Global Research

“(w)e are not that dishonest as to buy oil from terrorists. If it is proven that we have, in fact, done so, I will leave office. If there is any evidence, let them present it, we’ll consider (it).” (Turkey’s President R. Erdogan)

In Paris at the climate conference, President Vladimir Putin minced no words, saying: “(w)e have recently received additional reports that confirm that [stolen] oil from ISIL-controlled territories is delivered to the territory of Turkey on an industrial scale.”  (emphasis added)

“We have all grounds to suspect that the decision to down our plane was motivated by the intention to secure these routes of delivering oil to ports where it is loaded on tankers. Defending Turkmen is just a pretext” – terrorists allied with Ankara.

Washington knows what’s ongoing, doing nothing to stop it, permitting its ISIS foot soldiers to have a key revenue source. Sergey Lavrov acknowledged it, saying:

“Let us operate with facts. There have been many reports that god knows who is living off the oil wells illegally seized by the Islamic State.”

“When our aviation started flying in the Syrian airspace at the request of [Syrian president] Bashar al-Assad, we saw the whole picture of that illegal business from above.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about that on several occasions, including yesterday’s news conference and the G20 summit in Antalya where he had shown space and aerial images – very eloquent and very convincing – to his colleagues.”

“The US-led coalition started flying over Iraq and Syria, without the Syrian government’s consent by the way, more than a year before the [legal] Russian military operation.”

“I am convinced that they saw all that but did not do anything for some unknown reason.” Putin, Lavrov and other Russian officials know why. They diplomatically stop short of explaining, including about Washington’s involvement.

“Russian warplanes started bombing that criminal industry when they began operati(ng) in that area,” Lavrov added.

“(I)f the United States is so much concerned (about) who is benefitting from” stolen oil sales, why is it doing nothing to stop them.

Erdogan was caught red-handed, including by former Turkish officials. Courageous Ankara-based journalists exposed his weapons smuggling to ISIS terrorists.

Turkey’s leader lied, saying:

“(w)e are not that dishonest as to buy oil from terrorists. If it is proven that we have, in fact, done so, I will leave office. If there is any evidence, let them present it, we’ll consider (it).”

He failed to comply with Russia’s request to act against terrorists “emerging on Turkish territory,” infiltrating into parts of Russia, including the northern Caucasus, Putin explained.

“(W)e have traced some located on the territory of the Turkish Republic and living in regions guarded by special security services and police that have used the visa-free regime to return to our territory, where we continue to fight them.”

Putin urges world unity against the scourge of terrorism – impossible “while (some nations, notably America, Turkey and rogue allies) use several terrorist organizations to reach their immediate goals.”

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.

GR Editor’s Note

The closing of the Bosphorus Straits by Turkey would constitute an Act of War directed against the Russian Federation

A recent report by Sputnik states that in this regard:

In times of war, the passage of warships shall be left entirely to the discretion of the Turkish government, according to the document.

From a legal perspective, Turkey has no legal grounds to create obstacles for Russian vessels carrying cargo, including military cargo, Russian lawyer Vladimir Morkovkin told RBK. Turkey can ban non-friendly vessels from navigating through the Straits only if at war, the expert explained.

After World War II, Ankara made several efforts to gradually strengthen its control over the Straits. In 1982, Turkey tried to unilaterally expand the regime of the Istanbul port over the entire area of the Straits. The decision was harshly criticized by neighboring countries, and Turkey stepped back.

http://sputniknews.com/politics/20151126/1030827768/turkey-russia-bosporus-strait.html#ixzz3t61VcKve

We are at very dangerous crossroads. Russia’s maritime access to the Mediterranean is largely controlled by NATO countries and their allies (i.e. 1. Bosphorus and Dardanelles; 2. Suez canal, 3. Strait of Gibraltar)

GR Editor, Michel Chossudovsky, December 1, 2015)

*     *     *

Turkey has begun a de facto blockade of Russian naval vessels,  preventing transit through the Dardanelles and the Strait of Bosporus, between the Black Sea and Mediterranean.   

According to the AIS tracking system for the movement of maritime vessels, only Turkish vessels are moving along the Bosphorus, and in the Dardanelles there is no movement of any shipping at all.

At the same time, both from the Black Sea, and from the Mediterranean Sea, there is a small cluster of ships under the Russian flag, just sitting and waiting. The image below shows the situation with the ships using the GPS transponder onboard each vessel:

In addition, shipping inside the Black Sea from Novorossiisk and Sevastopol in the direction of the Bosphorus, no Russian vessels are moving. This indirectly confirms the a CNN statement that Turkey may have blocked the movement of Russian ships on the Dardanelles and the Strait of Bosporus.

There is a Treaty specifically covering the use of these waterways by nations of the world.  That Treaty is the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits.

It is a 1936 agreement that gives Turkey control over the Bosporus Straits and the Dardanelles and regulates the transit of naval warships. The Convention gives Turkey full control over the Straits and guarantees the free passage of civilian vessels in peacetime. It restricts the passage of naval ships not belonging to Black Sea states. The terms of the convention have been the source of controversy over the years, most notably concerning the Soviet Union‘s military access to the Mediterranean Sea.

Signed on 20 July 1936 at the Montreux Palace in Switzerland, it permitted Turkey to remilitarise the Straits. It went into effect on 9 November 1936 and was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on 11 December 1936. It is still in force today, with some amendments.

The Convention consists of 29 Articles, four annexes and one protocol. Articles 2–7 consider the passage of merchant ships. Articles 8–22 consider the passage of war vessels. The key principle of freedom of passage and navigation is stated in articles 1 and 2. Article 1 provides that “The High Contracting Parties recognize and affirm the principle of freedom of passage and navigation by sea in the Straits”. Article 2 states that “In time of peace, merchant vessels shall enjoy complete freedom of passage and navigation in the Straits, by day and by night, under any flag with any kind of cargo.”

The International Straits Commission was abolished, authorizing the full resumption of Turkish military control over the Straits and the refortification of the Dardanelles. Turkey was authorized to close the Straits to all foreign warships in wartime or when it was threatened by aggression; additionally, it was authorized to refuse transit from merchant ships belonging to countries at war with Turkey.

Turkey has now invoked its power, but has not publicly stated whether they are blocking Russian Naval Vessels because Turkey is “threatened with aggression” or whether Turkey considers itself to be “at war.”  Last week, Turkey shot down a Russian military jet over Syria and this has caused a major rift between the two nations.

This latest development of blockading Russian naval vessels is a massive and terrifyingly dangerous development.  Blockading Russia and preventing its Black Sea fleet from traveling to the rest of the world, or back to its home port,  is something that will not sit well with the Russians.

Earlier today, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the deployment of 150,000 Russian troops and equipment into Syria, but then ALSO ordered the deployment of 7,000 additional Russian Troops, tanks, rocket launchers and artillery, to the Russian Border of Turkey at Armenia, with orders to be “fully combat ready.”

It is important to note two things:

1) Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as is the United States and most of Europe, AND;

2) Turkey took the first shot at Russia when they intentionally shot down a Russian jet last week.

It is important to remember these facts because, as a NATO member, Turkey can invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty which requires all NATO members to come to its defense if Turkey is “attacked.”  So if Russia decides to fight back against Turkey downing its military jet, the Turks might call NATO and claim they’ve been “attacked” thereby calling-up NATO forces to go to war against Russia.

It bears remembering, however, that Turkey shot first.  Turkey was the nation which “attacked.”

Before NATO and the world get dragged into a war between Russia and Turkey, the citizens of the world must be ready to remind our leaders that Turkey Shot First.

Why did the Turks shoot?  Because Turkey has been allowing the terrorist group ISIS to sell the oil it has stolen from countries it is conquering.  The oil is transported from the wells in countries where ISIS has seized power, is taken by truck to Turkey, and is then sold at cheap prices on the black market.

This black market selling results in over 1 Million dollars per DAY flowing into ISIS to keep it equipped and supplied for its ongoing terrorist activities.  Only a fool would think that all this is going on through Turkey, without some Turkish officials having their hands out for money from the illegal oil sales.  Put simply, Turkey appears to be in business with ISIS and Russia is harming that by attacking ISIS in Syria.

So Turkey shot down one of the Russian planes that was attacking ISIS.  Russia is quite furious; with the Russian President stating the shoot down was “a stab in the back of Russia” and was carried out by “accomplices to terrorism.”

It would be shocking if NATO were to defend Turkey under such circumstances because by its actions, Turkey is providing material support to the terrorist group ISIS.  For NATO to defend that would make all of us accomplices to terrorism.

Il missile Aim-120 Amraam lanciato dall’F-16 turco (ambedue made in Usa) non era diretto solo al caccia russo impegnato in Siria contro l’Isis, ma a un obiettivo ben più importante: il Turkish Stream, il progettato gasdotto che porterebbe il gas russo in Turchia e, da qui, in Grecia e altri paesi della Ue. Il Turkish Stream è la risposta di Mosca al siluramento, da parte di Washington, del South Stream, il gasdotto che, aggirando l’Ucraina, avrebbe portato il gas russo fino a Tarvisio (Udine) e da qui nella Ue, con grandi benefici per l’Italia anche in termini di occupazione. Il progetto, varato dalla russa Gazprom e dall’italiana Eni e poi allargato alla tedesca Wintershall e alla francese Edf, era già in fase avanzata di realizzazione (la Saipem dell’Eni aveva già un contratto da 2 miliardi di euro per la costruzione del gasdotto attraverso il Mar Nero) quando, dopo aver provocato la crisi ucraina, Washington lanciava quella che il New York Times definiva «una strategia aggressiva mirante a ridurre le forniture russe di gas all’Europa». Sotto pressione Usa, la Bulgaria bloccava nel dicembre 2014 i lavori del South Stream affossando il progetto. Contemporaneamente però, nonostante Mosca e Ankara fossero in campi opposti riguardo a Siria e Isis, la Gazprom firmava un accordo preliminare con la compagnia turca Botas per la realizzazione di un duplice gasdotto Russia-Turchia attraverso il Mar Nero. Il 19 giugno Mosca e Atene firmavano un accordo preliminare sull’estensione del Turkish Stream (con una spesa di 2 miliardi di dollari a carico della Russia) fino alla Grecia, per farne la porta d’ingresso del nuovo gasdotto nell’Unione europea.

Il 22 luglio Obama telefonava a Erdogan, chiedendo che la Turchia si ritirasse dal progetto. Il 16 novembre Mosca e Ankara annunciavano, invece, prossimi colloqui governativi per varare il Turkish Stream, con una portata superiore a quella del maggiore gasdotto attraverso l’Ucraina. Otto giorni dopo, l’abbattimento del caccia russo provocava il blocco, se non la cancellazione, del progetto. Sicuramente a Washington hanno brindato al nuovo successo. La Turchia, che importa dalla Russia il 55% del gas e il 30% del petrolio, viene invece danneggiata dalle sanzioni russe e rischia di perdere il grosso business del Turkish Stream. Chi allora in Turchia aveva interesse ad abbattere volutamente il caccia russo, sapendo quali sarebbero state le conseguenze? La frase di Erdogan «Vorremmo che non fosse successo, ma è successo, spero che una cosa del genere non accada più» implica uno scenario più complesso di quello ufficiale. In Turchia ci sono importanti comandi, basi e radar Nato sotto comando Usa: l’ordine di abbattere il caccia russo è stato dato all’interno di tale quadro. Qual è a questo punto la situazione nella «guerra dei gasdotti»? Usa e Nato controllano il territorio ucraino da cui passano i gasdotti Russia-Ue, ma la Russia può fare oggi meno affidamento su di essi (la quantità di gas che trasportano è calata dal 90% al 40% dell’export russo di gas verso l’Europa) grazie a due corridoi alternativi. Il Nord Stream che, a nord dell’Ucraina, porta il gas russo in Germania: la Gazprom ora lo vuole raddoppiare ma il progetto è avversato nella Ue dalla Polonia e altri governi dell’Est (legati più a Washington che a Bruxelles). Il Blue Stream, gestito alla pari da Gazprom ed Eni, che a sud passa dalla Turchia ed è per questo a rischio. La Ue potrebbe importare molto gas a basso prezzo dall’Iran, con un gasdotto già progettato attraverso Iraq e Siria, ma il progetto è bloccato (non a caso) dalla guerra scatenata in questi paesi dalla strategia Usa/Nato.

Manlio Dinucci

This article was first published in February 2015

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened.  Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery.  They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.

In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten”.

The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.”  His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato’s inferno, described by David Cameron as a “humanitarian intervention”.

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.

For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships”.

Following Nato’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency”.

The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War”. The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust”. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines”. A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.

