serial killers and politically-motivated mass murderers are likely to be sociopaths, psychopaths or antisocial personality-afflicted people (the three terms are essentially synonymous).

Sociopaths are not technically mentally ill. They are very rational and are not insane. They are not depressed or anxious and do not hallucinate. Because of their neglectful early life experiences and serious lack of parental warmth, nurturing, love and caring during their childhoods (sometimes sociopaths are pathologically indulged [spoiled]), they are indifferent to the suffering of others and grow up to become verbally, physically or sexually aggressive, serial liars, clever thieves and even cunning murderers who are incapable of feeling emotions such as compassion. Prolonged incarceration or engaging in intense or prolonged combat war can lead to sociopathic behaviors and punitive political or radical theological beliefs.

Sociopaths are extremely good at deceiving others, including doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, clergypersons and even love-sick members of the opposite sex, and they rather enjoy having such power over their dupes. They enjoy being aggressive and then experience no real guilt or remorse for their actions. To no one’s surprise, they are over-represented in the killing professions, including among terrorist organizations.

Terrorists are Often Graduates of Schools for Barbarians

In 1938, Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann wrote “School for Barbarians”. The book’s rather long, but very illuminating subtitle was “How German Fascism Overthrew Germany’s Liberal Democratic System, its Public Schools, its Progressive Christian Churches, its Families, its Arts, its Civility, and its Intellectual Class by Indoctrinating its Youth to Mindlessly Participate in Racial Hatred, Believe in German Exceptionalism and Thoughtlessly March off to War”.

Mann quoted a German marching song for young Nazi boys who were being groomed to become good killing soldiers, good executioners, good racists, good sociopaths and “Good Germans” for the 1000 Year Third Reich. The song is a good example of the spirit of all shoot-em-up militaries (letting someone else clean up the rubble, human carnage and the mass poisonings from the military toxins) – whether German, Italian or Japanese fascist militaries, whether Russian, Chinese or North Korean Stalinistic communist militaries or whether American, British, French, Australian or Canadian democratic ones. The song promotes the sociopathic behaviors that are all-too-common in the killing professions when they take to the killing fields – wherever they are

Though the whole world lie ruined around us after the day of war,

What the devil do we care – we don’t give a hoot anymore.

Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, who hated the liberalism of the Mann family and drove them from Germany in the 1930s, understood before Rogers and Hammerstein did that future killing soldiers “have got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

In summary, there are many paths that can lead to what is often called “senseless” violence.

When supposedly “irrational” behaviors such as American mass shootings occur (on a daily basis now) and are reported on by journalists that have only a fraction of the most important details, we will continue to be confused and totally unable to get at the truth, and thus we will be deterred from solving and preventing mass shootings in the future. That will be fine with the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and Big Pharma, all of whom will be beneficiaries of the half-truths with which we will be force-fed.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Reader, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, psychiatric drugging, over-vaccination regimens, Big Pharma and other movements that threaten American health, democracy, civility and longevity. Many of his columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn

Ukraine, the UN Anti-Nazi Resolution and the Ravensbruck “Lapins”

On November 19, 2015, the United Nations Third Committee Human Rights Plenary adopted Resolution A/C.3/70/L.59/Rev.1 “Combating Glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and Other Practices That Contribute to Fuelling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.” 126 United Nations member states supported the resolution, including China, Russia, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Argentina, India, Kenya, Mexico, Philippines, Serbia, South Aftica, Zimbabawe, and a majority of other United Nations member states. The transcendent unification of Syria and Israel in support of this resolution is striking and extraordinary evidence of the remembrance of the horror at the nazi atrocities, the historic scourge which led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to found the United Nations. Four states opposed this Resolution, including the United States, Ukraine, Canada and Palau.

This year marks the 70th Anniversary of the establishment of the Nuremberg Tribunal and adoption of its Charter, a founding document of the United Nations which condemns Nazism. It is therefore a violation of the very essence of the principles upon which the United Nations was founded to oppose this resolution. This is not a question of freedom of speech and expression, which the United States repeatedly alleges as its motive for opposing this resolution, year after year, for almost a decade.

Ukraine’s opposition to this resolution raises troubling questions about the capacity of its government to distinguish between its subjective need to demonize Russia, on behalf of Ukraine’s current sponsors, and its apparent inability to take principled action, which would have required Ukraine to support the anti-Nazi resolution. In its explanation of vote, Ukraine stated: “In this regard, we reiterate our consistent position that the above mentioned resolution has nothing in common with fight against Nazism, neo-nazism and other forms of intolerance. On the contrary we are witnessing how the penholder, Russia, manipulate with the history and twist the essence of the Nuremberg Tribunal in pursuance of one’s aggressive political interests.”

It appears that Ukraine has not read the Resolution which explicitly states:

stresses. In this regard, that it is important that States take measures, in accordance with international human rights law, to counteract any celebration of the Nazi SS organization and all its integral parts, including the Waffen SS.

On November 2, 2015, Mutuma Ruteere of Kenya, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, under Item 71 of the General Assembly Third Committee stated: “I would now like to turn to my report on the implementation of resolution 69/160 on Combating Glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and other Practices that Contribute to fueling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination Xenophobia and Related Intolerance….Any commemorative celebration of the Nazi regime and the crimes against humanity whether official or non-official should be denounced and prohibited by States. Such events do an injustice to the memory of the countless victims of the Holocaust and thecrimes against humanity committed by the Nazis in the Second World War.”

In view of the Special Rapporteur’s unequivocal denunciation of any and all commemorative celebrations of the nazism, whether official or unofficial, it is questionable whether Ukraine opposes the anti-Nazi resolution for the reason it cites (questioning the motive of the Resolution’s sponsor, The Russian Federation), or whether Ukraine opposes the resolution because its current government is, in fact, actively pro-Nazi. There is troubling evidence of the latter possibility – or probability, as Ukranian President Poroshenko recently cancelled the February 23rd Commemoration Day of the Victory of the Soviet Army over the Nazi invaders, and has replaced that sacred commemoration by proclaiming October 14 as the Ukranian National Day of Celebration, commemorating that very day in 1943 when Stepan Bandera’s Nazi army was established.

Certainly the United States should be alarmed by Ukraine’s recent glorification of Nazism, since it was Stepan Bandera’s OUN which during World War II planned assassination attempts against the fiercely anti-nazi United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Ukranian government has chosen to betray and to trash some of the noblest aspects of Ukraine’s history: the symbol of Ukraine’s past and currently betrayed heroism is in the famous World War II “Match of Death.” On August 9, 1942, Ukraine’s world-famous soccer team was held prisoner by the Nazis. They were promised that if they defeated the Nazi team in a soccer match, they would be given their freedom. The Ukrainian team, the “FC Start” local soccer team then played in a contest with the Nazi team, “FLAKELF” the Nazi air defense artillery team. The Ukranian soccer team won the match, defeating the Nazis 5 to 3. The Germans then hanged every member of the victorious Ukranian soccer team, as punishment for humiliating Germany in so great a defeat. Those Ukranian soccer players were not naïve. They knew that their Nazi opponents would not honor the promise to spare their lives. They fought to victory to prove that the Nazis were not invincible, even in soccer, the most popular sport in Europe. The Nazi humiliation was a symbol of the ultimate Nazi defeat by the Soviet army.

The consistent United States opposition to the anti-Nazi resolution is especially troubling in view of the US awareness of the most grotesque and systematic war crimes and atrocities committed by the Nazis. Not many years ago, Norman Cousins, the famous editor of the “Saturday Review of Literature” brought to the United States for medical treatment the few surviving victims of hideous Nazi “medical” experiments, the Ravensbruck “Lapins.”

These very young and originally healthy women prisoners were forced to undergo unthinkable torture by the Nazis, as their leg bones were broken with hammers, pieces of these bones were extracted, and muscles and nerves torn apart. The sadistic “doctors” then deliberately infected these mangled legs by forcing into the gaping wounds virulent strains of bacteria, sawdust, rusty nails and slivers of glass. Gangrenous infectious cultures were forced into the wounds of the shattered legs of the “Lapins,” and the wounds were then sewn up, causing excruciating pain; agonizing mutiliation was suffered by the “survivors.”

In cases of disabled prisoners, entire lower limbs were amputated, then upper limbs were amputated, and the victims were then murdered. In May, 1943 the German Orthopedic Society at Congress of Reich Physicians gave awards to the perpetrators of the horrific Ravensbruck mutiliating experiments.

The Ravensbruck horrors were only an infinitesimal part of the Nazi scourge which ravaged Europe. It is therefore particularly alarming that the European Union, voting as a block, abstained on this anti-Nazi resolution.

It is also revealing that many countries currently being demonized by US/NATO for human rights abuses, including DPRK and Zimbabwe, supported this anti-Nazi resolution. This is one more significant piece of evidence of the Orwellian distortion of truth that is deeply entrenched in the narrative of certain States at the United Nations. Indeed, this anti-Nazi Resolution has become a barometer of which countries actually respect human rights, and which countries hypocritically proclaim human rights which they, in fact, conspicuously and shamelessly hold in contempt.

This is almost guaranteed to be the next big geopolitical point of contention.

Russia is set to provide Egypt with a $25 billion line of credit to construct the nation’s first nuclear power plant.

The plant is set to built in Dabaa and the loan will cover 85% of the costs. It will be repaid over 22 years, with the first repayment scheduled for 2029, at an annual interest rate of three percent.

Russia is going to contribute engineers, scientists and general staff to help establish and run the plant.

The plant will be ultra-modern and comply with all post-Fukushima safety standards.

This deal is sure to prove unsettling to some in the West and perhaps some in Israel; Egypt’s neighbour.

Earlier this year, after years of contention over the issue, a world historic deal was reached with Iran that will see the country peacefully developing nuclear power plants.

Many Israeli and Western neocons were particularly unhappy with the deal, and Netanyahu even wanted to launch an aggressive attack on Iran at least three times to stop the country from going nuclear.

Iran suggested that if Israel wants a nuclear free Middle East that it should turn over its own nuclear weapons first.

Watch a video of this report here:

Nuclear power is a necessity for the development of a modern state and Egypt should be praised for following such a path, moreover Russian support will undoubtedly ensure the project’s success.

Yet, with the geopolitical complications that presented themselves in the Iranian case and the volatility of Russian involvement in Syria, it could be possible that we will witness many worrying geopolitical developments in this Egyptian case as we go forward.

How do you think the reactionaries in Israel and Washington D.C. will respond to this new, nuclear development in the Middle East?

The Saud family, Saudi Arabia’s royals, have called together a meeting on December 15th in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of their fellow fundamentalist Sunnis who are fighting against the secular Assad government to take over Syria, and the Sauds will announce after the conference which groups will have the West’s blessings.

The only armed group that has thus far been announced to have been invited is Jaysh al-Islam, which is a Salafist-Wahhabist fundamentalist organization, and like all Salafists and Wahhabists, is rabidly anti-Shiite. By contrast, Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, is a Shiite, and, furthermore, he has always insisted upon a strict separation of church-and-state; so, he’s considered like the devil, by the Sauds and other Wahhabists and Salafists (including the leaders of America’s other Arabic allies: Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain).

This hatred against Shiites, and, really, all non-Sunnis, originated long ago:

In 1744, the two founders of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad Ibn Saud and Muhammad Ibn Wahhab, swore their mutual oath that the Sauds would exterminate Shiites, and that Wahhabist clergy would recognize the Sauds as the rulers appointed by God. From that time to this, little has changed in Saudi Arabia, except the discovery in 1938 of the world’s largest reserves of oil, which, moreover, is the cheapest-to-produce type of oil. The United States allied with the Saud family in 1945 so as to guarantee to America lots of cheap oil, and to guarantee to the Sauds lots of American military support for keeping the Saud family in power there.

The American expectation had been that the jihadist clergy wouldn’t be so influential to the Sauds if the Sauds had all the weapons they need in order to terrorize the non-royals there; but, in recent decades, that hasn’t turned out to remain true. Chopping off the heads of lots of nonbelievers no longer suffices for the Sauds. In recent times, it turns out that when clergy question the Sauds’ anointment by God, the Sauds need to pay attention, after all, notwithstanding the American alliance. Arab Spring made this clear. It’s a new world now. The Sauds are pressured, more than ever, to kill Shiites and other non-believers (people who aren’t Wahhabist or — as Wahhabism is known outside Saudi Arabis — Salafists). The only trick is for the Sauds to hide this intention until they’re fully in a position to act upon it. 9/11 was just kids’ stuff.

Wikipedia says: “Jaysh al-Islam leader Zahran Alloush gave a speech on the merits of Hajj in 2013 and praised Usama bin Laden, addressing him by the honorific ‘Sheikh’ and the honorific ‘rahimahu Allah’. … Alloush addressed the Al-Qaeda organization Jabhat al-Nusra as ‘our brothers’.” However, Al Qaeda itself has not been invited to the Riyadh conference, because doing that would be too much for the U.S. public to take. The Sauds need to fool Western publics, and therefore need to mind their manners as they proceed along. Cutting off heads of Saudis who challenge the regime or the Quran is one thing, but allowing Al Nusra or any other branch of Al Qaeda at their conference would significantly disturb Westerners.

Wikipedia adds: “Alloush said that Alawites are ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians’.” Assad isn’t just a Shiite, he’s an Alawhite, which is the least sectarian type of Shiite — like an atheist, in a fundamentalist’s eyes (and, even in the West, atheists are feared and despised — bigotry is strong in every religion; it’s how aristocrats become able to manipulate masses).

By contrast, the type of jihadists the West is considering for inclusion as ‘moderates’ is the type that can fool Westerners. All of that type are people who live outside Syria and who aren’t risking their own lives in jihad, but who are nonetheless aiming to ‘represent’ the people who are risking their lives there. In other words, these are slicksters, who seek acceptance both from suckers in the West, and from terrorists inside Syria.

Thus, some of the attendees will look like any businessman one would see on 5th Avenue in NYC, or like any candidate for President of the United States; and one such person who will be attending the conference is Dr. Khaled Khoja, President of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. He gave an address recently, on October 31st, at Britain’s prestigious neoconservative International Institute for Strategic Studies, where he spoke with gentlemanly hatred of both Russia, and the leading Shiite nation, Iran; and he said (40:00- on the video there) that only civilians were being killed in Syria by Russia’s bombings in Syria, and that Russia especially targets hospitals. So, he looks and sounds like just the right type of person for U.S. President Barack Obama to present in the West as being an acceptable person to rule the Syrian people. Obviously, someone such as Khoja would be loathed by both Syrians and ISIS etc., even at the outset, if he were to become appointed to lead Syria, but this is a show put on only for Westerners anyway. That’s where the first suckers must be targeted and manipulated. And the case for this is unmistakable:

All polling that Western firms have done in Syria shows clearly that in any free and fair election in that country, only Assad would have any chance to win. He is supported by a majority of Syrians in all polls, while all polls also show that Syrians feel fear and disgust at the United States and blame it for ISIS, which is almost universally despised among the Syrian population.

So: although the Sauds will ultimately select the candidates to replace Assad, or else will make the first-round selection of the West’s stooge to rule in Syria, it’s not going to help anybody but the West’s aristocrats, who are championing ‘democracy in Syria’ by insisting that that very thing be prohibited. Nor will this conference help to reduce the refugee crisis that the EU is experiencing from America’s latest round of international invasions: Libya, Ukraine, Syria, and so forth. It’s merely a PR operation that’s being carried out by the West’s aristocracies, to put on a show for the West’s suckers, while carving up the world.

The people who should be removed from power are clearly the leaders in the West, where democracy has died, and where deceit of the masses by the aristocracy has taken its place.

Only if the charade is forced to end, can peace become established again. But maybe things have already gone beyond even the possibility of that happening. Who will even allow the masses now to know the truth?

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.

Mass killings are everywhere.

When they hit westerners in small-scale, like the US, Egypt (downed Russian airliner), Lebanon, France, and Mali, murdering 14, 224, 50, 130 and 27 – mostly white people – they are blown out of proportion by media hype and by immediately associating them with links to Jihadist terrorists.

Nobody asks who may be behind these terrorists.

While mass killings large-scale, like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya – and many more nations, carried out by western NATO powers, remain largely unreported and are just part of the new normal, the eternal profit-making war on terror.

In retrospect all of the small-scale killers, disturbers of our western comfort, curiously, have allegedly police records and were known to the police. And even more curiously, the police was impotent in preventing the massacres.

This incapacity of the police in stopping the terror, justifies more police crackdown on civil liberties, gradually making the US – and for that matter the entire western world – to a police state – let’s call it the police Zionist-Anglo-Saxon Empire – that has adopted the right to kill with impunity. Killing to prevent killing. That’s the name of the game. Totally absurd, but the brainwashed to the core western populace doesn’t see it, instead it thirsts for ever more blood revenge.

The western media-duped people, heirs of western feudalists, truly believe they are at the mercy of a bunch of jihadist fighters whose only purpose is to disturb their ‘well-being’ and go to heaven as glorious kamikaze-heroes. They cannot fathom that vital western interests, their very ‘democratically elected’ leaders (sic) are behind these killings, that jihadists like other humans are corruptible; that these western interests are easiest materialized by a frightened people that literally asks for more police restraint.

In this game the people at large in the US as well as in Europe are willingly engaged – for their ‘safety’. They plead with the state for more protection; they give away their personal freedom for more cameras, more surveillance, more police squadrons patrolling the pavements of LA, Paris, Brussels, London, New York, Chicago, Berlin, Rome — the western world will become an amalgam of police and military-clad armed-to-the-teeth cities.