In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans.  Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions”. The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.

“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.  “The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records.  The majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina.  In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion . . . Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation.”  He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter’s National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. “Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon,

“could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]”. Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example”.

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised $500 million in arms and logistics to support tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The italics are mine.

The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a “freedom fighter”.

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilise” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims”.  His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of  the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone”. Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.

The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror”, in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones”, “body counts” and “collatoral damage”. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.

Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains.  Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat”.

“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing.  Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places — just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days”.

There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists”.

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government.  The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include  Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry”. If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as “the minister for defeatism”. It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev . The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.  

Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s.  The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion”. The Nato commander, General Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing”. In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by.  The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army”.  There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups”, but there was no Russian invasion.  This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime.  In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently,

“No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established ….If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media:

“The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack …. In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit”.

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist”.  In 2006, he wrote, “Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”

The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world.  In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas “investment”. She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.

They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.

The United States and its NATO allies offered a ritual of NATO unity after Turkish officials presented their case that the shoot-down of a Russian jet occurred after two planes had penetrated Turkish airspace.

The Turkish representative reportedly played a recording of a series warning the Turkish F16 pilots had issued to the Russian jets without a Russian response, and US and other NATO member states endorsed Turkey’s right to defend its airspace.

US Defense Department spokesman Colonel Steve Warren supported the Turkish claim that 10 warnings had been issued over a period of five minutes. The Obama administration apparently expressed less concern about whether Russian planes had actually crossed into Turkish airspace. Col Warren admitted that US officials have still yet to establish where the Russian aircraft was located when a Turkish missile hit the plane.

Although the Obama administration is not about to admit it, the data already available supports the Russian assertion that the Turkish shoot-down was, as Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted, an “ambush” that had been carefully prepared in advance.

The central Turkish claim that its F-16 pilots had warned the two Russian aircraft 10 times during a period of five minutes actually is the primary clue that Turkey was not telling the truth about the shoot-down.

The Russian Su-24 “Fencer” jet fighter, which is comparable to the US F111, is capable of a speed of 960 miles per hour at high altitude, but at low altitude its cruising speed is around 870 mph, or about 13 miles per minute. The navigator of the second plane confirmed after his rescue that the Su-24s were flying at cruising speed during the flight.

Close analysis of both the Turkish and Russian images of the radar path of the Russian jets indicates that the earliest point at which either of the Russian planes was on a path that might have been interpreted as taking it into Turkish airspace was roughly 16 miles from the Turkish border – meaning that it was only a minute and 20 seconds away from the border.

Furthermore according to both versions of the flight path, five minutes before the shoot-down the Russian planes would have been flying eastward – away from the Turkish border.

If the Turkish pilots actually began warning the Russian jets five minutes before the shoot-down, therefore, they were doing so long before the planes were even headed in the general direction of the small projection of the Turkish border in Northern Latakia province.

In order to carry out the strike, in fact, the Turkish pilots would have had to be in the air already and prepared to strike as soon as they knew the Russian aircraft were airborne.

The evidence from the Turkish authorities themselves thus leaves little room for doubt that the decision to shoot down the Russian jet was made before the Russian jets even began their flight.

The motive for the strike was directly related to the Turkish role in supporting the anti-Assad forces in the vicinity of the border. In fact the Erdogan government made no effort to hide its aim in the days before the strike. In a meeting with the Russian ambassador on 20 November, the foreign minister accused the Russians of “intensive bombing” of “civilian Turkmen villages” and said there might be “serious consequences” unless the Russians ended their operations immediately.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was even more explicit, declaring that Turkish security forces “have been instructed to retaliate against any development that would threaten Turkey’s border security”. Davutoglu further said: “If there is an attack that would lead to an intense influx of refugees to Turkey, required measures would be taken both inside Syria and Turkey.”

The Turkish threat to retaliate – not against Russian penetration of its airspace but in response to very broadly defined circumstances on the border – came amid the latest in a series of battles between the Syrian government and religious fighters. The area where the plane was shot down is populated by the Turkmen minority. They have been far less important than foreign fighters and other forces who have carried out a series of offensives in the area since mid-2013 aimed at threatening President Assad’s main Alawite redoubt on the coast in Latakia province.

Charles Lister, the British specialist who was visiting Latakia province frequently in 2013, noted in an August 2013 interview, “Latakia, right up to the very northern tip [i.e. in the Turkmen Mountain area], has been a stronghold for foreign fighter-based groups for almost a year now.” He also observed that, after Islamic State (IS) had emerged in the north, al-Nusra Front and its allies in the area had “reached out” to ISIL and that one of the groups fighting in Latakia had “become a front group” for ISIL.

In March 2014 the religious rebels launched a major offensive with heavy Turkish logistical support to capture the Armenian town of Kessab on the Mediterranean coast of Latakia very close to the Turkish border. An Istanbul newspaper, Bagcilar, quoted a member of the Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs committee as reporting testimony from villagers living near the border that thousands of fighters had streamed across five different border points in cars with Syrian plates to participate in the offensive.

During that offensive, moreover, a Syrian jet responding to the offensive against Kessab was shot down by the Turkish air force in a remarkable parallel to the downing of the Russian jet. Turkey claimed that the jet had violated its airspace but made no pretence about having given any prior warning. The purpose of trying to deter Syria from using its airpower in defence of the town was obvious.

Now the battle in Latakia province has shifted to the Bayirbucak area, where the Syrian air force and ground forces have been trying to cut the supply lines between villages controlled by Nusra Front and its allies and the Turkish border for several months. The key village in the Nusra Front area of control is Salma, which has been in jihadist hands ever since 2012. The intervention of the Russian Air Force in the battle has given a new advantage to the Syrian army.

The Turkish shoot-down was thus in essence an effort to dissuade the Russians from continuing their operations in the area against al-Nusra Front and its allies, using not one but two distinct pretexts: on one hand a very dubious charge of a Russian border penetration for NATO allies, and on the other, a charge of bombing Turkmen civilians for the Turkish domestic audience.

The Obama administration’s reluctance to address the specific issue of where the plane was shot down indicates that it is well aware of that fact. But the administration is far too committed to its policy of working with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to force regime change to reveal the truth about the incident.

Obama’s response to the shoot-down blandly blamed the problem on the Russian military being in part of Syria. “They are operating very close to a Turkish border,” he declared, and if the Russians would only focus solely on Daesh, “some of these conflicts or potentials for mistakes or escalation are less likely to occur.”

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

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Turkey shot down a Russian military jet near the Turkish/Syrian border (AA)

Russia Wakes Up About Western-Financed NGOs Operating Against Russia

It took the Russians too long to defend themselves from Washington’s Fifth Column NGOs, but finally they understood that these US-financed operatives were a dagger at Russia’s heart.

Russian prosecutors have banned them.

No one will give me credit for this, so I will claim it for myself. I wrote many columns about the Russian government’s insouciant toleration of Washington’s Fifth Columns operating against them. And some of these Fifth Columns are still present in the Russian media and in the neoliberal central bank.

One day, perhaps, the Russian government will come to its full senses.

For the past few weeks the world has been and still is focussing all attention on Syria, the NATO-Turkey downing of a Russian SU-24 fighter jet, the bombing of a Russian airliner over Sinai (224 dead), the alleged ISIS-Daesh Paris massacre (132), the Islamic terror attack on the Bamako (Mali) Radisson Blu hotel (27) – plus the endless fear mongering of more terror in Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Copenhagen — you name it. The mainstream media is in over-drive. And the neoliberal European (non)-Union uses the shock doctrine to cut civil rights and install police states with ‘temporary’ Martial laws – mind you, they are basically asked for by the populace – for their protection, they are made believe.

Absorbed by their own fate and fear, Europeans have hardly eyes to see beyond their Continent, their sphere of self-interest. The neoliberal coup d’état in Argentina happened almost unnoticed. Never mind that it is just about bringing some 42.5 million people (2015 pop. estimate) under Washington’s rule.

Argentina’s general election 2015 ended on Sunday 22 November in a run-off – the first in Argentina’s history – between Daniel Scioli, the incumbent Governor of Buenos Aires Province, a Kirchnerite from the ruling Front for Victory Party (FPV – Frente para la Victoria), and Mauricio Macri, a neoliberal multi-billionaire and Mayor of Buenos Aires from the right-wing Cambiemos party. Against all odds, Macri won with 51.4% against Scioli’s 48.6% – a margin of 2.8%. A margin small enough no to raise many questions of fraud.

And here are the odds: Two days before the 25 October ballot The Guardian polls predicted an 8.5% lead for Scioli (38.41%) vs. Macri (30.07%). Nevertheless, the 25 October real election results reduced Scioli’s lead to a mere 2.4% (36.8% vs. 34.4%).

At the end of July, three months before the first election run, Scioli was leading with a 13.6% margin (38.8% vs. 25.2%). The outcome of the 9 August Primaries left Scioli still with a more than 12 point lead (36.8% vs 24.7%).

There is definitely something fishy with a deterioration of a candidate’s lead so crass as to convert an almost 14 point lead into a 3 point loss in 4 months, a 17% percent difference. This is not a typical pattern of error for pollsters, nor an indication for a public opinion change, a public that has benefitted from their government to the extent Argentinians did within the last 15 years, since the economic collapse in 2001: An average annual growth of between 6% and 8%, a highly distributive economic development, helping reducing poverty from 65% in 2002 to less than 10% in early 2015 and with a massive increase in countrywide free education and health services, including in rural areas; not to mention the elimination of foreign debt.

A simple question of logic: Would a people of which 80% to 90% have massively benefitted from the ruling government policies vote with more than 50% against the continuation of such policies – and instead for a neoliberal politician, who promised to turn the clock back? Hardly. Unless they have been subjected to a massive media brainwashing and slander campaign, vote buying and other democracy-destroying measures, through foreign induced destabilization.

We know about the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and other US based think tanks (sic), receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department to train and fund “NGOs” throughout the world, to infiltrate in counties’ internal affairs, where Washington wants to achieve soft regime change, as opposed to hard-core regime change – which involves the US military, proxy-armies, mercenaries and – of course – the ever present NATO. – So far the election fraud worked in Argentina without bloodshed.

Such destabilization movements, soft and less soft, abound around the globe during the last 20 years, coinciding with the ever stronger onset of the all controlling globalized neoliberal doctrine. Suffice it to mention the invented Arab Spring , the Color Revolutions of Central Asia and the former Soviet Republics. If propaganda alone doesn’t do the trick, the Washington imposed changes are being helped with false flags, inducing armed conflicts and ‘civil wars’. Recent cases in point are the Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, to name just a few.

Argentina’s Constitution does not allow for more than two consecutive presidential terms. Before the mid-term elections in 2013, the ruling FPV hoped for a two third majority to be able to amend the Constitution allowing unlimited re-elections. Due to strong resistance from the opposition parties, the FPV did not win the necessary supermajority.

The president is elected with a modified two-stage system, whereby a candidate wins when he / she receives at least 45% in the first run, or 40% with a margin of at least 10% to the runner-up. A run-off election, like the one on 22 November 2015, has never happened before in Argentina’s history.

With a lead of more almost 14 points by Scioli over Macri, the right-wing Cambiemos candidate, it was absolutely necessary for the Macri camp to reduce the lead difference by the first round of balloting to less than 10% to provoke a run-off, allowing more time to manipulate voter opinion and committing more election fraud. Despite the polls indicating an 8.5% lead for Scioli two days before the 25 October first election run, the actual election count resulted in Scioli winning with only 2.4%. Again, this is an unusual margin of error that should have attracted the attention of the election organizers and supervisors.

In 2011 Wikileaks revealed that Mauricio Macri asked the US Embassy in Buenos Aires to launch a strong anti-Kirchner campaign, slandering her and her political alliances, thereby massively discrediting Cristina Kirchner’s Presidency. It did not work for Macri in 2011, as Cristina Kirchner was re-elected. But the Washington-driven anti-Kirchner and anti-FPV campaign expanded massively until this past election. And it paid off.

The international investigative journalist, Estela Calloni, who followed the elections closely, concluded that there was not only massive manipulation with lies and defamation by an important media elite, but a brutal campaign against the Kirchner legacy – ‘putting the future of Argentina at risk.’ She went on saying that ‘our societies are being hammered by information coming from the United States and that they are worse than disinformation.’ She warned that Argentina should stay alert not to lose any of the progressive achievements made in the past 15 years.

Who is Mauricio Macri? – He was born in 1959 into a family of owners of the country’s most important industrial and economic groups. In 1975, the Macri family possessed 7 enterprises; at the end of the military dictatorship the Macri fleet of companies had grown to 46. The Macri family benefitted greatly from business relations with the totalitarian military government of Videla. In connivance with US banks, they built up false debt which later had to be assumed by the Argentine government.