Who would have thought that 70 years after a devastating WWII, the same fascist powers that produced Hitler and his SS murderers would again be able to brainwash people into willing submission – this time on an even larger scale. Killing is not the issue. Fear is. And fear is the ‘soft’ weapon these elitist powers use to subjugate the people into their willing servants.

Never mind the western Zionist-Anglo-Saxon Empire instigated mass-killings, the so called ‘wars on terror’ that have killed more than 12 million people over the last 15 years, not counting the ten million African non-people of central African mineral-rich countries. I call them non-people, because their millions of lost lives are not even worth reporting by the corrupt western media. They were and still are being slaughtered in never ending, western armed civil wars for the sake of exploiting their rich lands for rare minerals such as Coltan, being used for electronics such as cell phones, but foremost by the high precision war industry; precisely these murder weapons that allow the west to dominate and kill for greed and power. They kill for the raw materials they need to kill. A never ending cycle of murderous profit making. The epitome of neoliberal doctrine.

Of the world’s total 590 tons of Coltan production in 2013, 400 tons were mined in Rwanda, Congo, Central Africa and neighbouring countries under the most inhumane conditions – child labor, prostitution, drug trafficking, controlled by mafia-type terror clans. These millions of Africans that live and die in misery remain anonymous and widely unreported by the western media – which is, hence, serving western capital interests, by leaving western consumers unperturbed.
—

The latest (at the time of this writing) of the series of mass killings in our civilized world is the recent shooting in San Bernardino, California, a working class neighbourhood of Los Angeles, killing of 14 and wounding 21. Obama is warning Americans that we are moving into a new era of terror, requiring new measures of protection, herewith paving the way for more police and military repression.

Similar words are heard from of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Not only are these terror acts linked immediately to people with Muslim background and with relations to ‘terrorist organizations’ in the Middle-East, mostly Syria, but they are always extremely well organized, professional killers, well trained (probably by CIA, MOSSAD, MI6 and the like) – and the suspects are immediately murdered by police – silenced. Dead people don’t talk – and cannot be questioned. Hence, potential evidence for false flags is drastically reduced, though never eliminated. Just look to the contradictory information on events like the Paris massacre of 13 November or the other Paris carnage at Charlie Hebdo on 7 January – or the absolutely incoherent accounts of the Boston Marathon killers – not to mention 9/11.

The San Bernardino case is now firmly in the hands of the FBI which is already assuming that the horrific massacre was a terrorist attack – which it surely was. But by terrorist Washington always, but always means an Islamist attack. Hate against Islam must be nurtured on a daily basis.

As usual, the two suspects, Syed Farook, a 28-year-old county health inspector, and his 27-year-old wife, Tashfeen Malik, were slain by the police. They were silenced. They had been “radicalized,” says the police. CNN reports that there were no signs of radicalization. Too bad, nobody can ask them anymore. – The couple had a six-month old child whom they left with grandma during their shooting. Why would they do an illogical thing like that? Leaving behind a new-born baby – for the sake of what? – Nobody can ask them anymore. Conveniently, police has killed the suspects and the witnesses in one. – Was it necessary?

Similar in the Paris massacre three weeks ago, the Charlie Hebdo carnage, and with the alleged Boston Marathon killers – one was shot death by the police and his brother was badly hurt, is in custody and not allowed to speak to anyone, other than his appointed lawyer. Any testimony he may have signed was probably coerced by police.

These supposed Jihadists / Islamic State organized killing sprees, immediately prompted western responses, starting with police crack-downs, a three-month temporary state of emergency in France that will most likely be extended; and even in Belgium – preventively. Paris and Brussels are under an ‘État de Siège’.

Brussels hosts the European Commission and Parliament, no less. Would that be a reason for extra fear – after what their neoliberal troika (ECB, EC, IMF) puppets have done to Greece, Portugal, Cyprus and are preparing for other European ‘heavily indebted countries’, not even mentioning their secret negotiation of the nefarious TTIP – Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – with the United States that would leave Europe for the corporate vultures to be sucked dry and picked apart. – Would that be any reason for fear from a terrorist attack?

Spreading and publicizing fear through the media, hyped up police surveillance and patrolling in cities throughout Europe, has become the norm for indoctrination. Fear is the enemy number One.

As to immediate revenge abroad, Hollande declared, even before the alleged ISIS claim of the crime was known, that the Islamic State was the perpetrator, that evidence exists, that he knows who the culprits were that they came from Syria (later ‘proven’ by a coincidentally lost passport of one of the kamikaze bombers who couldn’t speak anymore). Hence, Mr. Hollande was dispatching the nuclear powered aircraft carrier ‘Charles de Gaulle’, Europe’s largest, to Syria, were three days later French Rafale and Mirage 2000 fighter jets carried out bombing raids on Syria, presumably alongside Russia, but most likely spineless Hollande would not dare to differ from Washington.

Doesn’t it wring wrong in the head of any lucid citizen that an aircraft carrier plus accompanying fleet can be readied for war within three days? That the assault on Syria must have been prepared way ahead and the Paris massacre was a convenient trigger? Or was the convenient trigger planned by ‘insiders’? – Especially since France is a logical target for Islamic payback. The French have been meddling in the MENA region for years. France led the NATO attack on Libya, assailed sovereign Mali in 2012 for an alleged Touareg rebellion (Mali has uranium that France vies for), and then sent troops to Central Africa where a fierce western-alimented civil war wages for rare minerals. The French were also involved in destabilizing Syria from the beginning, in 2011 alongside CIA and Saudi Arabia.

Now Germany will join the group. Which group? – The US, UK, and the French, of course. Not the Russians, as Merkel may have insinuated a few days earlier. That would be unacceptable for Washington; and the Germans like the French do not want to test the goodwill of their Master.

On Friday, 4 December, the German Bundestag voted overwhelmingly – 445 to 146 (7 abstentions) to send 6 Tornado Reconnaissance jets and deploy a frigate to ‘protect’ the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle (protect from whom or from what?). Berlin may also send up to 1,200 “support” troops, boots on the ground, euphemistically called ‘military personnel’.

This is an action in direct violation of the German Constitution (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, signed after WWII in 1949) which prohibits any aggression on another nation emanating from Germany, as long as Germany is not being attacked. – It looks like to please the Master in Washington, abrogating one’s Constitution and sovereignty is of the order – and that even against the will of the vast majority of the German people.

As soon as a ‘terrorist attack’ hits one of our western cities, our leaders are ready to retaliate, retaliate against a pre-conceived enemy – and this enemy is unwaveringly in the Middle East, wherever the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon’s interests are. Right now the masters in Washington have decided it is in Syria, earlier in this century they were in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Yemen – but now, the next step is dividing and subjugating Syria, to cut her up in small parcels of different rivalling Islamic sects, to create chaos – chaos à la Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq. Divide and conquer.

The current phase of the Big Plan of the Big Dictator, the western Empire with seat in Washington, is to dominate the oilfields of the entire Middle-East, to move ever one step closer to the last vestiges of resistance – Russia and China. The objective of the next phase of the Big Plan (the PNAC) is most likely going to be Full Spectrum Dominance – with or without war. Let’s not forget, according to such prestigious main stream media like the Washington Post: War is good for the economy.
—

Back to the US crime scene. Did you know that the average American is 9 times more likely to be killed by police than by a terrorist? Thousands of Americans have been executed over the last 15 years by US police, no conviction, no trial, just sheer murder. In 2014 alone at least 1,104 Americans were assassinated by US law enforcement. That makes about 3 a day, every day of the year. Nobody talks about this state terrorism. We are not allowed to know, lest we might think twice before yielding to the state, the police, the military the power to ‘protect us’ from terrorism.
—

It doesn’t occur to the average American or European for that matter that hate breads more hate and murder more murder – and war more war. The Old Testament dictum of an eye for an eye is well alive and ticking. Christianity – the New Testament – which we pretend to practice today, the theory of turning the other cheek, is nothing but hypocrisy.

That omen of peace, taken over from the 12,000 year old theory of Tao (Tao Te Ching), pertaining also to the Christian doctrine, is far from our hearts and minds.Whenever the theory of Tao has been applied throughout civilizations, evil has been defeated. And we, who pretend to be Christians, are the most violent, murderous and greedy civilization that has walked our planet in the last 5,000 years.

It’s time to sit back and reflect – and then rescind the terror which we initiated in the west, by what we already know – peace by non-aggression, non-retaliation.

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 ofThe World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance

Pundits and commentators on the Left and Right are pronouncing ‘the end of the progressive cycle in Latin America’. They cite the recent presidential elections:

1. Argentina, where hard-right Mauricio Macri was elected;
2. Brazil, where President Dilma Rousseff has appointed a neo-liberal ‘Chicago Boy’ economist, Joaquin Levy, as Finance Minister and launched an IMF-style regressive structural adjustment policy designed to reduce social expenditures and attract financial speculators; and
3. Venezuela, where Washington channeled millions of dollars to far-right parties, as well as violent extra-parliamentary and paramilitary groups, to destabilize the center-left Maduro government; right-wing Democratic Unity Coalition (MUD) won the legislative elections in December 2015 with more than 2:1 margin over the Chavista Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV).

No doubt progressive social legislation has come to a virtual halt, even before the recent political advances of the US-backed right-wing parties with their neo-liberal economic agenda.

But paralysis, and even retreat and electoral defeats of the center-left regimes, do not mean the return to the neo-liberal 1990’s, a period of privatizations, pillage and plunder, which had plunged millions into poverty, unemployment and marginality.

Whatever the current voting results, the collective memory of mass hardship, resulting from ‘free market’ policies, is seared in the memory of the vast majority of the working population.

Any attempt by the newly elected officials to ‘unmake and reverse’ the social advances of the past decade will be met with (1) militant resistance, if not open class warfare; (2) institutional and political constraints; (3) and low commodity prices drastically limiting export revenues.

A careful analysis of the policies proposed by the neo-liberal right, their implementation and impact will demonstrate their likely failure and the rapid demise of any new right-wing offensive. This will abort the neoliberal cycle.

Argentina: President Macri and Wall Street 

In the upper income neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, there was singing and dancing in the streets as the Presidential election results rolled in and Mauricio Macri was pronounced the victor. Wall Street, the City of London and their financial mouthpieces, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, announced the coming of a new era and the end of ‘anti-investor, populism and nationalism, wasteful social spending’referring to increases in pensions, family allowances and wages, approved by the previous center-left government

Mauricio Macri does not merely represent the plutocracy; he is one of the richest plutocrats in Argentina. He not only boasts of a ‘carnal relationship’ with Washington in his acceptance speech, he pleasured US President Obama by announcing he would work to expel Venezuela from MERCOSUR, Latin America’s foremost regional economic integration organization.

Macri announced a cabinet made up of hard-core neo-liberal economists, former supporters of the military dictatorship and even a rabid rightwing rabbi. He then spelled out his policy agenda, which had been cleverly hidden during his electoral campaign when his raucous rhetoric for ‘change’, spoke to everybody and nobody.

Macri promises to

(1) end capital controls, export taxes and retentions on agro-business exports,

(2) devaluate the peso,

(3) pay over $1.2 billion dollars of Argentine public money to the Wall Street vulture-speculator, Paul Singer, who had bought $49 million dollars of old Argentine debt (a profit of astronomical proportions for buying paper),

(4) privatize and de-nationalize the state-owned airline, oil company and pension funds

(5)sign-off on EU and US-centered free trade agreements, thus undermining Latin America integration projects like MERCOSUR;

(6) tear up the jointmemo of understanding with Iran regarding an investigation into a terror bombing as requested by Israel; and

(7) expel Venezuela from MERCOSUR.

In a word, the multi-millionaire playboy President plans harsh austerity for the Argentine working class and bountiful handouts for the economic elite.

The day after the elections, local and overseas speculators boosted Argentine stocks 40% anticipating the free market bonanza. George Soros and hedge fund mogul, Daniel Loeb, ‘piled into Argentine assets’. Investment fund managers urged Macri to act swiftly in imposing his ‘sweeping reforms’ before Argentina’s famous capacity for mass popular resistance could be organized to resist his policies.

Macri’s Wall Street and Washington patrons are well aware that their clients’ boisterous big business bombast faces serious political obstacles because his policies will provoke severe economic hardships.

President Macri does not even have a majority in Congress to approve his radical proposals. The congress is controlled by a coalition of rightwing and center-left Peronist parties, which will need to be coaxed, bought or coerced.

The Argentine Congress will balk at supporting his entire neoliberal agenda. When he resorts to ‘executive decrees’ to bypass Congress, he will be contested in the courts, streets and legislature. It is doubtful he will be able to neutralize all his critics and implement his radical neoliberal agenda.

The head of the Central Bank, Alejandro Vanoli, who was appointed by the previous center-left Fernandez government, is not likely to go along with Macri’s tight money policy, radical devaluation and fiscal austerity. Macri will likely look for a pretext to purge the incumbent and nominate a free market crony. However, the institutional damage will increase the general sense of a lawless regime willing to trample the constitutional order to impose his free market dogma.

Macri’s promise to end the ‘tax’ retention on agro-exports will decrease government revenues, exacerbating the fiscal deficit and necessitating deeper reductions in social expenditures. The contrast between higher earnings for the agro-business elite and lower living standards for labor is an invitation to greater class hostility and strife. Even more decisive Macri’s “export strategy” will be undermined by the low world demand and prices of Argentine commodity exports.

Macri’s promise to end capital and price controls on his first day in office will provoke a major devaluation of the peso which may exceed 60%. This will automatically result in severe increases in the price of consumer goods and increased profits for the export elites, provoking mass unrest across the occupational spectrum.

Macri promises to meet with the 7% of speculator hold-outs of old Argentine debt (from the pillage years of the 1990’s) demanding full payment with interest, especially the ‘vulture funds’ led by Wall Street’s Paul Singer of Elliott Capital Management. Pay-offs of over $1.3 billion on an original $49 million purchase of Argentine debt to Wall Street speculators will provoke fury among Argentine workers and nationalists who will shoulder the added burden on top of austerity and cuts in social welfare. Moreover, the 93% of debt holders, who had agreed to the ‘financial haircut’ and discounted the debt at 70% will now demand full payment multiplying tenfold the demands on the Treasury with disastrous consequences.

The devaluation and decline of purchasing power will not attract the ‘tidal wave of foreign investment’ to lift the economy and provide jobs and general prosperity as Macri had promised during his campaign. Foreign capital will not create new enterprises; they will concentrate on buying existing privatized public enterprises at fire-sale prices. Incoming capital will not increase the productive forces; it will only shift the direction of the flow of profits from public coffers to private pockets, from the domestic economy to overseas investors.

Neoliberalism: Then and Now

The general foreign and domestic political climate is vastly different today from the 1990’s when the previous neo-liberal experiment was launched with such disastrous consequences. In the late 1980’s, Argentina was suffering from acute inflation, stagnation and declining income. The working class organizations were still recovering from the murderous decade of military rule. Moreover, in the 1990’s the US was at thepinnacle of imperial power in Latin America. China was only beginning its dynamic growth cycle. The USSR had disintegrated and Russia was a struggling vassal state. Latin America was ruled by a motley collection of neo-liberal clones under the thumb of the IMF.

Today Macri faces an organized working class. The trade unions and militant popular movements are intact and have experienced a decade of substantial gains under a center-left government. The IMF experience remains a poisonous memory for hundreds of thousands of Argentines. Hundreds of military officials responsible for crimes against humanity have been arrested, tried and prosecuted under the out-going regime. The threat of a military coup, ever-present in the 1980’s and 90’s, is non-existent. China has become the key market for Argentine agro exports (soya). Macri, despite his declared passion to serve Washington, is obligated to accommodate to the Chinese market.

Any moves out of MERCOSUR and into the arms of the Transpacific Trade Agreement will prejudice Argentina’s strategic trade links with Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and Paraguay. Today Macri will find a hostile climate in Latin America for his proposed embrace of the US. His promise to ‘expel Venezuela from MERCOSUR’ has already been rejected by its members.

In summary, Macri will find it impossible to replicate the neoliberal policies of the 1990’s for all the above reasons. There is one additional factor to consider: The earlier version of the ‘free-market experiment’ led to the most severe economic depression in Argentine history with double-digit negative growth, unemployment exceeding 50% in working class districts (and 25% nationally) and poverty and extreme misery in some Argentine provinces exceeding Sub-Sahara Africa.

If Macri believes he can rush through the “harsh medicine” – and avoid the inevitable mass protest– while attracting a massive inflow of capital with which to rapidly grow the economy, he is gravely mistaken. After the initial giveaways and uptake of the stock market, the Soros and Loeb speculators will grab their profits and run. Weakened domestic consumption and the depressed global commodity market do not attract long term, large-scale capital.

The real question is not (as the financial pundits claim) whether Macri will ‘seize the opportunity’ but how soon after he tries to impose his free market model his regime will crash amid the ruins of a depressed economy, raging inflation and general strikes.

Brazil: Right Turn or a Left Opportunity

Commentators left and right cite the vertical decline of support for President Dilma Rousseff from over 50% to less than 10% as a sign of the ‘decline of the left’. Judicial investigations have led to the arrest and prosecution of dozens of Congressional leaders of the so-called ‘Workers Party”’(PT) for wholesale bribery, money laundering and illicit transfers of millions of dollars!

Prosecutors have jailed scores of PT officials, legislators and senior executives of the giant public petroleum company, Petrobras, the directors of the biggest construction companies and investment banks who were partners in crime with former PT President Lula Da Silva. The one-time trade union leader, President Lula, turned into a poster boy for Wall Street and more recently a notorious influence peddler for Brazilian big businesses.