Nevertheless, the new President-elect in one of his recent observations has insisted that the Kirchner Government reopen negotiations with the IMF and pay the infamous vulture funds in full.

As Mayor of the City of Buenos Aires, Macri leaves behind a highly questionable legacy; mismanagement of public funds, huge budget overruns and never ending public works. He has also allegedly diverted public funds into his political campaigns and accepted contributions from prostitution rings.

Mr. Macri is known as an extreme conservative, right-wing politician following neoliberal policies, who will most likely turn the wheel of progress of the Kirchner Administration back by seeking reduction of public expenditures to the detriment of labor, privatization of public services and ending fiscal policies aiming at redistribution of wealth.

As to Mr. Macri’s views on human rights, it can best be described by his observation in 2014, “Conmigo se termina el curro de los derechos humanos” – “with me the chants of ‘human rights’ will end;” – meaning that protests against his government will be repressed.

South America had proudly achieved over the past 20 years a degree of independence from its Washington masters, no other western region has reached – least the vassal states of Europe. With this neoliberal, largely unnoticed coup d’état in Argentina, the Subcontinent of South America, is, indeed, gradually turning into what President Obama calls his ‘backyard’. In the Center-North are Peru and Colombia, neoliberal strongholds of the US; and now the Southern Cone is gone.

All the while the Great Dictator and its paid foreign minions are diligently working at discrediting the Governments of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela, and of Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil; the former with infiltrated and local mercenaries spreading unrest and violence; the latter with defamation of corruption linked to the oil giant Petrobras, all manufactured via henchmen and associated banks in Florida and New York. Corruption is always an easy accusation – difficult to prove, yet very effective with the common people – in discrediting their government. An accusation coming from the most corrupt, criminal rogue state of this globe – the United States of America.

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

Long term solutions to the crisis lies in building healthcare and educational infrastructures

Regional and international health officials are emphasizing that the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) crisis is not over with the appearance of three new cases in Liberia, one of the hardest hit West African states during 2014-2015, when over 11,000 people died from one of the most virulent forms of Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers (VHF).

Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone were the most severely impacted states in the EVD outbreak which came to the broad knowledge of the international community during the early months of 2014. All three states have experienced internal conflict and unrest over the last three decades.

Nathan Gboetoe, who was 15-years-old, was taken by his father to the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in the Liberian capital of Monrovia on November 18. He was bleeding from his mouth but did not have a fever.

He was taken to the trauma ward and tested for EVD. Two days later the results returned as positive.

However, the delay in diagnosis and medical treatment led to Gboetoe’s death on November 20 shattering the notion that the country had finally eradicated the dreaded epidemic. Many are now asking: how could such a situation take place in light of the experiences of 2014-2015, when the largest outbreak of EVD had a profound impact on Liberia, a country with strong historic ties to the United States?

A recent article posted on the Foreign Policy website written by Claire MacDougall stated that “Gbotoe should have been fully checked by a triage at the entrance at the hospital where health workers screen for patients who may have Ebola and need to be isolated. The doctors and nurses who handled his case didn’t wear the correct equipment for treating possible Ebola cases that protects against the highly infectious virus.” (Nov. 26)

Nonetheless, others have disputed this claim of possible negligence with one being Dr. Francis Kateh, the chief medical officer and acting director of the Incidence Management System that monitors Ebola cases. Dr. Kateh emphatically denied there had been a violation of protocol.

“No one would walk around with full [personal protective equipment] in this climate,” he told Foreign Policy in a phone interview. Kateh contends that after the lag in the response, the mechanism for addressing an outbreak began.

All of the nine healthcare workers who interacted with Gbotoe have since been quarantined.

Approximately 150 people who came into contact with Gbotoe were identified, including patients and medical personnel, Kateh reported.

Guinea Discharges Last Known Case

In neighboring Guinea, which is a former French colony, the healthcare resources available to people are reported to be more limited than in Liberia. The first cases of EVD were identified there during late 2013.

On November 28, a one-month-old baby girl, who was Guinea’s last reported EVD case, left the hospital. The medical staff was delighted after experiencing one the most challenging periods in the modern history of the country which gained its independence in defiance of French imperialism in 1958.

It will take another six weeks absent of any new cases for the state to be considered “Ebola free.” The baby, named Nubia — perhaps the first infant to survive after being born to an infected mother, represented the hope of finally eradicating the outbreak inside the country.

Laurence Sailly, who directs the humanitarian Medecins Sans Frontieres'(MSF) emergency team in Guinea, told Reuters news agency that “this is a very happy day for us. It was very moving for us and the family to be able to touch her without gloves.” (Nov. 28)

Sailly believes that Nubia was able to overcome the disease due to experimental drugs as well intensive treatment provided by twenty healthcare workers. Nubia received Mapp Biopharmaceutical’s Ebola drug ZMapp in addition to an experimental anti-viral medication called GS-5734, which is being developed by the U.S. bio-pharmaceutical firm Gilead Sciences.

During the course of treatment, Nubia was connected to a monitoring system allowing physicians and nurses to track the infant’s breathing and heart rate making sure that procedures were utilized to prevent further infections. Periodically the medical staff had to enter the treatment area to change diapers and perform bottle-feeding. Sailly said that Nubia “is a symbol of what we are capable of doing at this stage of the epidemic.”

Worse Outbreak in Nearly 40 Year History

The 2014-2015 epidemic was the largest outbreak of EVD since it was first observed in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The recent case in Liberia underscores the importance of robust surveillance measures to ensure the rapid detection of any reintroduction or re-emergence of the disease in unaffected areas.

Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone have each put surveillance systems in place to enable health workers and members of the public to report any cases of EVD and deaths from the illness.

Several other states in the West Africa region have not been impacted by the EVD outbreak or swiftly eradicated a limited number of cases which appeared in their countries. In Nigeria, Senegal and Mali, a small outbreak was immediately contained resulting in only few deaths.

The World Health Organization (WHO), an United Nations affiliated agency, came under severe criticism during 2014 for not taking decisive action during the first several weeks and months of the outbreak, has said that Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are not capable on their own to handle continuing cases.

“The response to Ebola – the national leadership, community engagement, so many people working so hard for such a long period of time with such dedication – if that can be translated into efforts beyond Ebola, then actually all there countries have a bright future ahead of them,” Peter Graaff, the UN Regional Inter-Agency Coordinator on Ebola, told the UN News Center. (Nov. 27)

This may be true in the short term but Africa cannot continue to rely on outside institutions and states to adequately monitor, prevent and treat EVD and a host of other infectious ailments. Internal structures must be developed and enhanced to bring about a healthy and productive life for the majority of citizens and residents.

In reaching this objective stronger emphasis must be placed on developing national and regional healthcare systems along with advanced educational and communication networks to eradicate the underlying causes for the outbreaks. The role of Cuba in providing assistance during the peak of the EVD outbreak provides an example of how underdeveloped post-colonial states can reverse the legacy of imperialist exploitation and alienation.

Cuba after the 1959 Revolution had to break with capitalist relations of production and move towards self-sufficiency. As a result of its relatively rapid development as a socialist state, Cuba is a beacon for international solidarity particularly towards the African continent.

Assistance provided by Cuba to Africa is viewed as a continuation of a decades-long process of reconnection with its ancestral and cultural roots as well as working towards a world where the value of human beings supersede the drive for profits and political domination. Cuba’s contribution to the international response to the largest EVD outbreak was even recognized by the U.S. through its corporate media.

African Union member-states have praised the response of the Cuban government to the EVD outbreak of 2014-2015. AU Commission Chair Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, visited Cuba recently to express gratitude and to discuss ongoing collaborative projects between the continent and the revolutionary Caribbean island-nation.

Russia is ready to coordinate practical steps to block the Turkish-Syrian border in cooperation with Damascus, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday after talks with his Syrian counterpart. Lavrov recalled that French President Francois Hollande earlier voiced same proposal. If Russia, Syria, France block the border, many terrorists groups in Syria, such as ISIS and al Nusra, will be cut from the supplies through Turkey.

On Saturday, the Syrian army spokesman, Brigadier General Ali Mayhoub, said, the Turkey military fired a number of mortar shells toward Syrian army positions from the Mount Jebel Aqra area, which is on the Turkish side. Apparently, it isn’t an act of support of the idea to block the border. According to Damascus Turkey has also increased weapon, ammunition and equipment shipments into Syria in exchange for oil and antiquities looted by ISIS.

The Syrian army and the National Defense Forces (NDF) and Hezbollah seized back the areas of al-Markashileh and Jab al-Ahmar in the Northern parts of Lattakia province on Saturday. The Syrian forces pushed back the militant groups and restored full security to al-Rahmalia and al-Khidr hills.

According to the field reportrs, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the NDF and Hezbollah backed up by the Russian Air Force launched an advance to capture the strategic town of Quayratayn form the ISIS in the Homs province on Saturday. Now, the pro-government forces took control of the villages of Muntar Armilah and Thaniyah and advancing on Quayratayn.

A number of pro-Syrian media outlets said Russia has vowed continued fight against terrorists in Syria using its warships. Moscow will reportedly launch massive operations codenamed ‘Total Destruction’ against the terrorists using 69 Sukhoi fighter jets, Tupolev 160 bombers, submarines and warships deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. The Russian grouping will be supported by S-400 missile defense systems in deployed Syria and the Moskva guided missile cruiser outfitted with S-300F Fort anti-air systems at the coast of Latakia.

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Both the American and Turkish air forces halted their strikes on Syrian territory around the time Russia deployed S-400 air defense complexes at the Khmeimim airbase, from which it stages its own incursions against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

Important time period for retail profits in the United States challenged by anti-racist protests

All across the United States from Chicago, Minneapolis, San Diego, Cincinnati, Portland, Seattle, Burlington, etc., thousands took to the streets demanding an end to the police killings of African Americans.

In Chicago the Magnificent Mile was the target of demonstrations in the Loop, where like in other cities and suburbs, the capitalist retailers encourage mindless consumption during the period between late November and the beginning of the year.

Advertising agencies expend tremendous resources to encourage workers and oppressed peoples to enter the shopping fray offering purported “deals” on electronic merchandise, a substantial portion of which are marketed to children and teenagers. Major firms in the United States gauge their performance during this season as a barometer of the viability of the capitalist system overall.

Despite these monumental efforts by retailers, sales were down for the “Black Friday” and holiday weekend. Corporate media outlets that advance the notion of consumer confidence as a key aspect of the strength of the U.S. economy, reported the decline in revenue although attributing it to factors such as early shopping and online purchases.

According to Reuters press agency, “Data from analytics firm RetailNext showed overall sales for both days fell 1.5 percent on flat customer traffic, while average spending per shopper dropped 1.4 percent. Preliminary data from ShopperTrak showed sales at stores totaled about $12.1 billion on Thursday and Friday. The company said it is an ‘estimated decrease from last year’ but did not give the percentage decline due to an internal change in the way it calculates data. Last year, it reported sales of $12.29 billion for the same period.” (Nov. 28)

Corporate Spokespersons Attempt to Explain Away Declines

Obviously with a rising population and the often touted recovery translating into lower sales during the premiere time for showcasing new merchandise does not bode well for the future of capitalist retail markets. These results indicate that there are other factors which are leading to the fall in sales and consequent profits.

Numerous social media groups and individual pages advocated for a refusal to shop on Black Friday and that the day should be turned into one of protest. Nonetheless, this phenomenon was not taken into serious consideration by the corporate media when providing explanations for the declining performance.

The same article cited above goes on to say “The data highlights the waning importance of Black Friday, which until a few years ago kicked off the holiday shopping season, as more retailers start discounting earlier in the month and open their doors on Thanksgiving Day. Both firms said that despite the fall in sales over the two days, the performance must be interpreted as a good one for retail stores because sales held up amid rising competition from online shopping and were better than expected due to pent-up consumer demand and lower gas prices.”

Even capitalist publications such as Forbes report that the real measure of economy viability must take into consideration the size of the labor force and the labor participation rate. Since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession the so-called “recovery” has been weaker than any such occurrence after the conclusion of World War II.

The size of the labor force has been almost flat over the last seven years. At the same time the labor participation rate is at its lowest in nearly forty years. This is a more accurate measure of the nature of the labor force than the current 5.0 percent jobless rate reported during the first week of November.

Forbes stated on November 30 that “Since the 2008 recession, the U.S. Civilian Labor Force has grown at an average annual rate of only 0.35%. In comparison, after the recession of 2001, the labor force grew at an average annual rate of 1.41%.”