Prosecutors have arrested 117 officials from Petrobras, the giant state oil corporation, and Brazil’s biggest company. They have arrested two of Brazil’s most powerful capitalists: Marcelo Odebrecht, president of Constructora Norberto Odebrecht, and Octavio Marquez de Azevedo of the Andrade Gutierrez Corporation. Both contributed to the Workers Party electoral campaign of ex-President Lula Da Silva and current President Dilma Rousseff.

Big business contributors, currently under investigation or jailed, had received forty-times the value of their political donations in terms of lucrative PT government contracts (a 4000% return on investment!).

Criminal cases and arrests for ‘bribes for contracts’ schemes have affected the financial sector, including the billionaire financier Andre Esteves, founder-President of BTG Pactual , a close friend and associate of Lula Da Silva.

The entire elite of Brazil’s capitalist and financial class has been indicted, jailed or is under investigation. The Treasurer of the PT, Senate and Congressional leaders and Presidential advisers of the ‘Workers’ Party have been arrested and jailed for bribes, money laundering and fraud, in connection with the Petrobras and other corporate corruption scandals.

The judicial investigation demonstrates that the PT had become a party of the corporate elite. PT leaders and officials work closely with business elites in channeling billions to corporate treasuries. In contrast, the PT’s so-called “poverty program” donated $60 a month to poor families, just above subsistence level. This poverty program was part of a vast patronage machine designed to secure votes to elect corrupt officials embedded with big capital and financiers!

While the prosecutors are not explicitly anti-capitalist, the investigations have exposed the corrupt basis of capitalist rule. In the course of one year Brazilian prosecutors have conducted deeper and more thorough research on the power elite and determined how it rules, exploits and pillages the wealth of the country than any analysis by the vast majority of ‘leftist’ academics and journalists over the fifteen years of PT mis-governance.

The prosecutors have acted against the entire class of capitalist executives and their political partners in the PT with greater force and integrity than the major ‘left’ trade union (the CUT) and social movement (Landless Rural Workers (MST) leaders. The CUT and MST leaders secured minor regime concessions, in exchange for ignoring the large-scale, long-term criminal links between bankers, agro- businesspeople, industrialists and the PT.

While leaders of the MST, the CUT and the National Union of Students gave ‘critical’ support to Presidents Lula and Dilma and their entourage of corrupt Congresspeople, the prosecutors exposed years of endemic fraud, swindles and bribes which had enabled the PT leaders to buy luxury BMWs, Rolex watches and million-dollar villas and luxury condos in exclusive neighborhoods.

Deltan Dallagnol, one of the prosecutors leading the investigation, has demonstrated that the PT works for the rich and powerful, foreign and domestic capitalists and deceives the poor. His investigations demonstrate that the PT is not a ‘center-left’ party – it is a party of kleptocrats working for capitalists.

One thing is sure: the PT is not a party embracing diverse popular classes; it is not an arena for popular struggle. It is a party that serves diverse capitalist sectors, including finance, construction, petroleum and agro business.

Because of corruption, the cost of government projects doubled and tripled. As a result vital social services were starved of funds and deteriorated and public transport construction was delayed for years.

In summary, the decline and discredit of the PT is not a defeat for the Left because the PT regime never was on the left. On the contrary, the discredit of the PT is a positive victory for anti-capitalist forces struggling against the ruling class and political elite.

Conclusion

The victory of hard right neo-liberal Mauricio Macri in Argentina and the disintegration of the PT do not augur a new rightwing cycle in Latin America. Macri’s economic team will quickly confront mass opposition and, outside the upper class neighborhoods, they lack any political mass support. Their policies will polarize the country and undermine the stability, which investors require. Brutal devaluations and the end of capital controls are formulas, not for economic development, but for inciting general strikes. Conflict, stagnation and hyperinflation will put an end to the enthusiasm of local and foreign investors.

Moreover, Macri cannot embrace Washington’s entire agenda because Argentina’s natural trading partner is China.

Macri’s regime is the beginning and the end of a reversion to the neo-liberal disaster, similar to what took place at the end of the 1990’s.

The fall of the PT, more a product of conscientious prosecutors than the action of trade unions and social movements, opens political space for new working class struggles, free from the constraints of corrupt leaders and bureaucrats.

Even if the Right returns to power in Brazil– it is tainted with the same stench of corruption; its capitalist partners are in jail or facing prosecution. In other words, the fall of the PT is only part of the decline and decay of all the capitalist parties.

Over time, soon after the collapse of the ‘New Right’, a new authentic left may emerge, free of corruption and links to big business. Hopefully, an authentic working class party will form, which can pursue socio-economic policies to end exploitation of labor, the pillage of the public treasury and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. This should be a left, which sustains the environment, respects nature and upholds the rights of Afro-Brazilians, indigenous people and women.

On Dec.9, Russia for the first time hit ISIS targets in Syria with cruise missiles launched from a submarine in the Mediterranean Sea. The 3M-54 Kalibr missiles were launched from the Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine “Rostov-on-Don”. According to the Russian Defense Minister, the missiles targeted the terrorists’ ammunition warehouses, mine production plant and the oil infrastructure in the territory of Raqqa.

In the past three days, the Russian Air Forces have carried out over 300 sorties hitting 600 terrorist targets. All sorties were performed with the backing of Su-30 fighter jets.

The pro-government sources argue that tens of terrorists were killed in clashes between the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the militant groups along the Damascus-Homs highway on Tuesday. Thus, the Syrian forces expanded its control on the Eastern side of the Damascus-Homs highway in Harasta.

On Tuesday, the SAA, Hezbollah, the National Defense Forces (NDF) and Harakat Al-Nujaba launched an offensive on the towns of Al-Zorba and Barqoum clashing against Al-Nusra, Harakat Nouriddeen Al-Zinki, Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham and Jaysh Al-Islam. The clashes are continuing in the both towns. If the Syrian forces capture Al-Zorba, they will be able to cutoff the militants’ supply route from Idlib to Aleppo. This operation is a part of the largest offensive of the Syrian forces which is aimed to secure the whole Aleppo-Damascus highway.

Since the start of the Russian military operations in Syria, the pro-government forces have been incrementally advancing in directions of the main strategic areas which allow to control crucial parts of the Syrian logistical infrastructure. It allows the Syrian forces to take advantage over the terrorists in the manoeuvre capability while the loyalists already have advantage in the fire power, intelligence and coordination.

Final results for Venezuela’s 167-seat National Assembly weren’t known until two days after the polls closed.

On Tuesday, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) reported opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) candidates won 107 seats to the ruling socialist coalition Great Patriotic Pole’s (GPP) 55 – a 64.07% to 32.93% majority. 

Indigenous seats comprise another 1.80% of the 167 legislative body. Two seats remained undecided. CNE announced MUD candidates won them, giving them 109 seats, three short of a crucial super-majority.

When new deputies are sworn in on January 5, three independent indigenous members will be swing votes. What they’ll support or oppose is crucial going forward.

Venezuela Analysis reported they endorsed MUD’s platform while campaigning. Whether it means they’ll risk compromising constitutionally guaranteed Bolivarian social justice rights remains to be seen.

They’re too precious to lose. One of Chavez’s first acts as new Venezuelan president in 1999 was to hold a popularly supported national referendum on whether to convene a National Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution, embodying his social justice agenda.

It passed overwhelmingly – followed three months later by elections to the National Assembly. Chavistas won 95% of the seats.

They drafted a historic document – a revolutionary Constitucion de la Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela. It was put to a nationwide referendum vote in December to let Venezuelans decide up or down whether to accept or reject it.

Its overwhelming approval changed everything, giving people no say on how they’re governed.

Venezuelans have a model participatory social democracy, – including a National Electoral Council (CNE), assuring electoral procedures are scrupulously open, free and fair.

Article 56 of the Bolivarian Constitution states: “All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law.”

All Venezuelans are enfranchised to vote under one national standard. Full participation is encouraged. No one is denied their constitutional right, vastly different from how America operates, disenfranchising millions of its citizens for dubious reasons, rigging things so business as usual always wins.

The spirit of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution is stated straightaway in its Preamble: “to establish a democratic, participatory and self-reliant, multiethnic and multicultural society in a just, federal and decentralized State that embodies the values of freedom, independence, peace, solidarity, the common good, the nation’s territorial integrity, comity and the rule of law for this and future generations;”

It further

“guarantees the right to life, work, learning, education, social justice and equality, without discrimination or subordination of any kind; promotes peaceful cooperation among nations and further strengthens Latin American integration in accordance with the principle of nonintervention and national self-determination of the people, the universal and indivisible guarantee of human rights, the democratization of imitational society, nuclear disarmament, ecological balance and environmental resources as the common and inalienable heritage of humanity…”

It mandates benefits too important to lose, including free healthcare and education to the highest levels, subsidized food, housing benefits and other social justice provisions.

Articles 83 – 85 require state policy “improve the quality of life and common welfare,” – low oil prices taking a heavy toll on its ability to fulfill its obligation to the full extent of its mandate.

Indigenous peoples’ rights are recognized and respected, Article 119 stating:

“The State will recognize the existence of indigenous peoples and communities, their social, political and economic organization, their cultures, traditions and customs, languages and religions, as well as their environment and original rights over the lands they ancestrally and traditionally inhabit, and which are necessary to develop and guarantee their ways of life. It shall be the responsibility of the National Executive, with the participation of indigenous peoples, to demarcate and guarantee the collective property of their lands, which shall be inalienable, not subject to limitations or distraint, and non-transferable in accordance with this Constitution and the law.”

Here’s what’s at stake for indigenous people and all Venezuelans if MUD has super-majority control.

It’ll be able to dismiss Supreme Court justices, appoint their own neoliberal ones. Most important, they’ll be able to enact constitutional changes, ending or gravely compromising Bolivarian social justice provisions – including fundamental indigenous peoples’ rights.

Will their representatives risk this outcome by supporting MUD, harming their interests in the process?

They hold the balance of power going forward.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Latin American mercenaries are leaving the ranks of the national armies of their countries to fight in the deserts of Yemen, wearing the uniform of the United Arab Emirates. They have been contracted by private US companies and in some cases directly by the government of the Arab country, which, thanks to vast oil reserves, has the second largest economy of the region.

An article in the New York Times revealed that 450 Latin American soldiers, among them Colombians, Panamanians, Salvadorans and Chileans, have been deployed to Yemen. The mercenaries receive training in the United Arab Emirates before deployment, in part from U.S. trainers.

The presence of Latin American mercenaries in the Middle East is not new. Colombian news media have interviewed mercenaries returning from the Middle East for years. They tell of being recruited by transnational companies with promises of salaries far beyond what they’d receive at home. However, the conflict in Yemen seems to be the first time that Latin American mercenaries have been sent into combat.

Colombia contributes the largest number. According to the New York Times, the UAE military recruits Colombians because of their experience fighting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the jungles and mountains of their country. But there is another reason.

Since the beginning of Plan Colombia, between 2000 and 2015 the U.S. spent almost $7 billion to train, advise and equip Colombia’s security forces. In the last few years, the U.S. government has carried out a strategy to prepare the Colombians for an emerging industry: the “export of security.”

And apparently, one way to export security is to become a U.S.-trained mercenary for Washington’s wars in other parts of the world.

Colombian troops, drilled in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency techniques, instead of exporting security are exporting the United States’ geopolitical agenda of permanent war. They end up doing the dirty work of their ally to the north, who, as a consequence, avoids exposing its forces to harm or facing accusations of interventionism.

According to analyst William Hartung, the United States government has trained a total of 30,000 soldiers from the four countries that make up the Latin American mercenary force in Yemen. A recent investigative report from El Salvador cites a Ministry of Defense source affirming that there are about 100 Salvadorans operating in Yemen. While the Colombians claim to have contracts directly with the Emirati military, in El Salvador the source states that contracting goes through a national company subcontracted by Northrup Grumman.

Northrup Grumman has a history in the Middle East mercenary business. Forbes reports that it absorbed an obscure company called Vinnelli that holds a $819 million-dollar contract to provide personnel for the Saudi National Guard, dating back to 1975.

The same Salvadoran source affirms that there are also Mexicans in Yemen. Mexico was not included in the New York Times report, but has a close relationship with the United States security complex through the war on drugs.

It cannot be known for sure if the hundreds of Latin American mercenaries were trained in the United States or by the U.S. military in their own countries. The U.S. government does not reveal the names of the soldiers or police that it has trained. Nor is there a public registry of mercenaries. Although the practice is legal in certain contexts, it forms part of the underground world of war, in which shadow powers dictate the conditions in which we live–and often die.

What is certain is that contracting Latin American mercenaries follows the logic of the new style of war designed by the Pentagon. This strategy reduces risks to U.S. troops, increases civilian deaths and feeds war profits. Drones–unmanned airplanes–kill thousands of civilians without risking a single life on the part of the aggressors. They’re shielded from the blood of their victims and the horror of their screams.

While technology makes long-distance war possible, another aspect of proxy war is to get others to fight your battles. A sad reflection of patriarchal violence and economic inequality, the recruitment of foreign mercenaries is central to modern-day warfare.

In the case of Yemen, the populations of the countries that are involved in the conflict or feel threatened by it, such as the United Arab Emirates, have no desire to go to war. In recent months the UAE has suffered increasing casualities on the ground while the U.S. and Saudi members of the coalition keep to the skies.

And the United States has strong interests in the region, but does not want to pay the political price of seeing its soldiers return home in body bags. The solution? Hire mercenaries from impoverished Latin American countries.

Recruiting young men from Latin American countries feeds the U.S. war industry. American companies like Blackwater, which has changed its name but remains Erik Prince’s empire of death, and Northrup Grumman, headquartered in Virginia, squeeze more out of their juicy government contracts by reducing soldiers’ pay. According to Colombian reports, their mercenaries receive less than half what European or U.S. soldiers get. Despite the gouging, they still make on average five times more than what they would earn in their home countries.

The third and often ignored element of the new remote-control war is weapons sales. U.S. arms sales are booming, bringing millions of dollars to the U.S. defense industry–a powerful lobby in Congress. US strategists recognize that arms sales effectively advance the geopolitical agenda by changing the balance of power in strategic conflicts.

The Obama administration has promoted bombings by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and developed a very close relationship with the UAE, which shares its zeal for eliminating the Islamic State. The administration has now decided to sell another $1.3 billion dollars worth of weapons to these countries to replenish supplies. While military aid to allies (and in not a small number of cases, to both sides of armed conflicts) has always been a tool of hegemony, arms sales are now explicitly a central strategy.


The Pentagon and its promoters in Congress openly talk about the advantages of killing from a distance. Critics cite the many lethal attacks on civilians, including large numbers of women and children that are characteristic of this type of war. The UN calculates that the war in Yemen has already led to the deaths of 2,500 civilians, among them women and children; almost 500 were killed by U.S. drone strikes.

Now how many will die at the hands of Latin American mercenaries?

And how many young men–Colombians, Mexicans, Salvadorans–will take their last breath in a desert half a world away, fighting a war that isn’t theirs?

“Russian aircraft were not on a mission in that area. All our flights in Syrian airspace are coordinated with air traffic control and the General Staff of the Syrian government’s armed forces,” Major General Igor Konashenkov, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said, adding that Russia always informs the US about the time, altitudes and routes of its aircraft in Syrian airspace.

“Pentagon officials said that on December 6, American aircraft were operating in that area, but striking a target some 55 kilometers away from the [affected Syrian] installation is true to an extent. But it’s not the complete truth,” Konashenkov stressed.

“Two pairs of warplanes from two other countries, members of the US-led international anti-ISIS coalition, were operating in the Deir ez-Zor area on the day of the attack,” Major-General Konashenkov said.

“If they were not involved in that airstrike, then why are the Pentagon’s representatives, as leaders of the anti-ISIS coalition, hushing up the presence of their allies aircraft in the Deir ez-Zor region on December 6? Isn’t it because the [anti-ISIS] coalition air force gets all the information on Islamic State targets in Syria from the Pentagon?” General Konashenkov asked.

“I’m sure, very soon we’ll learn who really inflicted the airstrike on the Syrian troops, as soon as the Syrian authorities make public the results of the investigation of that incident and the type of munitions used in the airstrike,” the Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman said.

Damascus says the airstrike against Syrian troop positions was carried out by the US-led coalition.

Konashenkov reported that according to the Syrian General Staff, the airstrike on the Syrian Army camp was inflicted on December 6, between 19:40 and 19:55 local time (+2 hours GMT).

An airstrike on a field camp on 168th Brigade of 7th Division of the Syrian Army left four serviceman dead and 12 injured. It also destroyed three APCs and four vehicles bearing 12.7mm heavy machine-guns.

Syria slams US-led coalition deadly strike against troops as ‘act of aggression’ https://t.co/knCS1yUmEz pic.twitter.com/p6E6zRX3bx

— RT (@RT_com) December 8, 2015

The incident is the first of its kind since the coalition started to bomb Syria more than a year ago, though the US-led alliance continues to deny it carried out the airstrike.

An anonymous US military source told Reuters on Monday that Washington is certain the airstrike was carried out by the Russians.

It seems that David Cameron has finally gone for the ultimate power grab in pushing through his own laws – in effect bypassing the House of Lords altogether.

Continuing the career work of dismantling the House of Lords started by his predecessor Tony Blair, Tory PM Cameron seeks to further weaken the House of Lords, thereby gutting the legislative House as the last remaining check to Cameron’s apparent preference towards an undemocratic authoritarian party whip system.

What this latest move does is formalise a single party state, but getting to this point has been clearly a two-party effort. Blair’s main strategy was to literally sell-off Lords membership peerages to party donors and as political favours. This was a clever Machiavellian strategy on two fronts: by selling off positions, it discredited the Lords chamber, reducing its image to that of a malleable political tool. The second objective was to fundamentally weaken the constitutional integrity of the chamber, forever. This was Blair’s leg of the mission.