Since the stock market crash of early 2000, described as the bursting of the “tech-boom”, the labor participation rate had peaked. Over the last decade-and-a-half, there has been a steady decline in this factor attributed as well to the Great Recession which triggered tens of millions of lay-offs and job eliminations.

The financial journal also noted in the same report in reference to the participation rate of workers within the economy that “it began a steady decline, which accelerated when the financial crisis began in 2008. As of October 2015, the Labor Force Participation Rate was 62.4 percent. We would have to go back 38 years to October 1977 to find a rate this low. A declining rate indicates that more individuals are dropping out of the job market.”

The National Question, the Labor Market and the Continuing Economic Crisis

Within the context of over one-third of the labor force being in a non-participatory status, a large segment of this population exists among African Americans. Even though the broader unemployment rate is tabulated at 5 percent, among African Americans in general it is officially 9.2 percent.

The latest unemployment figures among African-Americans were for October 2015 issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This jobless rate did not change since the month of September making it nearly twice the number of the national average.

African-American teenagers between 16-19 years old are plagued with a jobless rate of 25.6 percent, which officially declined from 31.5 percent in September. African American women over 20 are unemployed at 8.1 percent, constituting an increase from 8.0 percent in September. African American men over 20 are jobless at 9.2 percent level, an increase from 8.9 percent the previous month.

Forbes says “If the labor force is the economic engine, consumer spending is the fuel.”

Nonetheless, this mouthpiece for the status-quo continues to advocate the same failed policies of lessening regulations and lowering taxes for the ruling class although these measures have created an even wider gap between rich and poor as well as Black and White income and wealth levels.

These statistics indicate that recession level conditions exist within the African American communities. Therefore, this provides another factor in the rising anger against institutional racism and national oppression as manifested through mass demonstrations and urban rebellions such as in Ferguson and Baltimore during 2014 and early 2015.

In both Minneapolis and Chicago tensions reached enormous levels after the shooting of five protesters outside a police station in the former, and in the Windy City, where daily demonstrations have taken place demanding the firing of the police commissioner and chief over the video of the blatant killing of a 17-year-old last year.

Demonstrations during the initial weekend of the holiday retail season were in part carried out as solidarity actions with the people of Chicago and Minneapolis. In addition the spreading of anti-racist rallies, sit-ins and ideological struggles on university and college campuses led by African American students contributes immensely to a social atmosphere of defiance and immediacy.

One year ago in the aftermath of the rebellions in Ferguson and the subsequent expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement which began in 2012, African Americans and their allies escalated their demonstrations by marching into shopping malls disrupting business and blocking highways and thoroughfares to illustrate the urgency of the crisis of police abuse and killings and the refusal of the state apparatus to take remedial actions.

These manifestations will continue and expand due to the fact that the federal government and the capitalist ruling class has no plans for the African American people and other oppressed nations inside the U.S. beyond increased militarized repression and mass incarceration. A fundamental transformation of the political and economic system is the only hope for addressing these concerns and providing sustainable solutions.

If sanctioned, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would be the biggest trade deal ever seen. Yet the public continue to be kept in the dark about it. Large corporations have been granted privileged access to officials and have been allowed to shape the talks agenda from the outset. Throughout the process, organisations representing the public and civil society have been sidelined. The public has had to rely on leaks or resort to freedom of information law and heavily redacted documents to try to understand what is happening behind closed doors.

High-minded platitudes referring to protecting the integrity of industry and the sensitive nature of negotiations have been used in an attempt to prevent public scrutiny and secure the continued crucial influence that big business has held in the talks.

According to a recent report (Friends of the Earth, Corporate Europe Observatory, War on Want et al) public services in the EU are under threat from the proposed trade deal, which could endanger citizens’ rights to basic services. The study showed how the EU’s Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) deal with Canada and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could lock public utilities into irreversible commercialisation and remove governments’ ability to regulate services.

Exposing systemic collusion between big business and European Commission officials in drawing up CETA and TTIP, the report highlights how negotiators are doing the work of the EU’s most powerful corporate lobby groups in pushing an aggressive corporate agenda of far-reaching market opening in the public sector.

The consequences include proposals for excessive investor rights, which mean corporations could sue governments for implementing regulations that affect their profits, potentially leading to multi-billion euro taxpayer payouts in compensation. Even the fear of such action could lead governments to shelve plans in the first place. TTIP could eventually make it impossible for national governments to implement decisions for the common good.

Big business has successfully lobbied against the exemption of public services from CETA and TTIP as both agreements apply to virtually all services. This effectively limits the governmental authority exemption to a few core functions, such as law enforcement, the judiciary or the services of a central bank.There is also the real danger that the EC is following industry demands to lock in present and future liberalisations and privatisations of public services. This could threaten the growing trend of remunicipalisation of water services, energy grids and transport services.

A leaked EU document also shows the EC proposing an EU-US Regulatory Cooperation Council. Existing and future EU regulation would then have to go through a series of investigations, dialogues and negotiations in this body. This would move decisions on regulations into a technocratic sphere, whereby policies could be presented to the public as ‘done deals’, all worked out behind closed doors between pro-business officials and business leaders. There would also be compulsory impact assessments for proposed regulation, which will be checked for their potential impact on trade.

As if all of this were not bad enough, Deidre Fulton writes on the Common Dreams website that newly obtained heavily redacted documents reveal that EU trade officials gave US oil giant ExxonMobil access to confidential negotiating strategies considered too sensitive to be released to the European public. The documents have been by seen by The Guardian newspaper.

Director of War on Want John Hilary says the documents offer:

… an extraordinary glimpse into the full degree of collusion between the European Commission and multinational corporations seeking to use TTIP to increase US exports of fossil fuels. The commission is allowing the oil majors to write the proposed energy chapter of TTIP in their favour.

The Guardian goes on to state that officials asked one oil refinery association for ‘concrete input’ on the text of an energy chapter for the negotiations, as part of the EU’s bid to write unfettered imports of US crude oil and gas into the trade deal.

The documents also show that at a September 2013 meeting, EU trade officials gave a briefing on the state of TTIP talks to two trade groups and 11 oil and gas companies, including Shell, BP and ExxonMobil.

According to The Guardian, the EU is pressing for a guarantee that the US will allow free export of oil and gas to Europe, an undertaking that would require a $100 billion infrastructure investment.

War on Want campaigner Mark Dearn says:

A key aim of TTIP has been to destroy regulations that prevent high-polluting tar sand crude oil from entering Europe… [an] agenda that promises a high-carbon future unmasks the spin of rich country promises to phase out fossil fuels by the end of this century, highlighting the corporate nature of the deal and its devastating consequences for climate change.

Dearn concludes:

Far from being a simple case of European interests versus US interests, the lines of demarcation in TTIP are between the mutually exclusive interests of transnational big business and people and the planet; if the deal passes, the former wins and the latter lose.

TTIP is too often presented by officials and sections of the corporate media as constituting a well thought out recipe for job creation and economic growth. This depiction forms part of the neoliberal globalisation paradigm that sanctifies the notion of ‘free trade’. In reality, however, what we actually have is trade and markets that are anything but ‘free’: markets are rigged, commodity manipulated and nationscoerced, destabilised or attacked in order that powerful players gain access to resources and markets under the banner of free trade and democratic freedoms.

The TTIP is a mandate for corporate plunder and, given recent revelations, for major polluters. It represents a pro-privatisation agenda that enshrines the privileges of the world’s most powerful corporations at the expense of ordinary people, the environment and the climate.The ultimate aim of TTIP is to draw Europe closer to the US and divide the European continent by side-lining Russia. If events surrounding Ukraine tell us anything, it is that the US has driven a wedge between Europe and Russia to prevent closer economic alignment between the two. TTIP is another piece of the global jigsaw that aims to cement US hegemony.

By using TTIP, it is now clear the US is attempting to drive its fossil fuel energy into Europe. At the same time, Washington is attempting to force Russia out from the European energy market. Russia has already had to abandon its South Stream pipeline project to Europe. Furthermore, by pushing for a pipeline to supply dollar-denominated energy from Qatar through Syria and on into Europe, the US can strengthen the dollar while further driving Russia from Europe. In the meantime, to remove Assad who is regarded as a barrier to this project, US-backed war and destabilisation has resulted in 250,000 Syrians being killed.

TTIP is clearly not about improving the lot of ordinary hundreds of millions of Europeans, just like events in Ukraine and Syria are not intended to benefit the mass of ordinary folk in those countries. Ultimately, TTIP must be viewed within the context of the wider geopolitical chess board that serves rich corporate interests.

On 25 November 2015, the High Court of Paris indicted Marc Fellous, former chairman of France’s Biomolecular Engineering Commission, for “forgery” and “the use of forgery”, in a libel trial that he lost to Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini. The Biomolecular Engineering Commission has authorised many GM crops for consumption.

David Cameron has announced that MPs will vote this Wednesday 2 December on bombing Syria. 

Stop the War is asking all its groups and supporters to protest tomorrow night, Tuesday 1 December, against plans for bombing .

In London we will be assembling at 6pm in Parliament Square where we will hold a rally and then march to Labour and Tory Party headquarters, both nearby.

Elsewhere there will be protests in town and city centres around the country.

Our campaigning has already made a big impact and been widely reported. Over 40,000 people have already lobbied their MPs via the Stop the War website alone.

The Mirror, the Mail, The Financial Times and Observer have all come out against bombing, recognising how incoherent and dangerous David Cameron’s plans are.

We are urging people to use the little remaining time and every means available to maximise the pressure on MPs.

Please encourage everyone you can to lobby their MP by phone or email and publicise the protests as widely as possible.

We must do everything we can to stop MPs voting the UK into its fourth war on a Muslim country in 14 years.

Facebook Event…

This page will be updated as we get more information. Follow theDon’t Bomb Syria Action Page for updates of protests round the country.

Source: Stop the War Coalition

IMF staff earlier this month proposed that the yuan be added to the basket of currencies used to value the SDR, a reserve asset created by the institution in 1969, and today that decision is confirmed (as expected). 

The IMF’s Executive Board decision today means that the yuan will be included in the SDR basket from Oct. 1, 2016, effectively anointing the yuan as a major reserve currency and represents recognition that the yuan’s status is rising along with China’s place in global finance.

The IMF reviews the composition of the basket every five years. The fund rejected the yuan for inclusion during the last review, in 2010, saying the currency didn’t meet the necessary criteria. But now…

• *IMF APPROVES ADDING YUAN TO RESERVE-CURRENCY BASKET
• *IMF SAYS YUAN TO JOIN SDR BASKET EFFECTIVE OCT. 1, 2016
• *IMF SAYS YUAN MEETS `FREELY USABLE’ STANDARD
• *IMF STATEMENT DOESN’T SPECIFY WEIGHTING OF YUAN IN SDR BASKET
• *IMF SAYS CHINA IS EXPECTED TO HELP FACILITATE USE OF SDR
• *LAGARDE: ADDING YUAN RECOGNIZES CHINA’S PROGRESS ON REFORMS
• *LAGARDE SAYS CHINA TO IMPLEMENT MORE FINANCIAL REFORMS
• *IMF: YUAN TRADING UP SIGNIFICANTLY IN 2 OF 3 MAJOR TIME ZONES

Reuters then reports,

• CHINA’S RENMINBI TO HAVE WEIGHTING OF 10.92 PCT IN IMF’S BENCHMARK SDR CURRENCY BASKET

Which is less than the 14-16% expectation (but nationalistically greater than Japan’s Yen and Britain’s Pound)…

However, as politically-motivated as this decision may have been, now comes the hard part for China.

 The inclusion puts new pressure on Beijing to change everything from how it manages the yuan, also known as renminbi, to how it communicates with investors and the world. China’s pledges to loosen its tight grip on the currency’s value and open its financial system will come under new scrutiny.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, “The actual inclusion of the yuan in the SDR is a nonevent for most investors. The sound you’ll hear is a collective yawn,” said David Loevinger, a managing director at fund manager TCW in Los Angeles and a former U.S. Treasury official focusing on China. “The lack of data and policy transparency remains a risk for investors.”

 While IMF inclusion is largely symbolic, it could open Beijing to criticism of its financial policieswhen the fund conducts its five-year review of the currencies in its basket. Formally, inclusion would add the yuan to the IMF’s special drawing rights, or SDRs, a virtual currency IMF uses for emergency lending to its members and countries can use to bolster their reserves.

In the near term, inclusion would lead to a modest, less-than-$30 billion in new foreign demand for yuan-denominated assets, estimates Zhang Ming, a senior economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“Domestically, it’s far from certain whether the SDR status could force other, structural overhauls,” Mr. Zhang said.