Cameron’s leg of the job is somewhat more blunt, by attempting to almost physically (in political terms) subdue the decision-making and democratic functions of the Lords. Lord Strathclyde, a Tory grandee appointed by David Cameron, has been instructed by the Prime Minister to look at curbing the powers of the second chamber, is proposing that ‘hostile peers’ should be banned from overturning legislation – which, ironically, is one of the primary roles the Lords play in Britain’s constitutional checks and balances system. In other words, Cameron wants to stop the House of Lords from opposing any legislation he proposes – which by definition is a dictatorship.

On December 8, the IMF’s Chief Spokesman Gerry Rice sent a note saying: “The IMF’s Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors. We will provide details on the scope and rationale for this policy change in the next day or so.”

Since 1947 when it really started operations, the World Bank has acted as a branch of the U.S. Defense Department, from its first major chairman John J. McCloy through Robert McNamara to Robert Zoellick and neocon Paul Wolfowitz. From the outset, it has promoted U.S. exports – especially farm exports – by steering Third World countries to produce plantation crops rather than feeding their own populations. (They are to import U.S. grain.) But it has felt obliged to wrap its U.S. export promotion and support for the dollar area in an ostensibly internationalist rhetoric, as if what’s good for the United States is good for the world.

The IMF has now been drawn into the U.S. Cold War orbit. On Tuesday it made a radical decision to dismantle the condition that had integrated the global financial system for the past half century. In the past, it has been able to take the lead in organizing bailout packages for governments by getting other creditor nations – headed by the United States, Germany and Japan – to participate. The creditor leverage that the IMF has used is that if a nation is in financial arrears to any government, it cannot qualify for an IMF loan – and hence, for packages involving other governments.

This has been the system by which the dollarized global financial system has worked for half a century. The beneficiaries have been creditors in US dollars.

But on Tuesday, the IMF joined the New Cold War. It has been lending money to Ukraine despite the Fund’s rules blocking it from lending to countries with no visible chance of paying (the “No More Argentinas” rule from 2001). With IMF head Christine Lagarde made the last IMF loan to Ukraine in the spring, she expressed the hope that there would be peace. But President Porochenko immediately announced that he would use the proceeds to step up his nation’s civil war with the Russian-speaking population in the East – the Donbass.

That is the region where most IMF exports have been made – mainly to Russia. This market is now lost for the foreseeable future. It may be a long break, because the country is run by the U.S.-backed junta put in place after the right-wing coup of winter 2014. Ukraine has refused to pay not only private-sector bondholders, but the Russian Government as well.

This should have blocked Ukraine from receiving further IMF aid. Refusal to pay for Ukrainian military belligerence in its New Cold War against Russia would have been a major step forcing peace, and also forcing a clean-up of the country’s endemic corruption.

Instead, the IMF is backing Ukrainian policy, its kleptocracy and its Right Sector leading the attacks that recently cut off Crimea’s electricity. The only condition on which the IMF insists is continued austerity. Ukraine’s currency, the hryvnia, has fallen by a third this years, pensions have been slashed (largely as a result of being inflated away), while corruption continues unabated.

Despite this the IMF announced its intention to extend new loans to finance Ukraine’s dependency and payoffs to the oligarchs who are in control of its parliament and justice departments to block any real cleanup of corruption.

For over half a year there was a semi-public discussion with U.S. Treasury advisors and Cold Warriors about how to stiff Russia on the $3 billion owed by Ukraine to Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. There was some talk of declaring this an “odious debt,” but it was decided that this ploy might backfire against U.S. supported dictatorships.

In the end, the IMF simply lent Ukraine the money.

By doing so, it announced its new policy: “We only enforce debts owed in US dollars to US allies.” This means that what was simmering as a Cold War against Russia has now turned into a full-blown division of the world into the Dollar Bloc (with its satellite Euro and other pro-U.S. currencies) and the BRICS or other countries not in the U.S. financial and military orbit.

What should Russia do? For that matter, what should China and other BRICS countries do? The IMF and U.S. neocons have sent the world a message: you don’t have to honor debts to countries outside of the dollar area and its satellites.

Why then should these non-dollarized countries remain in the IMF – or the World Bank, for that matter. The IMF move effectively splits the global system in half,between the BRICS and the US-European neoliberalized financial system.

Should Russia withdraw from the IMF? Should other countries?

The mirror-image response would be for the new Asian Development Bank to announce that countries that joined the ruble-yuan area did not have to pay US dollar or euro-denominated debts. That is implicitly where the IMF’s break is leading.

Most Iraqis, be they civilians, military personnel, or government officials, do not trust Americans. 

At a base level, that makes all kinds of sense. After all, the US did launch what amounted to a unilateral invasion of the country just a little over a decade ago, and when it was all said and done, a dictator was deposed but it’s not entirely clear that Iraqis are better off for it.

ISIS controls key cities including the Mosul, the country’s second largest, and security is a daily concern for the populace. The Americans are still seen – rightly – as occupiers, and Washington’s unwillingness inability to effectively counter ISIS has created a culture of suspicion in which most Iraqis believe the US is in cahoots with the militants for what WaPo described as “a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.”

Some of the distrust, the US contends, is fostered by Iran. Tehran wields considerable influence both within the Iraqi military and in political circles in Baghdad. When Ash Carter announced that the US was set to send an “expeditionary targeting force” to the country to assist in raids on Islamic State targets, PM Haider al-Abadi flatly rejected the proposal, saying that “Iraq does not need foreign ground combat forces on Iraqi land.” Abadi rejected a similar Pentagon trial balloon involving Apaches helicopters last month.

(Abadi, pictured left)

Meanwhile, Tehran’s Shiite militias threatened to attack any US soldiers operating on Iraqi soil. “We will chase and fight any American force deployed in Iraq. Any such American force will become a primary target for our group. We fought them before and we are ready to resume fighting,” a spokesman for Kata’ib Hezbollah said. Similarly, influential Shiite lawmakers like the infamous Hakim al-Zamili have called on Abadi to seek direct military intervention from Moscow to expel foreign forces from the country.

Now, in the latest example of just how tenuous Washington’s grip on the region has become, the Iraqi parliament’s Security and Defense Committee is calling for the review and cancellation of Baghdad’s security agreement with the US.

“The government and parliament need to review the agreement signed with the United States on security because the United States does not seriously care about its fulfillment,” committee member Hamid al-Mutlaq, a senior Sunni lawmaker told Sputnik on Wednesday. “We demand that it be annulled,” he added.

Who will fill the void you ask? You guessed it:

“Soon, a meeting [of the committee] with Prime Minister Haider Abadi will be held, at which we will propose cooperating with Russia in carrying out airstrikes against IS and in the fight against terrorism in Iraq,” another committee member said earlier this week.

Recall that this is precisely what we said would happen once we learned in September that Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria had set up a joint intelligence sharing cell in Baghdad.

It was clear from the beginning that Tehran saw an opportunity to consolidate its power in Iraq and preserve its influence in Syria by convincing Vladimir Putin that Russia could replace the US as Mid-East superpower puppet master by helping Tehran to defeat the insurgency in Syria and boot the US from Iraq once and for all. Moscow will of course get a warm reception from Iraqi lawmakers thanks to the fact that many MPs are loyal to Iran.

This makes sense logistically as well. Once the Russians and Iranians have retaken Aleppo (which admittedly is taking a while), they can push east towards Raqqa and from there, move straight across the border, effectively pinching ISIS between an advance from the west and Iran’s Shiite militias already operating in Iraq. Of course that will entail some measure of cooperation with the US, France, Britain, and, once in Iraq, the Peshmerga. It is at that point that Washington’s resolve when it comes to preserving whatever charade is being perpetrated in Raqqa will be put to the ultimate test.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the US responds to a move by Baghdad to nullify the security agreement.

Washington knows it can land troops in Iraq by simply going through Erbil which is precisely what Turkey did last Friday. The KRG/ Barzani end-around serves to give the troop deployments a kind of quasi-legitimacy. That is, the Kurds control the territory and are self governing, so when Erdogan (and, soon Obama) drop troops in northern Iraq against Baghdad’s wishes, they can claim it’s not a violation of sovereignty. As we saw over the weekend, Iraqi officials aren’t going to stand for it going forward although now that it’s become clear that NATO and the Security Council aren’t going to be any help (just as we said), Iraq’s ambassador to the UN is striking a concilliatory tone, saying Baghdad will try to settle the dispute with Turkey “bilaterally.”

It now appears that the stage is set for Baghdad to claim that the US, like Turkey, is illegitimately occupying the country (again). If Iraq nullifies the security agreement and moves to invite the Russians into the country, the US will be forced to either pack up and leave, cooperate with Moscow, or fight for the right to preserve American influence.

Decisions, decisions.

*  *  *

Read more about the official relationship between Washington and Baghdad below.

us-iraq-sfa-en

Twenty years ago, developing countries signed onto the World Trade Organisation (WTO) with the promise of raising standards of living, ensuring full employment, food security, technological advancement and achieving sustainable development. In 2015, it is evident that WTO’s trade and investment rules have taken the developing world in the opposite direction. The WTO has served as a powerful tool in the hands of the North to undermine sovereign development trajectories in the South.

The Tenth Ministerial Conference to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 15-18 December 2015 is again heading towards strengthening of the hands of the North at the WTO.  There is a concerted push by developed countries such as USA and EU to further this fundamentally flawed, pro-corporate capital and anti democratic process of “free” trade and investment “liberalisation”. Issues that were earlier rejected in the Singapore Ministerial (1996) such as Investment, Government Procurement and Competition Policy are being brought back. Further, the so called ‘21^st century issues’ such as E-Commerce, Environmental Goods and Global Value Chains are now on the table with the sole purpose of eliminating autonomous policy space of the South. Several of these issues are already present in the US led Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) which has recently been concluded. These need to be rejected firmly by India.

In this context we are concerned that India is open to discussing new issues, as has been reflected in the Commerce Ministers recent statement. On the contrary India should unify developing countries in order to regain lost national policy space and highlight long standing issues of concern such as food security, special and differential treatment, reduction of agribusiness subsidies in developed countries and review of TRIPS, many of which find mention in the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) of WTO. Rather than being trapped in the agenda of the developed countries to aggressively pry open developing country markets, India should push for reinforcing the development mandate in any trade discussion. In the eventuality of India being unable to extract concrete concessions from the developed countries on these issues and the latter’s insertion of new agendas at Nairobi; we call upon the Government of India to walk out of the Ministerial Conference.

Provision of food, education, health and guarantee of decent jobs are essential elements for the realisation of the fundamental rights granted by the Indian Constitution. These are the issues under threat at the WTO. In the name of “market distortions”, minimum support price (MSP) for public stockholding of food grains, state support for health and education are sought to be withdrawn.At a time when neo-liberal economic policies have not only deepened the agrarian crisis in rural India, but also led to a breakdown of public services, resulted in complete de-industrialisation in some sectors and technological dependence in others forcing India on to the low value added path in the global supply chain resulting in loss of millions of jobs in manufacturing, especially in small medium and village enterprises, any further concessions at the WTO will lead to further impoverishment for the working classes, peasants, indigenous peoples, artisans, women, dalits and other marginalised sections of the Indian population.

We, the undersigned note with grave concern that so far the Government of India has not discussed in the Indian Parliament these disturbing developments at the WTO. We underline that no commitments should be made before due debate and ratification by the Indian Parliament and public consultation. Further, as trade issues have intruded on policy spaces under the purview of state governments, approvals from state legislatures and relevant local bodies should also be made mandatory. Given the deep democratic deficit in WTO processes, we call for a moratorium on any new commitments. In this context, we also demand that conditional GATS offers that were made by India in critical sectors such as higher education, health, finance and insurance be immediately withdrawn.

We call on the Indian Parliament to debate and vote, based on robust evidence of the employment, livelihood, social and environmental impacts of 20 years of the WTO Agreements, various free trade agreements (FTAs) and autonomous liberalisation. This process must be preceded by decisions of state legislative assemblies and should also be informed by inputs from academia, public intellectuals, trade unions, social movements and non-governmental organisations.

Based on this evidence, the Government of India should roll back harmful commitments that were made under the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs), Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and other WTO agreements.

Twenty years on, we demand that the Government of India thoroughly reorient its stand in international trade and investment negotiations and align it truly with the pro-people agenda of self-reliant and sustainable development. We also call upon the Government of India to work towards such a progressive and alternate agenda in solidarity and cooperation with likeminded countries of the South.

With this end in view, the signatories to this declaration commit to taking this message across the country through campaigns, rallies and conventions. We call upon mass organisations from across the country to join this process of defending democracy, reclaiming self-reliance and sovereignty.

Endorsed by:

1. Adivasi Dalit Morcha, Madhya Pradesh
2. All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA)
3. All India Drug Action Network (AIDAN)
4. All India Forum for Right To Education (AIFRTE)
5. All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS)
6. All India Peoples Science Network (AIPSN)
7. All India Power Engineers Federation (AIPEF)
8. All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA)
9. All India Students Association (AISA)

10. All India Union of Forest Working People (AIUFWP)

11. Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA)

12. Andhra Pradesh Vyvasaya Vruthidarula Union (APVVU)

13. Asha Parivar

14. Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS)

15. Beyond Copenhagen

16. Bharatiya Krishak Samaj (BKS)

17. Center for Environment Education (CEE), Madhya Pradesh

18. Centre for Equity Studies

19. CECOEDECON

20. Citizen News Service (CNS)

21. Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP)

22. Democratic Teachers Front

23. Delhi Right to Water Campaign

24. Delhi Science Forum

25. Diverse Women for Diversity

26. Federation of Central Universities’ Teachers’ Associations (FEDCUTA)

27. Focus on the Global South

28. Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN)

29. Food Sovereignty Alliance

30. Forum Against FTAs

31. Forum for Indigenous Perspectives and Action (FIPA)

32. Forum for Urban Commons and Governance

33. Gene Campaign

34. India FDI Watch

35. Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF)

36. Institute for Social Action and Research

37. Jan Pahal

38. Jan Pahel, Madhya Pradesh

39. Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA)

40. Joshi Adhikari Institute of Social Studies (JAISS)

41. Kalpavriksh

42. Madhyam

43. Manthan Adhyayan Kendra

44. Mines Minerals and People (MMP)

45. Nadi Ghati Morcha

46. Nagara Vanchitara Vedike

47. Nagpur Municipal Corporation Employees Union (NMCEU)

48. National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM)

49. National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR)

50. National Centre for Labour (NCL)

51. National Confederation of Officers Associations of Central PSUs (NCOA)

52. National Platform against Water Privatisation

53. National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO

54. Navdanya

55. New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI)

56. North East People’s Alliance

57. Pani Haaq Samiti, Mumbai

58. People’s Campaign for the Right to Water, Karnataka

59. People’s Research Society

60. Popular Education and Action Centre (PEACE)

61. POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS)

62. Public Advocacy Initiatives for Rights and Values in India (PAIRVI)

63. Public Services International (PSI), South Asia

64. Research Foundation for Science Technology & Ecology

65. Right to Education (RTE) Forum

66. Right to Food Campaign

67. River Basin Friends(North East )

68. Samajvadi Samagam

69. Sanchar Nigam Executives Association (SNEA)

70. Save our Rice Campaign

71. Shambhvi, New Delhi

72. Socialist Party (India)

73. South Solidarity Initiative –ActionAid India

74. Students Federation of India (SFI)

75. Swadeshi Andolan

76. Thanal

77. The Child Trust

78. The Hawkers Federation

79. Third World Network, India

80. Toxics Watch Alliance

81. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam

For more information or to endorse please write to G Manicandan: [email protected] (Tel. 9868319261) and Dinesh Abrol: [email protected]  (Tel. 9650365397)

What is the connection between the US bombing of a Syrian military base in Ayyash, Syria, and the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq?

Both of these seemingly isolated events are part of a larger plan to Balkanize the Middle East, to strengthen Washington’s grip on dwindling resources, to draw Russia into a costly and protracted war, and to ensure that ME oil remains denominated in US dollars. Author Joseph Kishore summed it up like this in a recent post at the World Socialist Web Site. He said:

“The basic force behind the war in Syria is the same as that which has motivated the imperialist carve-up of the Middle East as a whole: the interests of international finance capital. The major imperialist powers know that if they are to have a say in the division of the booty, they must have also done their share of the killing.” (“The new imperialist carve-up of the Middle East“, World Socialist Web Site)

Bingo. Ultimately, the war on terror is a public relations fig leaf designed to conceal Washington’s attempt to rule the world. It’s impossible to make sense of goings-on around the globe without some grasp of how seemingly random acts of violence and terror fit within the broader and more comprehensive geopolitical strategy to create a new unipolar world order, to crush all emerging rivals, and to extend US full-spectrum-dominance across the planet.

Let’s look at the particulars:  On Sunday, US warplanes bombed a Syrian military base east of Raqqa killing three Syrian soldiers and wounding thirteen others. The incident took place in the village of Ayyash in Deir Ezzor Province. Coalition spokesman US Colonel Steve Warren denied US involvement in the deadly raid despite the fact that the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed ‘that the air strike hit the military camp’.  According to the observatory,  ‘This is the first time that a strike from the US-led coalition killed Syrian government troops.’   Warren’s denial, which is the reflexive Pentagon response to any claim of culpability,  suggests that the attack was a deliberate provocation intended to trigger retaliatory strikes from Russia that would, in turn, justify a larger commitment of US troops and weaponry to the 4 and a half year-long Syrian war. Whether the airstrikes got the greenlight from the White House or from rogue elements acting independently at the Pentagon is unclear.  What is clear, however, is that the attack on Syrian troops, a full 30 miles from their designated target, was no mistake. It’s also worth noting, that according to South Front military analysis, the US bombing raid coincided with a “a full-scale ISIS offensive on the villages of Ayyash and Bgelia.” In other words, the US attack provided sufficient air-cover for ISIS terrorists to carry out their ground operations.