It has been a long path…

But, as Bloomberg details, there are 4 critical points…

• SDR status doesn’t require central banks to hold yuan but could be a catalyst for portfolio reallocation.
• Reserve managers for countries having strong trade and funding ties with China have the strongest incentive to increase yuan holdings.
• Reallocations by central banks may be gradual to minimize disadvantageous market pricing.
• Reallocations by private investors will be constrained until capital controls are lifted and transparency improves.

*  *  *

As we detailed earlier…
Note that there is already some notable divergences between actual reserve holdings and SDR weightings…

And Yuan’s addition may increase downward pressure on the dollar…

 SDR weights since 1978 have been based on a country’s relative share in reserve holdings by monetary authorities and the value of exports of goods and services. Preliminary estimates in August from the IMF put the yuan share of the SDR basket in a range between 14% and 16% depending on whether the yuan would be added as a fifth currency or replace an existing currency. Based on the latest available data, the euro appears likely to lose the largest ground in the IMF’s new SDR basket.

The weights of the SDR basket create no formal obligation on the part of the IMF’s 188 members to hold a similar proportion of international reserves. Indeed, the IMF’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves report — a confidential survey on the composition of central bank reserve holdings — indicates a preference, in aggregate, to hold a much larger share of the dollar and pound.

Suggested 15% weighting – which The IMF has not released yet

The reduction in dollar portfolio allocations from the IMF’s recognition of the yuan as a reserve currency may prove larger over time than the change in the SDR basket would suggest. Dollar allocations may face greater downward pressure simply because they are so large relative to other currencies — more than three times the size of euro holdings, for example. Part of this disparity is valuation, a reflection that the dollar is trading at a 12-year high against the euro. The dollar has increased 21% in trade-weighted terms over the last five years, according to Bank for International Settlements’ calculations of nominal effective exchange rates.

However, as Bloomberg concludes, the ability (and risks) are near-term constraints on any major re-allocations.

 The willingness to hold more yuan and less dollars is one thing; the ability to execute is quite another. At the moment, the ability of private foreign investors to increase their yuan allocation is limited by China’s capital controls. There are special arrangements for foreign central banks that give them enhanced access to China’s foreign exchange and interbank bond markets.

Another hurdle for expanding yuan holdings is the perception of a lack of transparency and market manipulation by the Chinese authorities. Until access and perceptions change, these factors will slow the flow into the yuan. The depth and security of U.S. government bonds may also constrain switches out of dollar assets.

Central banks tend to adjust reserve allocations slowly, so as not to pit market pricing against them. This suggests a steady gradual stream of demand for yuan assets over time. Until portfolio rebalancing is complete, dollar rallies may be short-lived as these may be seen as attractive opportunities for investors in both the public and private domain to trim dollar exposure.

As finally, before everyone gets too excited – The history of yen internationalization offers a cautionary tale on hopes for the yuan.

 Japan’s experience suggests that a floating exchange rate, free cross-border flows and stable economic growth are all necessary for successful internationalization. The challenge for China will be hitting all three of those criteria.

Currency internationalization comes in three stages. The first is use in trade settlement and financial transactions. Second is providing a safe asset for investment by non-residents. Third is to serve as an anchor for the regional and — ultimately — global market. In the 1980s and 1990s, the yen made rapid progress from stage one to stage two. Since then, it has stalled and even started to retrace its steps in some respects.

Of course, Wall Street analysts are already getting excited, here are their initial reactions when The IMF hinted it was going to happen…

HSBC:

• SDR inclusion would encourage China to stick to much- needed financial and capital-account liberalization, Paul Mackel, HK-based head of global research, writes in note dated Nov. 14
• USD/CNH moved above 6.4000 on Friday, which could suggest that more flexibility on yuan is coming
• Market players will want to see more volatility in the currency eventually; hence, inclusion in SDR doesn’t necessary mean that the RMB will be stronger
• Knee-jerk reaction for yuan to strengthen should be temporary; will be interesting to see if PBOC decides to become more hands-off

Commerzbank:

• China needs to show commitment to further opening up its capital account and accelerate domestic financial reforms, led by interest-rate liberalization, Zhou Hao, Singapore-based senior economist, writes in email
• Country needs to improve policy transparency to attract global investors; that would build trust between global investors and Chinese authorities
• PBOC should reduce frequency of intervention, allowing market forces to play a critical role
• China should provide more hedging options to corporates and financial institutions, so they can prepare for greater financial-market volatility

Huabao Trust:

• China stepped up rates liberalization in run-up to SDR inclusion; now it may increase pace of financial reform, Nie Wen, Shanghai-based economist, says in phone interview
• Onshore-offshore yuan spread is expected to narrow in coming days
• PBOC’s monetary policy stance will still be the most important element for investors to gauge regarding the yuan’s trading direction
• A more market-oriented system is crucial for Chinese capital markets; a “reasonable” pricing of domestic assets will reduce systemic risk

Maybank:

• Inclusion will largely be a symbolic move because slowing economy and capital-outflow pressures may delay FX reforms, Fiona Lim, senior FX analyst, says in phone interview
• SDR inclusion will improve “rationality” in investment and assets allocation, which will improve financial stability

SocGen:

• Any positive reaction on yuan’s possible inclusion in IMF reserves to be short-term, given that the outcome was well priced in, says Jason Daw, head of Asia currency strategy at Societe Generale SA in Singapore.
• Being added to SDR unlikely to speed up the pace of reserve diversification into Chinese assets, Daw says in Nov. 14 e- mail interview
• “We continue to see an upward bias to USD/CNY over the coming months and expect it to reach 6.80 by mid-2016.”

* * *

It would be most ironic, however, if China achieves its ultimate objective, which is simply to find foreign buyers for its currency as an offset to domestic outflows, which in turn sends the Yuan soaring beyond its pre-devaluation levels, thereby slamming the Chinese economy even further and assuring that the unfolding Chinese hard landing becomes a full-blown global crash.

Finally we could not help but see the irony in the fact that today The IMF accepts the Yuan into the ‘free market’ currency basket just a day after what appeared to be a huge intervention in the offshore Yuan market…

First published by International Action Center and Global Research in September 2014.

The US military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions. The role of the US military is not on the agenda of the Paris COP21 Climate Conference. 

There is an elephant in the climate debate that by U.S. demand cannot be discussed or even seen. This agreement to ignore the elephant is now the accepted basis of all international negotiations on climate change.

It is well understood by every possible measurement that the Pentagon, the U.S. military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

Ever since the Kyoto Accords or Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1998, in an effort to gain U.S. compliance, all U.S. military operations worldwide and within the U.S. are exempt from measurement or agreements on reduction. The U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemptions.  (Interpress Service, May 20, 1998)

The complete U.S. military exemption from greenhouse gas emissions calculations includes more than 1,000 U.S. bases in more than 130 countries around the world, its 6,000 facilities in the U.S., its aircraft carriers and jet aircraft. Also excluded are its weapons testing and all multilateral operations such as the giant U.S. commanded NATO military alliance and AFRICOM, the U.S. military alliance now blanketing Africa. The provision also exempts U.S./UN-sanctioned activities of “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian relief.”

After gaining this giant concession the U.S. government still refused to sign the Kyoto Accord, thus sabotaging years of international effort at an agreement.

The provisions of the Kyoto Protocol nevertheless became the basis of all future proposed international meetings on a climate treaty, including Copenhagen 2009, Cancun, 2010, Durban 2011, Doha 2012 and the United Nations upcoming 21^st Conference of the Parties on Climate Change meeting in Paris in 2015.

In all past international conferences it was again and again the U.S. government that sabotaged the meetings and refused to be bound by any treaty. The Obama Administration on Aug. 27 again confirmed that at the UN meeting in New York in September to prepare for the 2015 Paris meeting that only a non-binding agreement could be put forward.

Role of grassroots activists

Unless the climate activists at the grassroots level challenge this exemption of the U.S. military and begins to focus a laser light on the most dangerous source of global warming and climate change, the movement will become will be lost in vague generalities, utopian hopes and toothless accords.

The only hope that the mass outpouring in September in New York will have an impact is if independent voices can begin to consciously challenge the greatest global polluter.

Exposing the horrendous social costs of U.S. militarism must also be part of the challenge. Washington’s military role acts to constantly reinforce at every level the repressive state apparatus.

For decades, and at an accelerated pace since 2001, the military has provided an endless stream of free war equipment to local city and state police, National Guard units and sheriffs’ offices.  Youth of oppressed nations within the U.S. become targets of a vastly expanded police state. The fresh images of tanks and armored police in Ferguson confirmed for millions the results of this racist policy.

Exposing the devastation of U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is essential. These U.S. wars have contaminated the soil and water of vast regions under U.S. occupation with depleted uranium, benzene and trichloroethylene from air base operations and Perchlorate, a toxic ingredient in rocket propellant.

More than 1,000 military sites in the U.S. are filled with these toxins, topping the Superfund list of contaminated sites. The poorest communities, especially communities of color, are the most severely impacted by this continuing military poisoning.

It is essential to connect the Pentagon exemption from international negotiations to its primary role as the protector and expander of corporate power on a global scale. The most powerful and profitable corporations are the oil and military corporations; these are the other primary polluters.

Pentagon admits climate change

Unlike the climate change deniers, the Pentagon’s own published studies confirm the danger to the planet. But U.S. officer corps is committed to what they call full spectrum dominance. So every study of climate change by the military planners is based on evaluating how to take advantage of the future crisis to more firmly entrench U.S. corporate power and protect the irrational capitalist system that has created this crisis.

The Pentagon studies are not on plans to deliver emergency aid in the face of climate disasters such as floods, droughts, famines, epidemics, typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, water shortages and damage to infrastructure. Their war colleges and think tanks’ plans are on how to extract political concessions on docking rights and future military access during a besieged countries’ hour of greatest emergency need.

For example the U.S. Department of Defense releases every four years a. This is a broad outline of U.S. military strategy.

The 2014 Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review describes the threat of climate change as “a very serious national security vulnerability.” This QRD discusses how to maintain global U.S. military hegemony in the face of ever worsening global climate disruptions. (tinyurl.com/pn4awm8)

The military officer caste is focused on maintaining Wall Street rule and capitalist property relations during a crisis. There is concern with preserving the authority of their puppets, allies and collaborators.

“Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating.”

“The impacts of climate change may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, including defense support to civil authorities… The Department’s operational readiness hinges on unimpeded access to land, air, and sea training…”

Military and corporate planning is callously focused on how to take advantage of the life-threatening changes.

A most frightening example is the National Strategy for the Arctic Region. This White House Report opens by praising the Arctic as “an amazing place.” But then quickly defines the need for focusing on strategic priorities to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead.

The essence of the report is that the melting of the polar ice cap and the “new Arctic environment” means “ocean resources are more readily accessible as sea ice diminishes.” This is an opportunity to access the vast untapped oil, gas and mineral resources and increase the flow of fossil fuels — big profits for big oil. (tinyurl.com/cw2dvhk)

In 2014 Defense the Center for Naval Analysis issued a study titled: “National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change.” This report, a follow-up report to their 2007 report, prepared by eleven retired generals and admirals sees climate change as the source of international instability and the greatest threat to the established capitalist order.

This study is not on how to use the enormous technological ability of the U.S. military machine to provide solutions or emergency assistance. Everything is posed in terms of national security in the face of alleged potential terror threats.(tinyurl.com/lreswx8)

Based on these reports and on the U.S. role in every climate meeting in over 20 years it is clear that U.S. corporate power and the monstrous military machine it has funded must become a focus of class-conscious climate activists. This would contribute greatly to an understanding of the source and the real solutions to this global crisis.

This article first published in December 2013, documents the failure of the Climate Change COP19  Conference in Warsaw. What prospects for Paris COP21?

The sharply increasing scientific indicators of impending disastrous global climate change have failed to motivate the principal developed countries, led by the U.S., to accelerate the lackluster pace of their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental organizations walk out of UN meeting to protest lack of progress.

About 800 attendees associated with environmental groups walked out of the conference Nov. 21, protesting the lack of progress. In a joint statement on the day of the walkout, the World Wildlife Federation, OxFam, Friends of the Earth, Action Aid and the International Trade Union Federation declared:

 “Organizations and movements representing people from every corner of the Earth have decided that the best use of our time is to voluntarily withdraw from the Warsaw climate talks. The conference, which should have been an important step in the just transition to a sustainable future, is on track to deliver virtually nothing.”

According to Professor Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics and a leading British expert on climate change:

“The actions that have been agreed are simply inadequate when compared with the scale and urgency of the risks that the world faces from rising levels of greenhouse gases.”

There were also street protests and marches in Warsaw composed largely of younger conference attendees and local youth. One slogan, referring to climate disasters, was

“The Philippines, Pakistan, New Orleans: Change the System, not the climate.”

On Nov. 18, delegates from 133 developing countries — under the umbrella of the G77 group plus China — walked out temporarily “because we do not see a clear-cut commitment by developed countries to reach an agreement” to financially help poor countries suffering the effects of climate change for which they are not responsible. The U.S., for instance, was reluctant to help developing countries adapt to sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts, even though it is historically the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases.

By the end of the conference, perhaps encouraged by the walkout, the world body agreed to set up a “Loss and Damage” process for “the most vulnerable countries” experiencing losses from global warming. The details remain vague.

A distressing aspect of the conference came when four major developed countries took actions in contradiction to fighting global warming.

• Japan — the fifth largest carbon polluter — announced it was breaking its pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 25% of 1990 levels by the year 2020, blaming the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.

• Canada and Australia recently declared they would not support the Green Climate Fund — the UNCCC program to transfer money from the developed to the developing countries to assist them in dealing with climate change.

• Conference host Poland, a major coal producer, worked with the World Coal Association to simultaneously host the International Coal and Climate Summit in Warsaw. (Greenpeace and others protested outside the coal meeting.)

COP19 was permeated with corporate lobbyists from “fossil fuels, big business groups, carbon market and financial players, agribusiness and agrofuels, as well as some of the big polluting industries,” according to the oppositional “COP19 Guide to Corporate Lobbying.” Corporations appeared at previous COP meetings but witnesses say never in such large number.

Obviously, one of the most important issues confronting the world community is reducing greenhouse carbon emissions to impede global warming. This is a perennial UNCCC goal but hardly sufficient so far to prevent substantial increases in carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere, now exceeding 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in at least 3 million years since the Pliocene era.

Greenhouse reductions hark back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obligated developed countries to specific — and in the main incongruously low — emissions reduction targets while developing countries were encouraged to reduce emissions without a binding requirement. Since 1997, despite Kyoto, emissions have increased substantially. According to a new report from research teams coordinated by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, “The gap between where emissions are and where emissions would need to be in order to keep climate targets within reach is getting bigger and bigger.”

Kyoto, which the U.S. refused to join because of its so-called “bias” toward developing countries, has in effect been extended from 2013 to 2020 when new emissions targets will go into effect. Unless these new targets are far greater than the old, CO2 ppm will jump much higher.

At issue during COP19 was a proposal by the EU, U.S. and a number of developed countries to eliminate Kyoto’s nonbinding reductions for developing countries. Under this plan, each and all countries would set specific targets over next year.  These targets would then be inspected by the other countries to assure they are adequate for the mission at hand. The final targets would be published in early 2015 and presumably approved by that year’s COP, and implemented in five years.

Protest inside hall of climate meeting.An intense 36-hour struggle between a group of developing countries and most developed countries over this proposal went into an extra session lasting throughout Nov. 22 and into the early hours of the 23rd. Opposing removal of the distinction between developed and developing countries was a group called the “Like-Minded Developing Countries on Climate Change” (LMDC), including such countries as China, India, Venezuela, Bolivia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Thailand.

According to an account in the mass circulation Indian newspaper The Hindu:

“India, China and other countries in the LMDC group take the position that the new climate agreement must not force developing countries to review their volunteered emission reduction targets. Setting themselves up in a direct confrontation with the developed countries, the LMDC opposes doing away with the current differentiation between developing and developed countries when it came to taking responsibility for climate action.”

In other words, the developing countries will do what they can to reduce emissions, but the principal task by far belongs to the developed countries. They argue that developed industrial countries have been spewing fossil fuel-created greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for 100 to 200 years or more, and most of these pollutants have yet to dissipate. The carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere could warm the planet for hundreds of years.

The richer countries reject this argument, pointing to the increasing industrialization taking place in the developing world. Writing in the Guardian Nov. 25, Graham Readfearn points out: “Rich countries are desperate to avoid taking the blame for the impacts of climate change…. The developed countries won’t let any statements slip into any UN climate document that could be used against them in the future” in terms of financing mitigation, adaptation and compensation costs.

Most developing countries are very poor and have contributed miniscule emissions, but a few of them — China, India, and Brazil, among others — have become major industrialized powers in relatively recent years. China, now the largest annual contributor to global warming, has been seriously industrialized for less than 30 years and also functions as a global factory for many nations, including the U.S. These recently industrializing developing states, most of which are former exploited colonies of the rich countries, argue that the developed states became major powers based on burning fossil fuels and thus have the major responsibility to take the lead in reducing emissions.

China points out that while it has recently displaced the U.S. as leading producer of Greenhouse gas emissions, its population is three times greater. On a per capita basis, Beijing notes, the average American in 2011 produced 17.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide; the average Chinese, just 6.5 tons. (A metric ton is 205 pounds heavier than a 2,000 pound ton.) The U.S. rejects these arguments.

The developed-developing conflict over emissions was finally resolved when China and India withdrew demands for including Kyoto’s exception for developing countries, in return for which “commitments” to a specific target were changed to “contributions.” Clearly this is a vague stopgap measure that will eventually change. The important matter is the total of emissions reductions to be agreed upon in 2015.

The U.S., as the most influential developed country, has taken hardly any action at all to significantly reduce CO2 emissions when it was the number one emitter of carbon in the atmosphere or now when it is number two, tut-tutting about China’s smokestacks while President Obama boasts about expanding drilling for oil and fracking for gas. Ironically, though China is a mass polluter today it is investing far more heavily than the U.S. in renewable resources such as solar and wind energy. This may eventually pay off, but not before an unacceptable level of CO2 continue.

Given the number of drastic reports about climate change from the scientific community in the last several months, the accomplishments at COP19 are useful but hugely disproportionate to what is needed. In addition to the agreement on contributions to lower greenhouse emissions this also happened: The countries agreed on a multi-billion dollar program to combat global deforestation. The Loss and Damage project was passed, and developed states were urged to increase levels of aid to poorer countries. A plan was hammered out to monitor emissions reductions.

A few of those recent drastic reports include these facts:

 Greenhouse gas emissions are set to be 8-12 billion tons higher in 2020 than the level needed to keep global warming below 3.6 Fahrenheit, the UN Environment Program said. (Above 3.6 F, the world’s people will begin to experience extreme effects)….

According to the American Meteorological Society, there is a 90% probability that global temperatures will rise 6.3 to 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 100 years….

According to the Associated Press, a leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change means that “Many of the ills of the modern world — starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease — are likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change”…..

The U.S. is likely to become the world’s top producer of crude oil and natural gas by the end of 2013 due to increased oil drilling and fracking for gas….The U.S. is pumping 50% more methane into the atmosphere than the government has estimated, reports Science News….

In a new study, the team of researchers reports a global loss of 888,000 square miles of forest between 2000 and 2012 and a gain of only 309,000 square miles of new forest.

Summing up the Warsaw conference, an observer for Christian Aid, Mohamed Adow, declares: “In agreeing to establish a loss and damage mechanism, countries have accepted the reality that the world is already dealing with the extensive damage caused by climate impacts, and requires a formal process to assess and deal with it, but they seem unwilling to take concrete actions to reduce the severity of these impacts.”

“We did not achieve a meaningful outcome,” said Naderev Sano, the head of the Philippines delegation who had been fasting throughout the meeting in solidarity with the victims of Typhoon Haiyan.

Samantha Smith, representing the World Wildlife Fund at COP19 declared: “Negotiators in Warsaw should have used this meeting to take a big and critical step towards global, just action on climate change. That didn’t happen. This has placed the negotiations towards a global agreement [on emissions] at risk.”

The next major UNCCC conference, COP20, will take place in Lima, Peru, in December 2014. The extremely important 2015 meeting, when the countries will decide on new emissions targets, will be in Paris.

There is positive news as well as the negative.

•    A majority of the American people now seek to limit global warming, according to a recent report from Grist Environmental News. Stanford University Professor Jon Krosnick led an analysis of more than a decade’s worth of poll results for 46 states. The results show that the majority of residents of all of those states, whether red or blue, are united in their worries about the climate. At least three-quarters of residents are aware that the climate is changing. Two-thirds want the government to limit greenhouse gas emissions from businesses. At least 62% want regulations that cut carbon pollution from power plants. At least half want the U.S. to take action to fight climate change, even if other countries do not.

•    The walkout by environmental NGOs is highly significant. They are clearly “mad as hell” and presumably are “not going to take this anymore!” to evoke the famous line from the film Network. Their unprecedented action in Warsaw undoubtedly reflects the views of millions of people back in the United States who have been following the scientific reports and want Washington to finally take dramatic action.

•    At issue is mobilizing these people to take action in concert with others to force the political system to put climate sanity and ecological sustainability on the immediate national agenda. Two things are required. 1. A mass education program is called for because the broader and deeper implications of reforms must be understood and acted upon. 2. Unity in action is necessary to bring  together many constituencies to fight for climate sanity and justice with a view toward protecting future generations from the excesses of the industrial era.

•    There are up to a score of major environmental organizations in the U.S. Some, like Greenpeace and 350.org are willing to offer civil disobedience; some are important education and pressure groups; and some — far fewer — are too cautious and compromising, such as those advocating for nuclear power or natural gas. There must be many hundreds and more small and medium size environmental groups throughout our country, with anywhere from 5 to 50 or even 100 local followers. And then there are the numerous progressive and left organizations that basically agree with the environmental cause. None have to give up their individual identities, but they can come together around specific global warming and ecological issues and fight the power of the 1% to 5% who essentially rule America.

•    The actions of the developing societies at COP19 were important, too, particularly their brief walkout. The majority of these countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are not only vulnerable to the consequences of climate change but rarely possess the economic wherewithal to adequately survive. They will struggle for their demands in future global conferences.

•    Despite the foot-dragging of many developed countries, all of them contain environmental and progressive/left organizations. They, too, are “mad as hell” and will grow stronger.

•    Time may not be on sanity’s side, but as the CO2 ppm rises and the hopes for significant reductions in greenhouse gases falls in the next few years, conditions will be ripe for a global climate justice uprising.

At this point it seems that only a mass mobilization of the U.S. and world’s peoples will be able to provide the strength to stand up to the fossil fuel interests, the corporations, big business, banks, financiers and the weak or corrupt politicians who stand in the way of building an equal and ecologically sustainable society including rational conservation of resources and reduction of excess consumption.

 Jack A. Smith, Editor, Activist News

Afshin goes underground with one of NATO imperialism’s greatest chroniclers, John Pilger.

The award-winning journalist and filmmaker tells us how Washington, London and Paris gave birth to ISIS, and why he can’t imagine Labour Party changing. 

This article was first published in November 2012. Issues pertaining to weather modification are not part of the COP21 UN Sponsored Climate Change Conference in Paris

Over the past decade evidence has increasingly emerged indicating how geoengineering and weather modification programs designed to inflict major impacts on the atmosphere and environment are fully operational.

Despite such developments the CO2-specific anthropogenic theory of global warming touted by foundation-funded environmental groups and public relations dominates much of popular discourse and the prevailing worldview of intellectuals.

By drawing attention away from actually existing efforts of atmospheric experimentation and manipulation, such coordinated efforts are complicit in the impending environmental catastrophe they profess to be rallying against. The repeated claim of CO2-driven climate change without acknowledgment of geoengineering-related environmental intervention is a severe perversion of both meaningful scientific inquiry and public opinion with overwhelming implications for all life on earth.

Sea Level Awareness Program Pole, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Boca Raton, Florida.
Photo © James Tracy, 2012.

“While scientists continue research into any global climatic effects of greenhouse gases, we ought to study ways to offset any possible ill effects. Injecting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach. Why not do that?”—Edward Teller[1]

“To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. “—C. Wright Mills[2]

For anyone who looks up in the sky every so often while fostering some recollection of what a sunny day used to resemble, the reality of geoengineering—what are often referred to as “chemtrails”—can no longer be easily dismissed. For over a decade military and private jet aircraft have been spraying our skies with what numerous independent researchers, journalists, and activists observe to be an admixture of aluminum, barium, strontium, and other dangerous heavy metals. Such substances distributed into the atmosphere as microscopic subparticulates eventually descend to earth where they are breathed by living things and absorbed by the soil and plant life.