Was that part of the plan or was it merely a coincidence?

Less than 24 hours after the attack, US warplanes bombed the village of Al-Khan in north-eastern Syria killing 26 Syrian civilians including at least four women and seven children and four women. The message the US military is sending with these lethal attacks is that it wants to control the air-space over east Syria where it plans to remove ISIS and establish a de facto Sunni state consistent with its scheme to break Syria and Iraq into smaller cantons governed by local warlords, Islamic fanatics, and US puppets.  A great deal has been written about this topic already, so we won’t spend too much time on it here. A recent op-ed in the New York Times by neocon John Bolton sums up the basic concept which appears to be supported by virtually the entire US political establishment. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Today’s reality is that Iraq and Syria as we have known them are gone. ….. Rather than striving to recreate the post-World War I map, Washington should recognize the new geopolitics. The best alternative to the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq is a new, independent Sunni state….

This Sunni state proposal differs sharply from the vision of the Russian-Iranian axis and its proxies (Hezbollah, Mr. Assad and Tehran-backed Baghdad). Their aim of restoring Iraqi and Syrian governments to their former borders is a goal fundamentally contrary to American, Israeli and friendly Arab state interests….

The new “Sunni-stan” may not be Switzerland. This is not a democracy initiative, but cold power politics. It is consistent with the strategic objective of obliterating the Islamic State that we share with our allies, and it is achievable.”  (“John Bolton: To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State“, New York Times)

Like we said, the Bolton piece is just one of many articles and policy papers that support the partitioning of Iraq and Syria and the redrawing of the map of the Middle East. ISIS, which is largely an invention of western Intel agencies and their Gulf counterparts, is a critical component in this overall plan. By situating a terrorist organization at the epicenter of world oil supplies, one creates the rationale for intervening in the affairs of other sovereign nations whenever one chooses.  This helps explain this week’s bombings in Ayyash and Al-Khan in north-eastern Syria. The US justifies the attacks by waving the bloody shirt of “ISIS, when in fact, the US is merely pursuing its own narrow strategic interests. And while the US has not formally established a no-fly zone in the area, it’s clear  now that there are greater risks associated with operating in east Syria then there were just week ago,  which is precisely the message the Pentagon wanted to send.

This same rule can be applied Turkey’s invasion of northern Iraq with an estimated 900 troops and 20 tanks. First of all, there is no way that Turkey launched the incursion without first getting the thumbs-up from Washington. We all know how violently the Obama administration reacted when Moscow defended Crimea following the CIA-backed coup in Kiev. Compare that to the subdued response of special presidential envoy, Brett McGurk,   who has this to say on Twitter:  “The US does not support military deployments inside Iraq in the absence of the consent of the Iraqi government.” (Today’s Zaman)

That’s it?  5,000 US soldiers died fighting in Iraq and all McGurk can say is ‘You really shouldn’t do that, Turkey’?

Keep in mind, Washington hasn’t levied sanctions onTurkey, attacked its currency or financial markets, or threatened it with it with war as it did with Russia. In fact, Obama hasn’t even scolded Turkey. He’s simply looked the other way and ignored the matter altogether. Naturally, that’s incensed US ally in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has threatened to take action if Turkish troops don’t leave in the next 24 hours.

Once again, the Turkish move fits perfectly with the overall imperial strategy of “deconstructing” Syria and Iraq and breaking them into smaller, innocuous statelets that will remain in “a permanent state of colonial dependency” for the foreseeable future.

As for Turkey’s Islamist zealots in Ankara; they feel entirely justified in reclaiming territory they think was stolen from them following WW1. Turkish columnist for A Haber, Cemil Barlas, summed it up like this to RT’s Harry Fear:

“In the past, these lands belonged to us; we have the right to take part in their fate. Moreover, our relatives live in those regions. We are concerned as to what is happening to them….According to Barlas, Turkey has a right over Syrian and Iraqi’s natural resources and he thinks that people living there are not profiting from selling oil as it all goes to the ‘dictator.’”  (Sputnik News)

Turkey’s invasion of Iraq signals the beginning of a long-term occupation that will likely expand to Mosul. This will establish a critical beachhead for controlling resources and pipeline corridors that will keep the oil flowing through Turkey and on to the southern port of Ceyhan.  Here’s more on what’s going on from Turkish columnist Yavuz Baydar:

“Taking back Mosul in full is on the top of the agenda. For this there is an apparent convergence of interests between Turkey, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) and the Western allies….The key figure in the big picture is Khaled Hodja, leader of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), in close cooperation with KRG leader Masoud Barzani. It was he who declared that there would be a joint combat force built in the canton of Rojava.

A colonel, speaking anonymously to Tunca Öğreten with the Diken news site in İstanbul, confirmed the plans, adding that it was a formation initiated by the US and Turkey and that it would consist of around 5,000 men.

“…. These forces are supported by the US and Turkey, both against the [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad regime and to cut out the Kurds in northern Syria.”

Idris Nassan, the deputy foreign minister of Kobani, claims that this new force would consist mainly of members of the groups Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra, and Turkmens.

Nassan connects the latest moves to an imminent meeting in Riyadh, where Saudis are organizing new alliance-building for the Syrian opposition forces.“Behind the term ‘moderate forces’ are Saudi Arabia and Turkey,’ Nassan told the Diken website.” (“What lies beneath Turkey’s ’Mosul move’?“, Today’s Zaman)

So it looks like an agreement has been struck between Turkey, the KRG and the United States to seize parts of northern Iraq and eastern Syria to create a de facto Sunni state that will be jointly-controlled by Ankara and Washington.  It also looks like Obama has agreed to use dodgy jihadi-proxies (aka–Terrorists) to work alongside US Special Forces to carry out future military operations.  So while the effort to remove Assad has been temporarily put on the backburner, the determination to destroy Syria is as strong as ever.

The Daily Mail in an detailed investigative report confirms that Israel is supporting Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists operating inside Syria. But it’s all for a good cause. The Jewish State is not in the business of supporting terrorism.

The Daily Mail describes the contours of a strictly humanitarian undertaking which consists in rescuing wounded rebel jihadist fighters:

Officially, Israel says that this operation is part of its programme of humanitarianism, which has provided aid to a long list of countries from Haiti to Nepal. Palestinian civilians are also regular patients at Israeli hospitals such as the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa. (Mail online, December 9, 2015)

“Israel insists that these treacherous nightly rescues are purely humanitarian… But analysts suggest the Jewish state has in fact struck a deadly ‘deal with the devil’ – offering support to the Sunni militants [ISIS and Al Nusrah] who fight the Syrian ruler Assad…” (Ibid)

Israel officially acknowledges that this program of “saving Syrians” (aka terrorists) has been ongoing since 2012:

In the three years that Israel has been running these operations, it has saved the lives of more than 2,000 Syrians [aka terrorists]– at least 80 per cent of whom are male and of fighting age – at a cost of 50 million shekels (£8.7 million).  (Ibid, emphasis added)

The endeavor  operates under the auspices of the IDF out of the occupied Golan Heights. Israeli military personnel are providing direct support (weapons, supplies, logistics) to the terrorists inside Syria, in liaison and consultation with its allies including Turkey which provides hospital services to wounded fighters in Turkey’s hospitals as part of a broader program of support of the ISIS.

Reports confirm that upon their release from the hospital in the Golan heights, the wounded terrorists are not the object of arrest. They are send back to the battlefield inside Syria.

The Daily Mail report is confirmed by an earlier Foreign Policy article (quoting a UN mission report) which outlines Israel’s policy of treating wounded terrorists in Israeli hospitals.

Israel is  …  providing medical care and other unidentified supplies to the insurgents ….

In the past three months, battle-hardened Syrian rebels have transported scores of wounded Syrians across a cease-fire line that has separated Israel from Syria since 1974, according to a 15-page report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the work of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). Once in Israel, they receive medical treatment in a field clinic before being sent back to Syria, where, presumably, some will return to carry on the fight.

U.N. blue helmets responsible for monitoring the decades-old cease-fire report observing armed opposition groups “transferring 89 wounded persons” from Syrian territory into Israel, where they were received by members of the Israel Defense Forces, according to the report. The IDF returned 21 Syrians to armed opposition members back in Syria, including the bodies of two who died.

“Throughout the reporting period, UNDOF frequently observed armed members of the opposition interacting with the IDF across the cease-fire line,” according to the report. “On one occasion UNDOF observed the IDF on the Alpha side [inside Israel] handing over two boxes to armed opposition on the Bravo side [inside Syria].”

***

The Israeli government has been providing medical assistance to Syria’s wounded for more than a year. In February [2014], Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit to a military field hospital in the Golan Heights [see photo op below]. (FP, June 11, 2014)

 

 

As Republican presidential candidates lined up to one-up each other about how they would fight Islamic terrorism, many mainstream pundits questioned the hysteria and took particular aim at billionaire Donald Trump for seeking a moratorium on admitting Muslims to the United States, but Trump’s proposal was far from the most outrageous.

Getting much less attention was a statement by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is considered by many a more likely GOP nominee than Trump. Cruz suggested that the United States should nuke the territory in Iraq and Syria controlled by Islamic State militants.

“I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out,” Cruz told a Tea Party rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In reference to Cruz’s comment, a New York Times editorial added, “whatever that means.” But the phrase “glow in the dark” popularly refers to the aftermath of a nuclear bomb detonation.

In other words, Cruz was making it clear to his audience that he would be prepared to drop a nuclear bomb on Islamic State targets. While the bombastic senator from Texas was probably engaging in hyperbole – as he also vowed to “carpet bomb them into oblivion” – the notion of a major candidate for President cavalierly suggesting a nuclear strike would normally be viewed as disqualifying, except perhaps in this election cycle.

Image: Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for U.S. President.

While Cruz drew little attention for his “glow in the dark” remark, Trump came under intense criticism for his proposal to block the admission of Muslims into the United States until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on” in the aftermath of the Dec. 2 terror attack by a Muslim husband-and-wife team in San Bernardino, California.

Across mainstream politics and media, Trump’s idea was decried as both “unprecedented” from a top candidate for President and a likely violation of the U.S. Constitution which respects freedom of religion and requires equal protection under the law.

Other Republican candidates, even the more “moderate” ones, also talked tough about Muslims in what shaped up as a heated competition to outdo one another in appealing to the angry and frightened right-wing “base” of the GOP.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush argued that the threat from Muslims was unique: “The idea that somehow there are radical elements in every religion is ridiculous. There are no radical Christians that are organizing to destroy Western civilization. There are no radical Buddhists that are doing this. This is radical Islamic terrorism.”

Bush’s comment failed to recognize that the institution of Christianity has been at the center of “Western civilization” since the latter days of the Roman Empire and that “Christian” nations have routinely plundered other civilizations all over the planet, including across the Islamic world both in Asia and Africa. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Why Many Muslims Hate the West” and “Muslim Memories of West’s Imperialism.”]

Though inspired by a pacifist, Christianity has established a record as the most bloodthirsty religion in history, with its adherents conducting massacres and genocides in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia – every continent except Antarctica, which is largely uninhabited by humans. In many cases, European Christians justified the repression and extermination of non-Christians as the will of God, deeming indigenous people to be “heathens.”

The violence by Western nations against Muslims also is not something confined to history books and the distant past. In 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair led an unprovoked invasion of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed much of Iraq’s national infrastructure.

In other words, in the view of many Middle Easterners, the West continues to wage war against their civilization. However, none of that reality is reflected in the current U.S. political and media debate, even when a major Republican candidate raises the prospect of dropping the Bomb.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

On Monday, Donald Trump, the billionaire candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” following the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. This is only the latest in a series of increasingly fascistic and violent demands from the Republican frontrunner.

Although he went farther than other members of the US political establishment, Trump’s call was in line with remarks by other politicians, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who called for a ban on Muslim, but not Christian, refugees from Syria last month, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who said he had ordered state police to place mosques under surveillance.

David Bowers, the Democratic Party mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, last month approvingly invoked America’s history of interning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War. “It appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then,” Bowers declared.

The resurgence of such reactionary political demands in the United States is mirrored in the other imperialist countries. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has branded opponents of the authorization of war in Syria as “terrorist sympathizers.” In France, Marine Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Front (FN) received the largest share of the vote in this week’s regional elections, amidst the effective abrogation of democratic rights by the government of President François Hollande and the promotion of a climate of fear and hysteria in the wake of the November 13 attacks in Paris.

Throughout Europe, there has been a deliberate whipping up of anti-Muslim chauvinism in response to the refugee crisis, as all the major powers seek to justify their plans for the expansion of war in Syria.

In the US, the statements by Trump have been met with self-righteous indignation by politicians and media figures, who claim they are shocked by his statements. Who are they kidding? The blathering of this fascistic imbecile expresses only in more concentrated form the perpetual hysteria one hears every day in the media. The difference between Trump and someone like CNN’s Wolf Blitzer is just a matter of degree. He is the product of a diseased political environment.

As for Obama, in his national address on Sunday, the president postured as a critic of Republican calls for targeting Muslims. Yet the Obama administration is responsible for the continuation of an imperialist policy in the Middle East that has devastated entire countries, with at least a million people, mainly Muslim, killed in the process.

The unleashing of the forces of extreme reaction is, in fact, an organic expression of the nature of imperialism itself. As Lenin stressed , imperialism is “reaction all down the line.” Writing in the midst of World War I, he wrote, “The difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because they are both rotting alive.” The putrefaction of contemporary capitalist society—based on parasitism, financial swindling, war and looting—is once again spewing up political filth in the form of racist demagogy.

The whole experience of the 20th century has demonstrated the fact that imperialist war is always accompanied by attacks on democratic rights and the whipping up of xenophobia. American involvement in World War I, nominally undertaken by Woodrow Wilson to make the world safe for democracy, brought with it the lynching of workers and the imprisonment of socialist leaders including Eugene V. Debs, followed by the anti-socialist Palmer Raids.

The period leading up to and during World War II brought with it unspeakable horrors, including the rise of fascism and the Nazi Party’s “final solution,” which led to the murder of 11 million people and the extermination of a large section of European Jewry. In the United States, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the internment of Japanese Americans and the imprisonment of leading members of the Trotskyist movement under the Smith Act.

The period of the Korean War was the heyday of McCarthyite witch-hunts of socialists in the trade unions and entertainment industry. The French colonial war in Algeria brought the country to the brink of civil war, including the massacre of peaceful demonstrators and the invocation of a state of emergency. During the Vietnam War, the FBI in the US massively infiltrated political organizations and oversaw assassinations of oppositional figures, including leading members of the Black Panthers.

During every imperialist war, the ruling class seeks to cultivate the most backward and racist sentiments. The “war on terror,” which has led to the deaths of at least a million Muslims, is no different, creating an environment in which racist hysteria is relentlessly promoted in the media.

The deep social roots of the drive to war and the attack on democratic rights are demonstrated by the fact that the end of the Bush administration did not lead to a significant change in course. In fact, the abrogation of democratic rights continued under Obama, whose particular contribution was the institutionalization of state-sponsored murder as a central plank of American foreign policy.

The political impotence of what counts for contemporary liberalism, as well as the various pseudo-left organizations, is a result of the fact that they are deeply implicated in promoting and justifying war and militarism.

There is not widespread or deep-rooted popular support for the conceptions advocated by Trump and the political establishment as a whole, despite the constant barrage of media propaganda. But the organized expression of anti-imperialist and democratic sentiments depends on the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a program directed at the source of war and political reaction: the capitalist system.

When most people think of CIA sabotage, they think of coups, assassinations, proxy wars, armed rebel groups, and even false flags — not strategic stupidity and purposeful bureaucratic ineptitude. However, according to a declassified document from 1944, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which later became the CIA, used and trained a curious breed of “citizen-saboteurs” in occupied nations like Norway and France.

The World War II-era document, called Simple Sabotage Field Manual, outlines ways in which operatives can disrupt and demoralize enemy administrators and police forces. The first section of the document, which can be read in its entirety here, addresses “Organizations and Conferences” — and how to turn them into a “dysfunctional mess”:

— Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
— Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
— When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
— Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
— Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
— Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
— Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

On its official webpage, the CIA boasts about finding innovative ways to bring about sabotage, calling their tactics for destabilization “surprisingly relevant.” While they admit that some of the ideas may seem a bit outdated, they claim that “Together they are a reminder of how easily productivity and order can be undermined.”

In a second section targeted at manager-saboteurs, the guide lists the following tactical moves:

— In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
— Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
— To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
— Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
— Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

Finally, the guide presents protocol for how saboteur-employees can disrupt enemy operations, too:

— Work slowly.
— Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
— Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
— Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

Excerpt from Manual

To Consult the Complete declassified Sabotage Manual Click here

[GR Editor’s Note 

Since it’s publication, the tools of sabotage and destabilization instrumented by US intelligence have become increasingly sophisticated]

 The CIA is proud of its Kafkaesque field manual and evidently still views it as an unorthodox but effective form of destabilizing enemy operations around the world. Of course, so too might an anarchist or revolutionary look at such tactics and view them in the context of disrupting certain domestic power structures, many of which are already built like a bureaucratic house of cards.

It seems if any country should refrain from showcasing how easy it is to disrupt inefficient federal agencies, however, it would be the United States.