“A glimpse into new death technologies” intended to modify weather and the environment “is in legislation introduced by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich,” investigative writer Amy Worthington wrote almost a decade ago. Kucinich’s

unsuccessful Space Preservation Act of 2001 was intended to ban space deployment of:

*electronic, psychotronic and information weaponry
*high altitude ultra low frequency weapons
*plasma, electromagnetic, sonic and ultrasonic weapons
*laser weapons
*strategic, theater, tactical or extraterrestrial weapons
*chemical biological, environmental climate or tectonic weapons
*chemtrails (this term was stricken from a later version, suggesting duress)

In their quest to remain top dog in the kill chain, the purveyors of perpetual war have deliberately dimmed earth’s life-giving sunlight, and reduced atmospheric visibility with lung-clogging particulates and polymers. This ecological terrorism has severely compromised public health, according to thousands of testimonials.[3]

A recently discovered NASA document from 1966 indicates that weather modification efforts have been underway since the 1940s. “There is … great motivation to develop effective countermeasures against the destructive measures of weather,” the paper observes,

and, conversely,  enhance the beneficial aspects. The financial and other benefits to human welfare of being able to modify weather to augment water supplies, reduce lightening, suppress hail, mitigate tornados, and inhibit the full development of hurricanes would be very great.[4]

According to the report, in 1964 the National Science Foundation formed a Special Commission on Weather Modification. Thereafter, weather weapons in the form of cloud seeding were used to flood North Vietnamese supply lines during the Vietnam War.[5] More recent documentation points to private and government bodies’ active pursuit of weather modification, including the US Department of Homeland Security’s Hurricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program.[6] And in mid-2012 scientists proposed a $5 billion geoengineering plan to potentially unleash one million tons of particulates in the upper atmosphere each year to “cut world greenhouse gas emissions.”[7]

Since this is such an open program—taking place in plain sight directly over our heads—why is there almost complete silence about it in academic circles as well as mainstream and “alternative” progressive media outlets, particularly if one is to conclude that academe and the press are where disinterested inquiry and the dissemination of information and ideas in the public interest are allegedly anticipated and guaranteed? Indeed, geoengineering and weather manipulation are “a scientific taboo,” Michel Chossudovsky points out.

The possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, is never considered as relevant. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter, and environmentalists are strung on global warming and the Kyoto protocol.[8]

In this way such a condition is also attributable to the deleterious effect of intellectual disengagement and naivete originating within scholarly and journalistic communities that, combined with well-funded public relations efforts promoting the CO2-specific theory of global warming, eventually compromises the reasoning and communicative capacities of the broader public sphere.

The Trouble with Normal

When individuals share certain understandings and rationalities about themselves, their profession, and the broader society and culture, as is the overwhelming case in academe or journalism, they possess a binding ideology, and thereby a basis where certain perceptions and beliefs may become readily embraced or dismissed. Concepts inimical to such firm convictions are verboten. Moreover, the heavy reliance on foundation funding combined with rigid hiring and peer review processes ensure that ideas and research challenge this institutional matrix and the broader order of things in only playful and generally non-threatening ways.

Speaking as someone who works in the academy, the fear of being rejected as a crackpot also plays a large role in self-censorship. I never wholly dismissed the chemtrail phenomenon or the reports of chemtrail activists. Yet the very idea of such a nefarious program was so disturbing and surreal that several years ago I half-heartedly sought out a variety of what appeared to be conflicting information of both chemtrail activists and skeptics via online sources to placate and thereby suppress my concerns. After all, I thought, if there was anything to such claims they would be interrogated and ferreted out by university research itself and the independent progressive-left news media and intelligentsia that I relied on so heavily to form my worldview. The real problem, clearly articulated by United Nations agencies, Noble laureates and from seemingly every corner of our mediated environments is the abundance of carbon dioxide and the threat it poses in the form of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and severe weather events.

Not until 2010, when I happened across the documentary What in the World Are They Spraying? (WITWATS) did I become more fully convinced that coordinated geoengineering programs not only exist, but that they are far-reaching in scope and have major implications for life on earth. Perhaps alongside the alleged scourge of CO2-induced global warming, geoengineering programs that are purportedly in place to “curb” such processes actually pose the greatest threat to humanity and the environment. Like Monsanto, which seeks to control all facets of agriculture and thus our physiological makeup, the US military’s self-admitted objective is to “control the weather” through atmospheric manipulation by 2025.[9]

Living in a tropical climate and spending much of the time outdoors I eventually became something of a novel “skywatcher.” Upon closer observance it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the activity of numerous high altitude aircraft leaving plumes that over the course of several hours expand and coalesce to make massive cloudlike formations that could be easily mistaken for overcast above sometimes naturally-occurring cumulus clouds. I recognized how throughout most of the year this was an almost daily phenomenon initiated by planes with sometimes bizarre and inconsistent flight paths.

When I contacted to Federal Aviation Administration in Fort Lauderdale on a day with high aerial activity of this nature, I was consoled by an overly polite FAA agent that the trails were merely “water vapor,” and that dispersal of any substances several miles overhead would have but negligible effects at ground level. While it is true that jet engines can briefly produce plumes akin to cirrus clouds resulting from the exhaust process, the prevalence of this activity once I became aware of it struck me as highly unusual, and geoengineering activists contend that the inexplicable and often dangerous admixture of microscopic heavy metal particulates now common in our air—particularly aluminum—originate in the persistent contrails. A variety of air samples, most recently by activists at losangelesskywatch.com, confirm this phenomenon.[10]

In late 2011 my six year old daughter had a long-running respiratory ailment which prompted me to send off a small sample of her hair for lab analysis. The results indicated a high level of aluminum.[11] This was disturbing especially given that she had received an abbreviated vaccine regimen, drank water run from a state-of-the-art reverse osmosis filter, and ate only organic food. Her pediatrician expressed some astonishment, asking whether we use aluminum cookware. Apart from this he could offer no explanations and merely prescribed a popular antibiotic for the cough. While there may have been no correlation between the symptoms, it seemed as if the often obscure and bizarre government projects pointed to by “conspiracy theorists” had now struck home in a most intimate way.

It was around this time that I proposed to my department chair we invite WITWATS co-director Michael Murphy to screen his film and give a public talk on campus. Earlier that year a colleague hosted De Franklin Lopez, the director of EndCiv, a provocative documentary profiling the ideas of radical environmental activist and writer Erick Jensen that compares CO2-producing activities with the severest forms of colonial exploitation and Nazi war crimes while advocating violence and vandalism to save the earth. The screening was well-attended by faculty and graduate students.

At the time our department also included on faculty a talented documentary filmmaker whose work has become a platform for proselytizing on anthropogenic global warming and the many lifestyle changes necessary to thwart it. I took for granted that the university was a place where a variety of ideas, however controversial, could be presented, scrutinized, and pondered. However, after emailing the WITWATS YouTube link to my superior I was told in no uncertain terms, “That’s far right propaganda.”

Following a lengthy and good-natured exchange (which included an apology) there was no moral or monetary support forthcoming, which prevented me from approaching other university-related funding sources. Aided by Murphy’s honest willingness to forego an honorarium, I helped to support his campus visit to speak to one of my classes and present the film to the broader public. The screenings and question and answer sessions were very well-received by the students especially, all of whom can detect baloney a mile or two away. Yet despite publicity for the screening and personal invitations to colleagues I found it instructive that none were in attendance.

The story provides a microcosmic demonstration of the limited parameters for the exchange of information and ideas, that are at least as constrictive in the academy—which asserts a license on what constitutes truth and knowledge—as they are in the broader public sphere that is typically policed by ideas and assumptions that have legitimacy and rootedness in academic circles. Along these lines, within mainstream and specifically progressive media the hypothesized ecological dangers of CO2 have become the default line of reasoning for environmental issues. And, as public discourse in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy suggests, such notions overwhelmingly constitute the precognitive conditions and informational frames through which “extreme weather” events are interpreted.

The CO2 Noise Machine

A significant portion of the underlying research and public relations maneuvers of conventional environmental groups alleging CO2’s baneful and poisonous nature are funded almost entirely by major philanthropic foundations, and this goes a long way in drowning out other arguably more clear-cut and well-documented explanations of weather events, above all geoengineering and weather modification programs.

A foremost reason for the CO2 climate change theory’s endurance is the perceived legitimacy of its proponents, a widescale uncritical acceptance of its assumptions by mainstream and purportedly “alternative/progressive” media figures and outlets, and a limited understanding of the dubious science often based on drastically tortured and opaquely-constructed measurements and data. That a minority of climate scientists and seemingly impartial United Nations entities such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have apparently managed to convince a wide swath of opinion leaders and policy makers that the atmosphere is heating up because of genuinely miniscule increases in carbon dioxide is a feat that takes substantial resources and coordination.[12]

A passage from “economic hitman” John Perkins’ second semiautobiographical book provides an illustrative example how the CO2 theory of climate change becomes a deep-seated component of an ostensibly well-informed individual’s outlook and belief system.

I checked the clock on the bookcase and, aware that I had dallied too long, headed for the shower. As I passed the radio I flicked it on the local NPR station … Then suddenly the words of the radio announcer caught my attention.

“Within less than a hundred years,” she said, “all the maple trees—and the fall foliage—will be gone from Massachusetts. According to a recent scientific study, global warming will make our climate here similar to North Carolina’s. So” she sighed, “enjoy this year’s display. We may not have many more like it.” I stood there for a moment staring through the bathroom window. Outside, the old red maple next to the house bowed in the wind, its branches scrapping against the wall. The familiar sound now seemed foreboding, a death rattle. I felt absolutely devastated.[13]

Scratching the veneer of some of the major climate change movers and shakers one finds a very well-financed assemblage of entities with major philanthropic foundation ties. Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundations alone are major players behind the anthropogenic global warming “activism” and propaganda. For example, in 2009 the Rockefeller Family Foundation gave $3,500,000 to Grace Communications Fund, an organization that “builds partnerships and develops innovative media strategies that increase public awareness of the relationships among food, water, and energy systems.” Also in 2009 Rockefeller gave $775,000 to the Natural Resource Defense Council, whose foremost agenda is “curbing global warming” and “creating a clean energy future.” Another $650,000 was channeled to the World Wildlife Federation, $350,000 to the Center for Climate Strategies, and $200,000 to the Sierra Club.[14]

As bizarre as it may seem, such organizations are funded to such a degree because of their express intent on austerity and even depopulation programs. Toward this end they speak in one powerful voice that climate change is caused by the CO2-specific consumptive practices of human beings. Curiously, however, these extremely well-funded groups completely ignore actually existing or impending environmental upheavals brought about by geoengineering, dangerously designed nuclear power plants, the wanton disbursal of depleted uranium, and the proliferation of genetically modified organisms throughout the food supply.

A leading mouthpiece of the CO2 global warming hysteria is science author and journalist Bill McKibben, who oversees the popular 350.org publicity outlet. Through this effort McKibben has succeeded in convincing young and old alike to draw attention to the “scientific” assertion that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are advancing from the low 300s to 400 parts per million of overall atmospheric gases—an ominous .01 percent—by sending in money, buying 350.org paraphernalia, partaking in civil disobedience and even hiking across the United States. This is an impressive public relations accomplishment. More importantly, however, such antics cleverly lend themselves toward authenticating the notion that most every extreme weather event is attributable to dangerous CO2 levels. This conjecture has become as central part a part of the powerful liberal and progressive opinion generating apparatus as the declarations of eugenicists seeking to build a master Nordic race a century ago—an assemblage of scientists and publicists who were, uncoincidentally, funded by some of the same interests.

McKibben’s 350.org project is the public face of his 501(c)(3) 1Sky Education Fund, which between its founding in 2007 and 2009 took in close to $5,000,000 in foundation money and “public contributions.” In 2010 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave 1Sky $200,000. The key “scientific” paper McKibben points to as support for his dire warnings on climate change, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim,” coauthored by NASA scientist James Hansen, was partially funded through Rockefeller Foundation money.[15]

The piece is not so much a scientific report as it is a set of mandates calling for drastic social and political action to avert continued CO2 “buildup.” “Preservation of a climate resembling that which humanity is accustomed,” the authors assert, “requires that most remaining fossil fuel carbon is never emitted to the atmosphere.” Independent researchers and journalists assert that such proposed policies based on tying carbon emissions to atmospheric decay, many of which are already underway in some US states at the local level, will inevitably curtail further industrial development (and consequently economic growth) of almost every type and circumvent existing property rights while ushering in a new age of near-feudal hardship.[16]

McKibben and 350.org are an especially proficient example of the many foundation-supported promotional outlets that, in the tradition of Edward Bernays, have since the late 1990s fundamentally altered public perception and discourse on weather and the climate. This is particularly the case among members of the intelligentsia who disturbingly accept the pronouncements of calculating figures such as McKibben and Vice President Al Gore—individuals that routinely demonstrate their contempt for science and the public interest by trumpeting the assumed inevitability of an uncertain theory. As a result the CO2 explanatory phantom dominates center stage and wholly removes from consideration far more probable causes of unusual and extreme weather.