On October 9, the cabinet of Haitian prime minister Evans Paul adopted a decree to reestablish the country’s armed forces. The previous Haitian military, which for decades under the Duvalier dictatorships had served as force of internal repression, was disbanded in 1994 by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The disbanded Haitian army traced its origins back to the Garde d’Haïti, a force that was organized and trained by the US Marine Corps during its occupation of the country from 1915 to 1934. Its initial role was as an auxiliary to the American occupation forces in suppressing a nationalist insurgency. After the withdrawal of US troops, it became the most powerful institution within Haitian society, while carrying out systematic violence against the population with impunity.

The October 9 decree is an ominous development. The army will be built up alongside a 15,000-member Haitian National Police, which the government has developed as a substitute for the UN’s MINUSTAH force. The military will also have a role along the border with the Dominican Republic, where tensions have been high because of that country’s deportation of Dominico-Haitians.

Haitian president Michel Martelly, who has already been shown in photos reviewing the first military trainees, has been ruling by decree since January 2015. It was then that the country’s parliament stopped meeting, in large part because Martelly had delayed the calling of legislative elections throughout his presidency. Martelly’s hand-picked successor, Jovenel Moïse, finished first in a November 5 presidential election in which even the UN was accused of participating in the widespread fraud.

The Departmental Operations and Intervention Brigade (Brigade d’Opération et d’Intervention Départementale, BOID) a unit of the Haitian National Police created last June, has played an especially violent role in recent months. It arrested 27 members of opposition parties in the days following the elections—many just for wearing the t-shirts of their parties—and, since its creation, has killed an estimated 15 people in Cité Soleil, the sprawling slum north of the capital of Port-au-Prince.

Prime Minister Paul has cynically said of the November 5 elections that fraud is “a problem of society” that needs to be fixed “in order to avoid its reproduction in future elections.” Meanwhile, Paul has formed an “independent” commission to address the electoral impasse; this commission includes a member of Martelly’s PHTK political formation, Liné Baltazar, who with Moïse has also met with the official Provisional Electoral Council (Conseil Electorale Provisoire, CEP).

It is less than 25 years since the army, led by Raoul Cédras and supported by the CIA, overthrew democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and instituted a regime that murdered more than 3,000 people. Cédras, who headed the military government from 1991 to 1994, had spied for the CIA before coming to power. He currently lives in Panama.

Even the US Library of Congress wrote in its Haiti and Dominican Republic country studies book that under the rule of Cédras, the “armed forces became…a violent business enterprise with numerous criminal features” and had its finger in the state-owned telephone and electric companies, the ports, and the importation of cement and flour.

After the fall of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in February 1986, General Henri Namphy headed an interim administration called the National Council of Government. Under his leadership, on November 29, 1987, Haitian soldiers murdered 34 people and injured 75 others outside a voting center. It was also reported that soldiers had stabbed or beaten to death 46 civilians in the Fort Dimanche prison.

Between the downfall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 and the first election of Aristide, General Prosper Avril served as both president and commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Haiti from September 1988 to March 1990. A former member of Francois Duvalier’s Presidential Guard, Avril was responsible during his presidency for the imprisonment, torture, and murder of political opponents, labor leaders, and intellectuals. When he was ousted in 1990, the US military flew Avril to Miami.

Many of the generals involved in the post-Duvalier governments are still alive and likely to be welcomed home from abroad now that the army is back in business

Article 41 of the 2015 decree states that the special operations command should “stay informed about all cases of aggression or attack from both the interior and exterior, to analyze them in order to evaluate the risks of…diplomatic incidents.” Previous Haitian armies were used mainly for domestic repression, but the Haitian bourgeoisie is also worried about border tensions affecting the import and export of goods from the Dominican Republic. Martelly and his ministers also needed to ensure the new military’s ability to cooperate with the US and other imperialist powers.

Article 65 of the decree gives the Defense Ministry 19 responsibilities, including “participating in keeping the peace throughout the territory of the Republic in cases of force majeure,” “participating in the elaboration and coordination of plans in case of war, civil troubles, or natural catastrophes,” and “collecting and managing all information relative to national defense.” Force majeure is a legal term referring to both civil unrest and natural events like hurricanes.

The decree also establishes the position of Minister of Defense. Lener Renaud, a former officer in the Forces Armées d’Haiti (FAdH) who was 29 when it was demobilized in 1994, has been named to the post. Renaud has told Le Nouvelliste that every citizen should contribute to the cost of the army, even if just a centime. Calling the suppression of protests “war,” Renaud said that the army is needed in addition to the Haitian National Police because “to see police in the streets looking like men in a war situation is not good.”

The recommissioning of the army will start with one battalion of soldiers, some of whom have already been trained in Ecuador.

“The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow.  This is decentralized… We try until it works.” –  Craig S. Wright, Jan 10, 2009

One of the co-creators of Bitcoin, the supposedly named and frustratingly elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, has become the subject of police attention in Australia. The person in question was identified in two investigations by ‘Wired and Gizmodo’ as Craig Wright.  (Both outlets differ about their material – the former using the term “leaked”, the latter “hacked”.)

Wired began by considering the awkward bits and bobs man who was Skyped into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas.  When asked about his role with Bitcoin, he too three, long seconds. “Um. I’ve been involved with all this for a long time.”[1]

Gizmodo ran with an interview that is said to have taken place between Wright and the Australian Tax Office. “I did my best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running Bitcoin since 2009 but I think its getting – most – most – by the end of this half the world is going to bloody know.”[2]

Ten Australian Federal Police personnel arrived at the Sydney suburban house in Gordon during Wednesday afternoon – around 1.30 pm.  Two sported white gloves, and set to work on the garage.  The letter box was full; the garbage bin was still outside.  The Wright family were scheduled to move out on December 22.  An empty house, about to be emptied. This was heavy-handed stuff.

As for the occupants in question, Wright’s abundant “computer stuff,” as pointed out by a 17-year-old witness across the road, was considerably impressive to strike onlookers as abnormal. Maybe, surmised witness, “they just need heaps of computers, I don’t know.”  Abnormality – the greatest sin in Australian suburbia.

The Guardian Australia, in sniffing about, suggested that the raid may not have been directed specifically at Bitcoin per se, but against Wright’s tax records. Further digging may find that the two are intrinsically linked.  When financial innovations are created, notably those that facilitate entirely new currencies, you can be assured that inland review officers will be interested.  As Australia’s own Administrative Appeals Tribunal has decided, cryptocurrency is very much an asset and should be assessed for capital gains purposes.

There is still too much speculation about identity and attribution.  Various outlets have been on the case about Nakamoto.  Newsweek, Fast Company and the New Yorker have all have their conjectures.  The Gizmodo transcripts have yet to be verified.

The absence of any public documentation about Wright’s supposed involvement with the Administrative Appeal’s Tribunal, a body that covers appeals on tax matters, is also puzzling.  And running is hardly the same as founding and directing.  At no point does the transcript reveal the attribution between Wright and Nakamoto.

That said, it is hard to refute the accumulated evidence suggesting that Wright and Nakamoto are, if not the same person, then certainly linked.  Wright was certainly no stranger to Bitcoin’s functions, announcing last year that he had plans to pioneer the first Bitcoin bank.[3]

His own company, DeMorgan Ltd., is described on his Linkedin page as “a pre-IPO Australian listed company focused on alternative currency.”[4]  And Wright does make a slew of claims to being Nakamoto starting in 2008, just prior to the publication of the white paper that did make Bitcoin a reality.[5]

Events such as these tend to add unnecessary innuendos of guilt to a perfectly valid and powerful currency.  The narco-trafficking legacy of the Silk Road and activities of Darknet markets have terrified and thrilled, the result being that some of the suspicions are self-perpetuating.

Then come an assortment of figures who feel that such virtual currencies are the puffery of the moment, and will never reach wide circulation.  Nothing will replace solid, acceptable currencies.  Such dreary views come from central bankers and monetary fund directors who have to justify their continued relevance.  The scepticism of Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund and Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan is far more telling than they let on.

Dimon, before the Fortune Global Forum last month, was happy to heap upon the currency.  “There will be no-real time, non-controlled currency in the world.  There is no government that is going to put up with it for long.”[6]  No currency, he suggests, will get around government controls, an odd assertion given that the banking system was bucking against and attempting to circumvent government controls for the years leading up to the 2008 global collapse.

Kashmir Hill in Fusion, one who has spent some time beavering in the Bitcoin community, suggests that Wright may well have been the tipster behind the attribution.  “What does seem clear… is that Craig Wright was involved in doxing himself.”[7]

WikiLeaks has done its own speculating about Wright.  As ever, it is trying to cover a range of options.  First, is Wright even credible?  Then, the site’s Twitter feed featured a link to an old discussion – some might say spat – between Wright and Assange in their salad days. “Do we really need your amateur political views?” writes Assange in an email on September 18, 1996 with the subject line: “Risk v Charity”.  Some prickliness never changes.

Irrespective of whether Wright is the one, WikiLeaks puts its finger on a famed cultural and political tendency in Australia.  The Australian “tall poppy” syndrome might be at work – the price for success is punishment.  Sydney-based scribbler J.R. Hennessy would lament that Australians were “responsible for WikiLeaks AND Bitcoin.  Our primary export is weenie libertarianism.”

Corruption breeds alternatives.  Virtual currencies, like any innovation, come with their problems, but they also come with a radical assortment of means to conduct transactions between citizens. A currency mined algorithmically, without a central bank or backing assets, smacks of revolution.

Innovation, as the history books tend to show, often starts with a crime – or at least one deemed so by the powers that be.  Whether Wright is Bitcoin’s actual founder, or a spectacular hoaxer with nerdish proclivities, is irrelevant. This virtual currency is far from being a fad.

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

Notes:

 

“We are being far too kind to industrialised agriculture. The private sector has endorsed it, but it has failed to feed the world, it has contributed to major environmental contamination and misuse of natural resources. It’s time we switched more attention, public funds and policy measures to agroecology, to replace the old model as soon as possible.” – Dr David Fig, Biowatch, South Africa

Based on the results on his farm in Gujarat, Indian farmer and campaigner Bhaskar Save demonstrated that by using traditional methods, his yields were superior to any farm using chemicals in terms of quantity, nutritional quality, biological diversity, ecological sustainability, water conservation, energy efficiency and economic profitability.

Bhaskar Save died in October, but in 2006 he published a now quite famous open letter to the Indian Minister of Agriculture and other top officials to bring attention to the mounting suicide rate and debt among farmers. He wanted policy makers to abandon their policies of promoting the use of toxic chemicals that the ‘green revolution’ had encouraged.

According to Save, the green revolution had been a total disaster for India by flinging open the floodgates of toxic agro-chemicals which had ravaged the lands and lives of many millions of farmers (for example, read about the impactin Punjab). He firmly believed that organic farming in harmony with nature could sustainably provide India with abundant, wholesome food.

India had for generations sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth, without any chemical fertilisers, pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain or ‘bio-tech’ inputs – and without degrading its soil. For instance, see this analysis which highlights better productivity levels in India prior to the green revolution. (If further evidence is required as to the efficacy of organic farming, see this report, based on a 30-year study, which concludes that organic yields match conventional yields, outperform conventional in years of drought and actually build soil fertility rather than deplete it; and see this report that says that organic and sustainable small-scale farming could double food production in the parts of the world where hunger is the biggest issue.)

Save argued that numerous tall, indigenous varieties of grain provided more biomass, shaded the soil from the sun and protected against its erosion under heavy monsoon rains. But in the guise of increasing crop production, exotic dwarf varieties were introduced and promoted. This led to more vigorous growth of weeds, which were able to compete successfully with the new stunted crops for sunlight. The farmer had to spend more labour and money in weeding or spraying herbicides. In effect, farmers were placed on a chemical treadmill as traditional pest management systems were destroyed and soil degradation and erosion set in.

Moreover, this water-intensive, high external input model of agriculture led to the construction of big dams, indebtedness, population displacement and a massive, unsustainable strain on water tables. Save noted that more than 80% of India’s water consumption is for irrigation, with the largest share hogged by chemically cultivated cash crops. Maharashtra has the maximum number of big and medium dams in the country. But sugarcane alone, grown on barely 3-4% of its cultivable land, guzzles about 70% of its irrigation waters.

For Save, in a country of farmers, it was essential to restore the natural health of Indian agriculture to solve the inter-related problems of poverty, unemployment and rising population. See his arguments in more detail here.

Such views may be out of step with global agribusiness interests and the international bodies, national governments and regulatory bodies they have co-opted or hijacked (see this, this, this, this, this and this), but there is an increasing awareness across the globe that the type of viewpoint put forward by Save and many others is valid.

Of course, millions of farmers across the world already knew that what Save had stated was correct long before he said it and have for a long time been organising and resisting the industrialised model of petrochemical-intensive and GMO farming being imposed across the planet. They are in step with what the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology (IAASTD) report (among others) advocates: a shift towards organic farming and investment in and reaffirmation of indigenous models of agriculture.

Likewise, botanist Stuart Newton’s notes that the answers to agricultural productivity do not entail embracing the international, monopolistic, corporate-conglomerate promotion of chemically-dependent GM crops. He argues that India must restore and nurture its heavily depleted, abused soils and not harm them any further with chemical overload, which is endangering human and animal health.

Newton provides good insight into the vital roll of healthy soils and their mineral compositions and links their depletion to the green revolution. In turn, these degraded and micro-nutrient lacking soils cannot help but lead to denutrified food and thus malnourishment: a very pertinent point given that the PR surrounding the green revolution claims it helped dramatically reduce malnutrition.

Over the past few years, there have been numerous high level reports from the UN and development agencies putting forward proposals to favour small farmers and indigenous agriculture, but this has not been translated into sufficient action by national governments on the ground where small farmers increasingly face marginalisation and oppression due to corporate seed monopolies, land speculation and takeovers, rigged trade that favours global agribusiness interests and commodity speculation (see this on food commodity speculation, this on the global food system, this by the Oakland Institute on land grabs and this on the impact of international trade rules).

In fact, these reports seem to have been largely ignored by offialdom in India, which seems to be intent on following World Bank advice on removing 400 million out of agriculture, thus capitulating to US agribusiness interests and in the process seeking to demonise those who criticise the prevailing trend. The erroneous reasons behind this forced displacement (largely by making agriculture financially unviable) and the impacts are discussed in the article ‘Global Agribusiness Hammering Away at the Foundations of Indian Society‘. The urban-centric model of ‘development’ being pursued is unsustainable and is wholly misguided at best and at worst little more than a con-trick.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Professor Hilal Elver:

“Empirical and scientific evidence shows that small farmers feed the world [see this]. According to the UN Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO), 70% of food we consume globally comes from small farmers… Currently, most subsidies go to large agribusiness. This must change. Governments must support small farmers.”

Despite the situation adopted at the top in India, it should be noted that a good deal of inspiring work is taking place.

In Tamil Nadu (South India), for example, women’s collectives have been organising to restore traditional foods and farming methods, resulting in lower costs, higher yields and improved nutrition. Before the green revolution, there were 14,000 different varieties of paddy, but these traditional varieties were displaced by hybrid varieties which only grow if chemical fertilisers are used.

Sheelu Francis is General Coordinator of the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu and is involved in a fightback against the deleterious social, economic and environmental impacts of the green revolution. She states that by practicing agroecology, an increasing number of women farmers are now free from chemical fertilisers and pesticides and grow many crops together – grains, lentils, beans, oilseeds – to create biodiversity, using maximum input from the land within the farm to produce food.

With the onset of the green revolution, farmers gave up traditional farming practices and agriculture systems. Francis says that farmers were encouraged to grow rice because of government subsidies which promoted growing rice, especially with hybrid seeds and chemicals. Rice paddies use lots of water, so when it is the dry season or when there is drought, there is no production at all.

The use of chemical fertilizers hurt the health of the people, according Francis, not just because of the chemicals but because people rely on polished rice for their nutrition, which is not very nutritious (she says 46% of children are malnourished in Tamil Nadu).

When you combine the effects of soils depleted of nutrients, monocrop diets and chemically-laden food, you have a recipe for catastrophe.

Little wonder then that people are now going back to traditional farming practices and growing traditional crops, which are more nutritious, provide a balanced diet and help maintain soil health

However, it is an uphill struggle, as Francis notes:

“People who try to hold onto their ways of life are marginalised from their land, their seeds, and their way of farming. Now the industries are trying to take over, and to some extent they have succeeded. That is why we are strongly opposing Monsanto and Syngenta and the whole project of GM (genetically modified) seeds.”

Elsewhere, in Africa, while Monsanto and The Gates Foundation are trying to force through a corporate-controlled GMO/green revolution, the Oakland Institute recently published research that highlighted the “tremendous success” of agroecology across the continent. By combining sound ecological management, including minimising the use of toxic inputs by using on-farm renewable resources and privileging endogenous solutions to manage pests and disease, with an approach that upholds and secures farmers’ livelihoods, agroecology essentially embodies a social movement for positive change.

Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute, says that the research provides irrefutable facts and figures on how agricultural transformation can yield immense economic, social, and food security benefits, while ensuring climate justice and restoring soils and the environment. Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, who coordinated the research, adds that the research debunk the myths about the inability of agroecology to deliver and highlights the multiple benefits of agroecology, including affordable and sustainable ways to boost agricultural yields while increasing farmers’ incomes, food security and resilience.

There are many stories about such local projects from across the world and it is encouraging. However, what is ultimately required is a national-level and international-level commitment to stop prioritising chemical-industrial agriculture at the expense or indigenous agriculture, to stop handing out massive subsidies to agribusiness and to get off the destructive and wholly unsustainable and poisonous chemical treadmill.

“Agroecology is more than just a science, it’s also a social movement for justice that recognises and respects the right of communities of farmers to decide what they grow and how they grow it.” Mindi Schneider, assistant professor of Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague.”

As Mindi Schneider implies above, agroecology is essentially a system that prioritises local communities, smallholder farmers, local economies and markets. It is a system that the Rockefeller-backed green revolution has been dismantling across the globe for the last 60 years or so. The green revolution is in crisis and is causing massive damage to the environment and to farmers’ livelihoods to the point where ecocide and genocide is occurring and the cynical destruction of agrarian economies has taken place. The solution ultimately lies in challenging the corporate takeover of agriculture, the system of ‘capitalism’ that makes such plunder possible and embracing and investing in sustainable agriculture that is locally owned and rooted in the needs of communities.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer – his website is here

A complaint has been lodged with police calling for David Cameron to be arrested over “international war crimes”, as Britain on Saturday launched its second air strike on Islamic State in Syria.

Representatives of the Scottish Resistance – a pro-independence group – the Indy Amigos and Scottish CND, walked into the Rutherglen Police Station near Glasgow on Friday, brandishing copies of an 87-year-old peace treaty, which they claim Cameron broke last Wednesday when the government passed a vote to extend RAF airstrikes in Syria.

Led by campaigner James Scott, the men told a lone officer that Cameron broke the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact by voting to extend RAF airstrikes on Isis from Iraq into Syria.

James Scott reporting the “international war crime” at Rutherglen Police Station near Glasgow

Signed in Paris by nations including Britain, the US, Germany and France, the treaty pledged to “renounce war as an instrument of national policy”.

Despite it failing to prevent the Second World War, the Scottish Resistance insist the pact is still in force.

A video of the men delivering the complaint, “exactly 37.5 hours after the UK Parliament voted to go to war in Syria”, has been uploaded to YouTube. It has been viewed over 8,000 times.

Scott began by telling the lone police officer, who they later identified as sergeant Brian Scanlan, that: “We have the law here, which you’ll probably have to read.”

James Scott, far right, Piers Douglas-Brown (middle) and Sean Clerkin, issued the complaint

He went on: “We’re here to make a criminal complaint against the Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron .

“He’s gone to war in breach of international law. In 1928, a treaty was made called the Kellogg-Briand pact.

“It was a treaty to end all war. This is the truth.”

The trio left the police station with an incident number for their complaint. Scott concluded: “So hopefully the matter will be properly investigated”.

Piers Douglas-Brown, who was among the group to issue the complaint, applauded the sergeant, as “brave”, for willingness engaging with them.

Douglas-Brown said the officer had told them, “I have no idea this law existed, and you’ve educated me”.

He said: “It looks like police Scotland is a lot more orientated in accommodating these types of incidents than the police down in England.”

TEXT OF PETITION

Tony Blair led us into a war, using lies and deception, resulting in the death of thousands of our soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians. His actions have given rise to instability in the region and terror groups the freedom to rise. He should be arrested and put in prison.

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For the past eleven years, since the coup and overthrow of the elected government in 2004, Haiti has been deemed so dysfunctional, so failed, a state, that the international community has decided to run it directly. UN troops patrol its streets. Nongovernmental organizations oversee most aspects of social provision. Donors provide the finances. The resources and reach of the government is limited. There were elections in 2010/11 and there will be a runoff presidential election at the end of December – both of these took place under this limited-government, maximum-international-community, regime (which could be called ‘donor rule’ and which I have called ‘Haiti’s New Dictatorship’).

The 2010/11 elections were politicized and unfair. They banned the most popular party, Fanmi Lavalas, from running. The first round of the current elections have been characterized by massive fraud, and Haitians know it. They have no confidence in the elections. They are protesting, and their protests are met with tear gas from police – one of the few things that the government is allowed to do (though this important duty is often shared with the UN).

Some observers may throw up their hands and say, how could you expect credible elections, Haiti is a poor, dysfunctional country. But Haiti has had fair elections – they occurred in 1995 and in 2000, before the UN took over. The international community, which has been governing Haiti directly since 2004, is the body that is incapable of running a fair election. As in Haiti, so in Afghanistan, where the 2014 presidential elections were won by Ashraf Ghani, after which the international community imposed a power-sharing arrangement with the loser, Abdallah Abdallah. An extraordinary agreement was brokered as part of this, that the exact vote totals would not be made public. 

The Extreme Centre                                                                                                    

The first-world version of what is happening in Haiti and Afghanistan is what Tariq Ali calls the Extreme Centre, in which political parties are indistinguishable from one another on most important issues, and alternate in power. Under such conditions, with major issues out of contention, fair elections are acceptable to elites.

The rich Western countries have their own problems with elections, of course. The most famous case was the U.S. presidential election of 2000, with voting machines and ballots that were made incomprehensible for voters, supreme courts intervening to prevent recounts of votes, and other stranger-than-fiction happenings. Electoral cheating in Canada in 2006 and 2011 was relatively minor by comparison. When Jeremy Corbyn became the Labour leader in the UK, a general there told the media casually that there might be a military coup if he ever won a general election.

If electorates could be relied upon to do the right thing, then there would be no need for cheating by those in power. Many tyrants have mastered the art of elections theater: Egypt’s President Sisi managed to win the 2014 presidential election with an astounding 96.91 per cent of the vote. Syria’s President Assad held elections in 2014 in a country where most people were running for their lives, and in which his army and its opponents were slaughtering large numbers of voters. He won a remarkable 88.7 per cent of the vote. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, who recently got term limits lifted so that he (and he alone) can keep running for president, won the 2010 election with 93 per cent. Kagame’s neighbours, Joseph Kabila in the DRC and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, use some of the same techniques, including arresting opponents and terrorizing the press, but they have had much more modest success (Museveni only won the 2011 election with 68 per cent, Kabila won the 2012 election with a mere 48.95 per cent).

Some countries don’t bother with the pretense. Two examples: Israel doesn’t pretend to give the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, whose lives it controls to the last detail, any say in how they are occupied. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, one that also schedules beheadings and crucifixions of youths like Mohammed Nimr, who is still very much in danger. The Western governments that watch keenly and comment severely on the fairness of elections in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia do happy, multibillion-dollar business with apartheid Israel and the Saudi Kingdom.

Elections Matter

But the pretense clearly does matter. Very few countries get the kind of immunity that Israel or Saudi Arabia do. Despite the openness of the fraud and the incredibility of the results, most dictatorships do hold electoral exercises. In most cases, the appearance of electoral legitimacy is important enough to keep up elections theater, even if electorates are not powerful enough in many places to actually impose their will through elections.

On the other hand, there are still fair elections, ones where the electorate actually has a say. One example in India: Narendra Modi’s BJP were surprised to lose the recent elections in Bihar, in which the electorate gave their verdict on the BJP’s unsubstantiated claims of development and their anti-secular, divisive program. Another example: while the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history continues to struggle with incomprehensible combinations of paper ballots and voting machines, Venezuela has managed to create a voting system that is very difficult to defraud (and I believe that at least at one time its voting machines were made in the USA – at least the machines contributed to fair elections somewhere).

Even these real elections pose dangers, because the belief in electoral legitimacy is not shared by all contestants. The BJP’s desire to make India a Hindu nation conflicts with India’s democratic constitution. If the Venezuelan opposition comes to power in December, it is unlikely that it will respect the constitution or maintain the integrity of the electoral system.

Elections matter. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be so much effort put into manipulating them, limiting options available to the electorate, and preventing them from being free. Nor would so many tyrants still feel they need to go through the motions of demonstrating that they have elections, however unfree. But a world of free, fair, meaningful elections with choices for voters is still a distant utopia.

And even where there are relatively fair elections, good electoral systems are always at risk. Electoral systems are not technical matters run by disinterested parties. They are political, which is why even the most disinterested-seeming parties, like the international community ruling Haiti, can’t seem to get them right. To get them right, the international community would have to value Haitian democracy more highly than its own continued rule, and believe that Haitians had the right, and the ability, to make their own decisions about their government. That kind of democratic feeling is surprisingly rare, especially among those who have grown accustomed to ruling, unelected.

Justin Podur is Associate Professor at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. His writings can be found at podur.org. This article first appeared on the teleSUR English website.

Gearóid Ó Colmáin analyses Marine Le Pen and the French far-right party’s historic victory last weekend at the regional elections.

As this Asia-Pacific Journal site (and its associated publications) has repeatedly demonstrated, Okinawa is a unique joint US-Japanese colony, that has endured 70 years of lying, deception, manipulation, discrimination, abuse and contempt from the Tokyo-based nation state. But it has also generated an opposition movement of world-historical significance on the part of the Okinawan people. That movement remains little understood internationally. The accompanying “position paper” by the “All Okinawa Council”¹ is one recent initiative to try to remedy the situation.

What follows here is a resume of recent developments in the “Okinawa problem,” through the prism of the contradiction between the nation state headed by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and the prefecture headed by the Governor, Onaga Takeshi, followed by a consideration of the three major dimensions of the ongoing struggle between them: in the realms of information, the law, and the physical confrontation at the Henoko site. The multi-faceted struggle enters a phase of crucial importance.

Onaga vs. Abe

The confrontation pits the Prime Minister and Cabinet of Japan against the Governor and people of Okinawa. Since assuming office (for his second term) in December 2012, Abe has pursued a radical agenda, not only oriented towards enforcing his will over Okinawa but towards transforming the national polity: reinterpreting the constitution, committing Japan to global military support for the US, and joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet for none of these things did he have a mandate, and it is salutary to remember that the political dominance (holding 61.3 per cent of seats in the lower house) that allows Abe such concentration of power rests on an electoral victory in December 2012 in which his coalition secured just 33.4 per cent of the votes in the proportional system. That is, since only 52.4 per cent of people voted, Abe’s team gained the support of just 17.4 per cent of eligible voters.

Within Okinawa the margin of opposition to the base project stands in successive surveys at above 70 per cent, on occasion even as high as 80, while even nationwide he faces growing opposition, i.e., support for the Okinawan stance.² “All Okinawa” is one of the most recent, representative, and determined of the civic organizations challenging the Abe agenda.

When Abe Shinzo at the end of 2012 formed government for the second time (following his 2006-2007 administration), virtually the entire prefecture, including the Governor and the Okinawan branch of his own party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), opposed the Henoko project. He therefore concentrated on weakening, dividing and neutralizing that opposition. In 2013, he achieved his first success by persuading two prominent Okinawan LDP politicians to reverse themselves and drop their opposition to the Henoko base in April, and in December they were followed by the Okinawa chapter of the LDP itself and eventually by the Governor. The first defector, Shimajiri Aiko played a key role in leading and helping orchestrate the shift and was rewarded by being made parliamentary secretary to the cabinet (naikaku seimukan) and later (October 2015) given a seat in the third Abe cabinet. Her task was plain: to steer Okinawa’s polity and society from resistance to compliance, as she had helped do earlier with the LDP.

In July 2014, relying as warrant on the formal consent to reclamation/construction extracted from Governor Nakaima in December 2013, the Abe government began preparatory works on Oura Bay. By late 2015 it was moving towards the actual reclamation – readying to scour the coastal hills and beaches of much of Western Japan to provide two and a half million tons of soil and sand to dump into it.

Having taken office as Governor in December 2014 committed to “do everything in my power” to stop the Henoko construction project, Onaga Takeshi became the figurehead of Okinawan resistance. Once in office, Onaga referred the Nakaima decision process to a Third Party (Experts) Committee of environmentalists and lawyers. When they in due course concluded from their meticulous examination that the process had indeed been marked by fundamental flaws, Onaga on October 13 formally cancelled the reclamation license. The national government, its warrant for works removed, temporarily suspended them, but it was determined to evade and negate the governor’s ruling. The Minister for Lands and Infrastructure (Ishii Keiichi) issued an order cancelling the Governor’s order on grounds that otherwise it would be “impossible to continue the relocation” and because in that event “the US-Japan alliance would be adversely affected.” ³ He proceeded to issue first an “advice,” and then, three days later, an “instruction” to Governor Onaga to withdraw the cancellation order. Onaga summarily rejected both.

On October 27, the Abe cabinet met and decided to step up its pressure. It declared (through the Minister for Defense) that there had been no “flaw” in the license Nakaima had granted, suspended ongoing (if mostly in effect stalled) negotiations with the prefecture, launched judicial proceedings in the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court to compel the prefecture’s compliance, and ordered the resumption of works at the site. It also ordered an additional 100-plus riot police from Tokyo (units with names such as “Demon” and “Hurricane”), to reinforce the mostly local Okinawan forces who till then had been imposing the state’s will at the construction site. Overall, it amounted to a constitutional coup: stripping the Governor and prefectural government of powers vested in them by the constitution and the Local Government Act.

Okinawa for its part refused the direction to withdraw the cancellation order, prepared to launch a vigorous judicial defense, and launched a formal complaint under the little-used “Council for Resolving Disputes between Central Government and Local Governments”⁴

That same late-October session of cabinet also decided to abandon the plan to shift some units of Marine Corps MV 22 “Osprey” VTOL aircraft training to facilities in Saga prefecture (i.e. in Kyushu, mainland Japan), since local municipal and prefectural authorities there were resolutely opposed. In other words, local opposition was respected in the case of Saga, but over-ruled in the case of Okinawa. Throughout Okinawa, this was seen as decisive evidence of the national government’s discrimination against it.

Information

Both the Abe state and the Onaga prefecture strive to represent their case in terms of a “story” that would be persuasive in Okinawa itself, Japan, and in international fora. While Abe and his ministers insist that there is no alternative to the Henoko project, that it amounts to a “burden reduction” for Okinawa, and that the project has now entered the irreversible phase of “main works” (hontai koji), Governor Onaga presents the totally different story of an inequitable and increasing burden, building upon the initial illegal seizure of Okinawan land and in defiance of the clearly and often expressed wishes of the Okinawan people; of a struggle for justice and democracy and for the protection of Oura Bay’s extraordinary natural biodiversity, worthy, as the prefecture saw it, of World Heritage ranking. Increasingly, Okinawa carries that message to international fora, including the the Governor’s mission to the US in May and the UN (Human Rights Committee) in Geneva in September 2015. The All Okinawa mission of November 2015 is part of that process.

The visit to Okinawa by the Greenpeace vessel, Rainbow Warrior in early November 2015 was another expression of this gradual internationalizing of the dispute. Though Greenpeace had several times in the past (2000 and 2005) visited Okinawa, including Oura Bay, this time the vessel was allowed to dock only in in Naha and Nago harbours, its crew forbidden even to go ashore at Naha for four days, and refused permission to visit Oura Bay. It signified the Abe government’s determination to contain the Okinawa story and stop it from gaining wider international publicity.

Another measure of the Abe government’s intent to control the “Okinawa story” is the view, several times articulated, by Abe’s close friend, the novelist Hyakuta Naoki, that the two Okinawan newspapers (Ryukyu shimpo and Okinawa Times) should be closed down because they express “traitorous” views. Hyakuta is an Abe appointee (2013) to the board of governors of Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, NHK. Though such views amounted to “hate speech,” they attracted little attention in mainland Japan.⁵

The Abe government steadily strives to sway local Okinawan opinion, finding and encouraging supporters for the government’s design and countering elected officials who oppose it. In the cabinet reshuffle of October 2015, Shimajiri Aiko, the original “turncoat” of 2013 was promoted to cabinet as Minister for Okinawa, with responsibilities that included also the Northern Territories, science and technology, space, oceans, territorial problems, IT, and “cool Japan.” She was much appreciated in Abe circles, not only for her role in 2013 but for the views she expressed in 2014-5: calling for the Riot Police and Coastguard to be mobilized to curb the “illegal, obstructionist activities” of the anti-base movement (February 2014), denouncing Nago mayor Inamine for “abusing his power (April 2015), and referring contemptuously to the “irresponsible citizens’ movement” (October 2015). As Okinawa minister, she could be expected to use her considerable powers of patronage and influence to try to sway Okinawan society towards submission to the Abe design.

Since Nago City had from 2010 twice returned a mayor and local assembly majority that resisted all attempts at suasion, and refused to accept any monies linked to it, Abe, Shimajiri, and other members of government paid close attention to trying to divide and weaken the city’s anti-base movement. Late in October, the heads of three of the city’s 55 sub-districts (ku) – Henoko, Kushi and Toyohara (population respectively 2014, 621, and 427) – were invited to the Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo. They set out their wish-list, asking for repairs to the local community halls, purchase of lawnmowers, and provision of one (or perhaps several) “azumaya” (a kind of summer-house or gazebo).⁶ They were told they were to be allocated the sum of 13 million yen each in the 2016 budget, a subsidy that would bypass the representative institutions of the city and prefecture. It was to be (as Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga later put it), “compensation” for the noise and nuisance caused them by the protest movement.

It was a trifling enough sum (less than half a million dollars in all), but it was without precedent, it defied the principles of parliamentary sovereignty and local self-government, and was a most likely illegal attempt to evade democratic will and constitutional procedure. ⁷ Public funds were appropriated, with no accountability, to encourage a cooperative, base-tolerating spirit in a few corners of a stubbornly anti-base city.⁸

The ku in rural Japan and Okinawa are the very smallest administrative units, commonly based on traditional and family networks. No head of a ku had ever been invited to the Prime Minister’s residence, seated at the table with top state officials like a head of state, and offered direct subsidy from state coffers.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga (left) meets heads of the three Kube Districts, Prime Minister’s office. (Photo: Sankei shimbun, October 26, 2015)

Suga declared that the local ku districts “agreed” to the Henoko construction albeit with some strings attached, and suggested it was only natural that they be given every encouragement. However, within weeks, the heads of all three contradicted him, saying he had misunderstood them. The head of Kushi insisted that that district had not changed its opposition to Henoko base construction since taking that position in 1997, and the head of Toyohara that “absolutely no-one in Toyohara” wanted a base.⁹

The extraordinary appropriation for the three districts was in the same vein as the LDP Secretary-General’s 50 billion yen offer of funds for Nago City’s development on the eve of the crucial mayoral election of January 2014 (decisively rejected by the city which returned instead its anti-base incumbent). Citizens of Nago are familiar with such crude interventions, and might even take heart from this most recent one because there was something pitiful about the spectacle of the national government hosting local bigwigs and trying to seduce them with lawn-mowers to its base construction cause. It was, as Ryukyu shimpo put it, an “unprecedented politics of division”¹⁰.

However, although such extraordinary, unaccountable disbursements (almost certainly illegal and probably unconstitutional) were intended to show how cooperativeness would be rewarded, Shimajiri’s position late in 2015 was fragile. A civic ombudsman organization launched a criminal complaint against her alleging breaches of the Public Election Law and the Political Funds Regulation Law,¹¹ precisely the offences for which two female ministers of the Abe cabinet had been forced to resign in September 2014.

Law

In a democratic polity, when different units of the polity are in dispute, resort to the law would normally be seen as the necessary path to resolution. But as the Henoko problem is referred to the judiciary, there is a question as to whether Japan, especially Abe’s Japan, enjoys the division of powers and independence of the judiciary that are the hallmark of modern, constitutional states. As the Abe government in July 2014 had effectively amended the constitution by the simple device of adopting a new interpretation, so in 2015 it showed scant respect for the relevant laws in the way it addressed Henoko reclamation. On the one hand it pretended for purposes of its dispute with Okinawa to be just like a “private person” (ichishijin) seeking redress under the Administrative Appeals Law (a law specifically designed to allow aggrieved citizens to seek redress from a recalcitrant state, whose function he was thus reversing), while on the other it deployed the full powers and prerogatives of the state under the Local Self-Government Law to sweep aside prefectural self-government and to assume the right to proxy execution of an administrative act (gyosei daishikko). As constitutional lawyers had, overwhelmingly, condemned the 2014 de facto revision of the constitution, so in 2015 they criticized as manipulation or breach of several laws the way the Abe government was proceeding in the dispute with Okinawa prefecture.¹² In Okinawa such proceedings are seen as a mockery of any claim to fairness and objectivity.”¹³

The legal procedures, still at a relatively early stage, will play out in months ahead. However, the grim reality facing Okinawans is that the courts have, since the Sunagawa case of 1959, abandoned their theoretical, constitutional prerogatives to adjudicate on contests involving state rights on the grounds that “matters pertaining to the security treaty with the United States are “highly political” and concern Japan’s very existence.¹⁴ This means that in effect the security treaty is elevated above the constitution and immune from challenge at law. As former [1990-1998] Governor Ota Masahide, remarked,

“Despite the principle of separation of powers, the judiciary in Japan tends to subordinate itself to the administrative branch … I think it will be very difficult for the prefectural government to win the suit.” ¹⁵

Ota had himself been the target of heavy Tokyo pressure when in 1995 he refused to sign the proxy lease-agreement documents to allow the continued confiscation of private Okinawan land for base purposes. Arraigned before the High Court, he was issued in August 1996 with a peremptory order to obey. The fact that he then submitted makes this a worrying precedent for those who would place their faith in his successor.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo with, to his right, Defense Minister Nakatani Gen and to his left Chris Bolt, the captain of the USS nuclear-powered carrier, Ronald Reagan, with Finance Minister Aso Taro 2nd from right. (Photo: Reuters/Kyodo)

In the meantime, however, there are many legal options open to Okinawa and to Governor Onaga to delay and obstruct the government. The law had never envisaged the carrying out of a massive project in the teeth of local non-cooperation. The Governor of Okinawa and mayor of Nago City could, and undoubtedly would, block and delay each stage of the process. The Okinawan Prefectural Assembly in 2015 adopted a law empowering the prefecture to inspect soil or sand being imported from outside the prefecture (and at least in principle to forbid its entry) because of the fear that pathogens imported from elsewhere (including Argentine ants) could wreak devastating effects on the island’s environment.¹⁶ The Okinawan protest movement on this front was gradually stirring a response in the many districts throughout Western Japan targeted for the provision of sand and soil for the base project; in other words, opposition was spreading at the “supply” end as well as at the Okinawan reclamation site. Henoko was also found to be the location of important “natural monuments” such as hermit crabs, and of historically important “cultural relics” dating back to the pre-modern Ryukyu era such as “anchor stones.” Even as Abe readied his heavy machinery to step up the assault on the Bay, the discovery of 17 culturally significant earthen and stone-ware objects in the Oura Bay site vicinity was announced. It was thought almost certain to lead to legal measures to protect and further investigate the site.¹⁷

Physical Confrontation

The Abe government is different from previous LDP governments in the violence with which it treats the resolutely non-violent protest encampment at the Camp Schwab gate that opens to the Henoko construction site. The earlier design of a Henoko offshore base had been abandoned in 2005 because, as then Prime Minister Koizumi put it, of “a lot of opposition”¹⁸ and, as was later learned, because the Coastguard was reluctant to be involved in enforcing the removal of protesters from the site for fear of bloodshed.¹⁹ No such inhibitions appeared to affect Prime Minister Abe and his government in 2015.

Designated Land-fill Sources and Routes of Transport to Henoko/Oura Bay (Map showing, from top, Setouchi, Moji, Amakusa, Goto, Amakusa, Satamisaki, Amami oshima, Tokunoshima, with Henoko at far bottom left.)

Despite being relatively remote and difficult of access, especially in the early mornings, Henoko attracts steadily growing numbers of participants, exceeding 1,000 for the first time on the 500^th day of the sit-in, November 18, 2015. While the citizenry remains committed to non-violence and to the exercise of the right of civil disobedience only after exhausting all legal and constitutional steps to oppose the base project, the National Coastguard and Riot Police appear to be flaunting their violence more and more openly, dragging away protesters (quite a few of whom are in their 70s and 80s), dunking canoeists in the sea, pinning down one protest ship captain till he lost consciousness, and on a number of occasions causing injuries to protesters requiring hospital treatment.²⁰ The daily scenes from the Henoko site are shown on local television and in the two prefectural newspapers (i.e. the media that in Abe circles is seen as deserving to be shut down).

If the Abe government design had been to induce submission by the exercise of overwhelming force at the works site, and by wielding its authority in the judicial arena and executive arenas, it has not worked. If anything, it is counter-productive. Okinawan anger deepens. If the ongoing “Battle of Henoko” were to continue indefinitely on its current lines for the five years that the government reckons reclamation and construction would take, “unforeseen” events, with the real possibility of bloodshed, become more likely. In the supposed pursuance of “security,” insecurity spreads. The riot police reinforcements sent from Tokyo at the beginning of November 2015 were no doubt chosen in part because they could be expected to remain insensitive to this Okinawan pain and anger.²¹

Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), in his lament over the German people’s failure to contest the rise of Nazism till too late, wrote “First they came for the Communists” after which “they” came for the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc, but it did not concern “me” till it was too late. In today’s Japan, “they” is the Abe regime and “they” have come now for the Okinawans. If democracy is to survive, the Japanese people as a whole will have to realize that, like the sometime Germans, they today are “all Okinawans.” It is not just the fate of Oura Bay but the principles of a law-based constitutional state, committed t truth, justice, and democracy, that are under threat in Okinawa and must be defended there lest they be swept aside in Tokyo, Osaka and throughout Japan.

Gavan McCormack is an honorary professor of Australian National University, editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal, and author of many texts on aspects of modern and contemporary East Asian History, including Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012 (co-authored with Satoko Oka Norimatsu). His work is commonly published in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, as well as English. For some of his recent essays, “Okinawa as sacrificial victim,” Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2015, pp. 6-7, and “Chauvinist nationalism in Japan’s schizophrenic state,” in Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, eds, The Politics of the Right, Socialist Register 2016, London, The Merlin Press, 2015, pp. 231-249.

Notes

¹ See accompanying paper on this site, The All Okinawa Council/Yoshikawa Hideki, “All Okinawa goes to Washington.”

² “Polls show growing nationwide opposition to Henoko relocation,” Ryukyu shimpo, May 4 2015. One recent survey found an astonishing 90-per cent level of nation-wide popular opposition to the Abe policy on Henoko. “Henoko hantai 9-wari, Shutoken, Kansai, kaito de 1-man nin tohyo,” Ryukyu shimpo, November 27, 2015.

³ “Tokyo overturns Futenma works plan,” Japan Times, 1 November 2015.

⁴ This is a five-person unit within the government’s Department of General Affairs, set up in 2000 but to date only twice called upon to adjudicate a dispute. On neither occasion –both matters of relatively minor importance – did it return a finding negative to the government. (“Keiso-i handan wa yosoku konnan,” Okinawa taimusu, November 2, 2015.)

⁵ Ando Kenji, “Kono kuni wa zentaishugi ni ippo ippo susunde iru, Hyakuta Naoki ni Ryukyu shimpo to Okinawa times ga hanron,” The Huffington Post, July 2, 2015.

⁶ “Jimoto 3-ku ni kuni hojokin kofu e, Henoko kichi hantai Nago-shi no atamagoshi,” Tokyo shimbun, October 27, 2015.

⁷ Takeda Shinichiro, professor of administrative law at Seikei University, quoted in Suzuki Takuya, Uechi Kazuki, Yoshida Takushi, “Seiken, Henoko 3 chiku ni chokusetsu shinkohi no shishutsu, ken, machi no atamagoshi ni,” Asahi shimbun, October 26, 2015.

⁸ “Kube 3-ku kofu yoko o sakutei, kaku-ku ni 1300-man en,” Ryukyu shimpo, November 27, 2015.

⁹ “Henoko yonin, jimoto 2 kucho ga hitei, kichi isetsu de seifu setsumei to kuichigai,” Tokyo shimbun, November 18, 2015. And “Henoko chokusetsu hojokin’ chiiki kowasu kosoku na shudan da,” editorial, Okinasa taimusu, November 30, 2015.

¹⁰ “Kube 3-ku kofukin, Seiken no ichite wa gyaku koka unda,” Ryukyu shimpo, November 30, 2015. See also “Kuhe 3-ku kofu yoko o sakutei, kaku-ku ni 1300-man en,” Ryukyu shimpo, November 27 2015.

¹¹ “Shimajiri Aiko Okinawa-sho o keiji kokuhatsu, ‘karenda’ mondai de daigaku kyoju ra 30 nin,” Okinawa taimusu, November 24, 2015.

¹² See Lawrence Repeta, “Construction of an outlaw base in Hnoko,” Japan Times, November 15, 2015.

¹³ “Henoko hontai koji chakko’ jichi hakai suru bokyo da,” editorial, Okinawa taimusu, October 30, 2015.

¹⁴ See discussion in Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012, pp. 53-54.

¹⁵ “Okinawa governor plans countersuit in U.S. military base row,” Kyodo, JIJI, Staff Report, November 18, 2015

¹⁶ “Seitaikei hogo, shin kichi e kabe,” Okinawa taimusu, November 1 2015.

¹⁷ “Ichidai ni bunkateki kachi,” Ryukyu shimpo, November 4, 2015 and also “Shin kichi yoteichi ni doki,” Okinawa taimusu, November 3 2015. And “Ken kyo-i, schwabu doki no bunkazai nintei, shin kichi koji e eikyo hisshi,” Ryukyu shimpo, November 28, 2015.

¹⁸ McCormack and Norimatsu, p 98.

¹⁹ According to Moriya Takemasa, senior official in Defense Agency (later Department of Defense), 1996-2007, closely connected with Henoko-related matters, as related in his 2010 book ‘Futenma kosho’ hiroku. Noted in “Henoko shimin 700-nin kesshu, ‘taishu undo no seika da’,” Okinawa taimusu, 25 November 2015.

²⁰ “Karetsu na Henoko keibi, shimin no inochi kiken ni sarasu na,” Ryukyu shimpo, November 23, 2015.

²¹ The Self-Defence Forces were accommodated at a nearby luxury resort hotel, the Kanucha Resort, which charges a basic daily rate of 25,800 yen, or about $300. They were thereby immunized from any possibly dangerous thoughts that might strike them if exposed to local society. (“Kokuhi de rizoto shukuhaku,” Shukan kinyobi, November 20, 2015, p. 8.)

From Alabama to Chicago and Minneapolis, the movement for equality and self-determination continues

There was much discussion during the first week of December on the 60th anniversary of the arrest of Rosa Parks and the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, signaling the beginning of the modern mass Civil Rights Movement in 1955-56.

After Parks’ arrest on December 1 for refusing to relinquish her seat in the segregated area of a public bus to a white man, the African American community of Montgomery was rapidly mobilized. After being charged and convicted for violating the segregation statutes of Alabama, on December 5, thousands refused to ride buses demanding the racist laws be overturned, that African Americans be treated with courtesy and hired as bus drivers.

Although Parks was convicted in the municipal and state courts, the case was appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court where the segregation laws governing public transportation were declared unconstitutional in late 1956. The boycott lasted for 381 days and transformed the consciousness of African Americans heightening their degree of militancy which lasted for another two decades.

By the early 1960s, tenant farmers, students, clergy, community people and their allies had built a movement that challenged what appeared to be the last vestiges of legalized segregation and institutional discrimination. The Freedom Rides organized during the spring of 1961 resulted in another landmark decision outlawing segregation in inter-state travel.

Just three years later in 1964, a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the-then President Lyndon B. Johnson. This legislation was purportedly designed to end all forms of unequal treatment before the law involving public accommodation, education and employment.

The following year in 1965, after protracted struggle in Alabama and other states, the Voting Rights Bill was passed guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote in all elections. Over the last five decades African Americans have been elected to thousands of political offices on the local, state and federal levels.

Nonetheless, a series of Supreme Court decisions since the late 1970s have reversed much of the progressive character of the Civil Rights Bills passed during the period of 1957-1968. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were stripped of their enforcement provisions which set the stage for tremendous setbacks in the areas of job openings, educational opportunities and access to legal due process.

Revisiting the Legal Abolition of Slavery

Some 90 years before in December 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified by Congress legally abolishing slavery in the United States. Nonetheless, some 150 years later, millions of African Americans are incarcerated in prisons, jails, half-way houses and under judicial supervision.

Historian W.E.B. Du Bois in his seminal work “Black Reconstruction in America”, published in 1935 during the Great Depression, asserted through firm material documentation that “Slavery was not abolished even after the Thirteenth Amendment. There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work that they did before emancipation, except as their work had been interrupted and changed by the upheaval of war.” (p. 188)

Du Bois goes on to note “Moreover, they were getting about the same wages and apparently were going to be subject to slave codes modified only in name. There were among them thousands of fugitives in the camps of the soldiers or on the streets of the cities, homeless, sick and impoverished. They had been freed practically with no land [n]or money, and, save in exceptional cases, without legal status, and without protection.”

The first Civil Rights Bill was introduced in Congress in 1865 but was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson. However, by 1866 it was reintroduced and vetoed again by Johnson although a two-thirds majority overruled his objection.

Much of the language contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was quite similar to that within the later passed 14^th Amendment (1868) which ostensibly granted equal protection before the law for former enslaved African men. African women were not included, as white women, during this period. They were largely denied civil rights being viewed as subjects of their husbands or other male family members.

Federal Reconstruction lasted until the aftermath of the compromise surrounding the contentious national elections of 1876. A process of disenfranchisement and organized terror was inflicted upon the African American people for the remaining decades of the 19^th and leading into the 20^th centuries.

By the time of the 1954 Brown v. Topeka decision on public school desegregation, national oppression and discrimination constituted the law of the land backed up by a series of Supreme Court decisions including the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873 through Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896. Even though African Americans had fought to end slavery during the Civil War (1861-65) as well as in the two imperialist wars of 1917-18 and 1941-45, they were still living under conditions of neo-slavery and domestic colonialism.

The struggle against national oppression took on various forms utilizing the legal system, petitioning and voting, the boycott as in Montgomery, along with mass demonstrations and urban rebellions. Despite these persistent efforts, the capitalist system in the U.S. continues to be based on economic exploitation and institutional racism.

African Americans are not only being herded into failed schools which feed into the prison-industrial-complex, they also suffer from jobless and poverty rates at least twice as high as the national average. The federal government and the corporate communities ignore the plight of the African Americans although the state claims to be a leader in the field of international human rights.

Lessons for 2015 and the Struggle Ahead

Today, 150 years later, the anti-racist struggle is by no means over. An escalation in protests and civil unrest across the U.S. reveals a renewed commitment by the African American people to overthrow national oppression, economic exploitation and institutional racism from the streets and work places to the campuses.

This renewed movement is also producing pioneering women and youth leaders. There is a direct historical trajectory from Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who was born in slavery during the Civil War in Mississippi, becoming a courageous journalist and organizer against lynching; to the Women’s Political Caucus of Montgomery which drafted and circulated thousands of leaflets calling for the bus boycott prompted by Rosa Park’s arrest; all the way up to the present period when activists such as Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Pattrisse Cullors are coining slogans such as “Black Lives Matter”, becoming a battle cry in the fight against state violence and judicial impunity.

Taking the anti-racist struggles to the streets outside police stations and into the shopping malls owned by some of the largest multi-national corporations in the world, right onto the college campuses where the ideological struggle over the ideas that will assess the past and chart the course for the future are being determined, the African American struggle continues to play a decisive role in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. All the oppressive system has to offer the masses of workers and youth is more repression along with false promises that are only realized in the form of more refined methods of exploitation and social containment.

There are many lessons for today to be learned from this profound history of recurrent movements and ideological advancements. Only the transformation of the racist capitalist system to one based on socialism, where full equality and national liberation for the subjected peoples can be realized, will guarantee genuine peace and security within the U.S. and globally.