Piece of Mind through Conformity

The established intellectual communities’ uncritical acceptance of the CO2-specific description of climate change has far less to do with its plausibility or scientific soundness—the “science” is too opaque for pedestrian comprehension and its accompanying shortcomings and qualifications are routinely and fraudulently downplayed—than it does with the overall ubiquity of the notion and an especially naïve faith in the fair and equitable production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

The reasoning goes something like this. If non-CO2-related explanations of unusual weather patterns existed, the benevolent and impartial foundations would recognize their significance and fund such countervailing scientific research. As the histories of modern medicine, psychiatry, eugenics, and public education suggest, however, the reality is that the dominant paradigm is not the one that is ultimately the most valid and principled, but rather the one that is best funded. In this regard the foundations’ wealthy benefactors call the tune and run the show.

The overall effort has been a public relations coup of immense proportions not because it has seized the hearts and minds of the general public, many of which remain skeptical of the theory, but rather among educated opinion leaders who through personal mystification with their own credentials and titles are the most steadfast in the beliefs they are inured to accept. Even the few who have misgivings about the prevalent explanation of climate change and less examined yet entirely conceivable causes will seldom speak their minds for fear of incurring the wrath of their colleagues and peers, thus perpetuating a professional sphere that more closely resembles a Stalinist inquisition than one where free and open debate are fostered.

In order to preserve ones sanity, reputation and specialized status one need recognize the importance of alignment with an unexamined belief in what one has been told by the “experts” and their spokespersons while simultaneously assuming excessive skepticism toward the readily apparent phenomena of everyday life, however well-documented and alarming they may be. We may seldom have any more clear, sunny days, storms may be of mainly synthetic derivation and direction, and in less than a generation children could be developing Alzheimer’s by their late teens, but are these sufficient reasons to jeopardize one’s professional and social standing?

To broach the topic of weather control and geoengineering programs not only indicates an unhealthy lack of faith in overwhelmingly powerful yet poorly understood institutions and their guiding rationales. It also runs counter to that “good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.” Such dialogue suggests bad taste, especially when one can discuss Paul Krugman’s latest column or where to buy the best arugula. For these reasons I’ve tentatively resigned myself to a fate befitting a well-educated and properly conditioned member of the intellectual class. Realizing that my destiny and that of my loved ones can no longer be considered exclusively our own, I’ve finally learned to stop worrying and love chemtrails.

Notes 

16. See, for example, Rachel Koire, Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21, The Post-Sustainability Press, 2011. Also Susanne Posel’s excellent coverage and analysis of Agenda 21 at http://occupycorporatism.com/category/united-nations-2/agenda-21/

Two Turkish generals and a colonel were detained on Saturday for intercepting Syria-bound trucks that belonged to Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT), the newspaper Today’s Zaman reported.

In the early-1950s, when it became widely known that smoking caused cancer, giant tobacco companies formed the Tobacco Industry Research Council (TIRC). Its main goal was to deny the harmful effects of tobacco and confuse the public.

The tobacco lobby wormed its way into the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO), wreaking havoc and slowing the WHO’s efforts to reduce the growing number of cancer deaths.

Realizing that the tobacco corporations were obstructing progress, the WHO finally built a firewall between public health officials and industry lobbyists. Only then was it possible to better control tobacco.

Flash forward to Paris and the 21st annual UN Climate Conference, November 30 to December 11  The 190 participating countries are charged with trying to hold carbon emissions to liveable limits between the years 2020 and 2030.

But – just like when the tobacco lobby was powerful – the fossil fuel lobby is strongly influencing decisions to be made in Paris.

Pointing to the struggling world economic situation, theWorld Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) says climate change is important, but it should not jeopardize economic growth.

Fossil fuel corporations have spent billions-of-dollars over the years funding front organizations that mislead and confuse the public by claiming that climate change is not serious threat.

But scientists say that the human race cannot continue to function in a near-normal way unless about 80 per cent of the remaining fossil fuels are left in the ground.

The corporations oppose government regulations, and their main goal is to have the marketplace determine the amount of carbon emissions. However, public interest groups believe that industry will serve its own interests for profits instead of prioritizing the reduction of carbon emissions.

The public interest group Corporate Europe Observatory, located in Brussels, has compiled information on the agenda the corporations will be pushing at COP21:

•  Instead of governments taxing emitters – a simple and inexpensive system to operate – corporations want to create a world market where polluters and investors can buy and sell carbon credits. They claim the system would help spur investments in low-carbon energy However, this system has worked poorly in Europe and is vulnerable to abuse.
• The fossil fuel industry wants governments and the public to acknowledge natural gas as a “clean energy source.” This would result in significant increases of fracking in many parts of the world. It’s true that gas, when burnt, has low emissions, but the fracking process leaks methane into the atmosphere, which is 80 times worse than carbon.
• The ‘net zero’ proposal: Rather than attempting to reduce emissions to zero, ’net zero’ means that some emissions can keep rising. The industry says this would be offset in the future via the removal of emissions from the atmosphere when yet-to-be developed technologies make the removal possible.
• According to Shell, going to net zero would allow them to keep burning fossil fuels for the rest of this Century. This would be balanced off by the – so far – theoretical removal of carbon from the atmosphere at some point in the future.

While public interest groups will be kept mainly on the sidelines, corporations are being allowed to hold at least 10 special events for government officials. Names of some of the sessions: “Business and Climate: A positive revolution for companies?”; “The Future is Looking Up”; and “Energy for Tomorrow.”

In addition, some of France’s dirtiest corporations are official sponsors and donors for COP21. Included are nuclear and coal giants EDF, energy utility corporation Engie, coal-financing bank BNP Paribas, and airline Air France.

Some of the very corporations driving global warming will be represented in Paris. Included will be Shell, BP, Volkswagen, Monsanto, Total, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Syngenta, Nestles, McDonalds, Walmart and others.

Fossil fuel companies have not managed to get a much coveted seat at the actual negotiating table during COP decision-making. But they are lobbying so hard that they hope politicians will come up with pro-industry solutions.

Meanwhile, a growing number of public interest groups want the fossil fuel lobby barred from the UN process.

“When you’re trying to burn down the table,” saysHoda Baraka of the protect group 350.org, “you don’t deserve a seat at it.”

NGOs have launched a campaign, Kick the Polluters Out and are planning demonstrations in Paris. Close to a half-million people signed the protest document over a short period of time.

But, at the present time at least, it would be very difficult to get the fuel lobby organizations out of the climate change process.

The corporations are so powerful in the UN climate talks process they appear to be the proverbial tail wagging the dog. Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), scolded those who claim the fossil fuel industry is not part of the solution, telling them to “stop demonizing oil and gas companies.”

In what critics consider a betrayal of the climate control effort, after a few years inside the system, UN experts move over to the private sector. According to the Corporate Europe Observatory, this revolving door helps business to control the process in the COP process.

At the national level, because oil, coal and other fossil fuel corporations are so wealthy and so important to national economies, corporations are able to intimidate governments from taking the best possible carbon reduction pledges to Paris. Energy corporations are successful in compromising the policies of the U.S. government.

In October, the European Parliament expressed concern that an early analysis government pledges indicated the temperature would increase between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius. An increase within this range would be disastrous for humankind.

The European Parliament has now called on governments to agree in Paris to revise the projections downward before 2020 to keep the increase to 2 degrees Celsius, which is the target recommended by scientists.

The government of the state of Israel has used the EU decision on mandatory labelling of goods from the Occupied Territories, as an excuse to abort any peace initiatives from Europe or any UN member state.

In a clear move to further his aim of a Greater Israel, ethnically cleansed of all indigenous Arab communities, Binyamin Netanyahu is in danger of not only losing Israel its primary export market but also the receipt of millions of euros in research and development aid.

In his refusal to dismantle all illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Netanyahu is playing a dangerous game that could see Israel revert to being just another insignificant Mediterranean state dependent on US aid and arms for survival.

But that support is by no means guaranteed as Israel’s geo­political significance dramatically weakens in favour or more stable and economically successful states such as the UAE which has now become strategically far more important. Already, the huge American military supply base at Jebel Ali port, in Dubai, is vital to satisfying the whole US armed forces requirement in the Middle East.

‘Israel has said it is suspending contact with EU officials involved in peace efforts with the Palestinians. The move follows the bloc’s decision to label goods from Jewish settlements in the West Bank.’  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “ordered suspension of diplomatic contacts with the institutions of the European Union ..”

Note

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world­middle­east­34959807

The Wampis nation of the Peruvian Amazon declares the creation of the first autonomous indigenous government in Peru to defend the totality of their ancestral territory covering 1.3 million hectares of tropical forest.

29th November 2015, Soledad, river Santiago, Perú: The Wampis nation has declared the formation of its autonomous territorial government with the election of the first representatives and the approval and publication of its Statute, the legal framework which they will use to govern the territory. In a historic moment for the indigenous Peoples of Latin America, they issued their first Resolution which declared the totality of their ancestral territory, an area that covers more than 1.3 million hectares, as an integrated territory.

The announcement was made during the first ever Wampis Summit in front of almost 300 representatives from 85 communities. Andres Noningo Sesen, one of the Waimaku, or Wampis visionaries, explained why they had reached this decision.

“We have taken this decision partly as a strategy of territorial defence; in response to the efforts to divide us into communities. We will still be Peruvian citizens but this unity will give us the political strength we need to explain our vision to the world and to those companies and governments who only see the gold and oil in our rivers and forests much less the spirit beings of Nunkui and Tsunki, who look after our earth and water. It will also enable us to promote our own vision for our future that we want, a future that is healthy and in harmony with the natural world”.

The Wampis Statute is built strictly on the obligations of the Peruvian state to respect the rights and autonomy of indigenous peoples and nations. Amongst other principles, the statute requires that any activity that could affect Wampis territory secure the free, prior and informed consent of the Wampis nation.

Their Magna Carta also promotes their own vision of their future. It prioritises their well-being and food security and the promotion of economic alternatives that respect their vision for a healthy and harmonious relationship with the natural world. These include the promotion of small scale fish farming and the production of cocoa and banana.

“We trust that the Peruvian state will support our initiative as it will help them to comply with their own obligations to respect the fundamental rights of indigenous peoples and nations to determine their own future. In addition, our historic decision will help them to meet their commitments to protect the Peruvian Amazon as part of its objective to address global climate change” said Mr Wrays Pérez Ramírez, during his first address after being elected as the first Pamuk, or president, of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampis nation.

At the same time he also added that the event is being held on the eve of COP21 in Paris where the governments of the world will announce their commitments to address climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In previous climate conferences the Peruvian government announced its objective to reduce net deforestation to zero by 2020 and their commitment to secure legal recognition of indigenous peoples ‘ ancestral territories that remain without legal security.

“Despite the commitments of the Peruvian government to reduce deforestation and guarantee the legal security of indigenous territories, the State continues to give away our territories to companies exploiting oil and gas, timber and palm oil without any consultation and deforestation continues to grow. While the Peruvian government and other governments are in Paris talking about how to protect tropical forests and reduce contamination, we are taking concrete actions in our territory to contribute to this global goal,” said the Pamuk.

The government’s first Resolution recognises and reaffirms that the territory of the Wampis nation is an integrated territory and establishes the mechanisms for its use and administration. “Our territory cannot be divided into communities or into water, forest or subsoil, it is one territory. This resolution will serve us as a tool to defend our territory which remains untitled and confront the diverse threats that surround us, like the oil lot 116 and the mega dam planned for the Manseriche rapids” said Alan Encinas Tserem, the PAMUKA AYATKE, the Vice-president of the new Autonomous Government.

The formal declaration is the result of a long process over many years in which the Wampis nation has held over 50 community meetings and 15 general assemblies to elaborate and debate the Statute in addition to conducting anthropological, legal and biological studies that reinforce the creation of the Autonomous Territorial Government.

“Today, we are very happy to have realised out dream. We have united here all the communities of the river Kankaim (Morona) and Kanus (Santiago) to come together and defend our territory. Now, we will be one single force” said local leader, Veronica Sharip.

“This achievement has been realised thanks to the struggles of our historic heroes including Sharian and Tsamaren and our present day leaders who, day after day, have worked tirelessly to defend our territory” said Mr Shapion Noningo Sesen.

“In the last eight months ISIS has managed to sell … $800 million dollars worth of oil on the black market of Turkey. This is Iraqi oil and Syrian oil, carried by trucks from Iraq, from Syria through the borders to Turkey and sold …[at] less than 50 percent of the international oil price,” Mowaffak al Rubaie said in an interview with RT.

“Now this either get consumed inside, the crude is refined on Turkish territory by the Turkish refineries, and sold in the Turkish market. Or it goes to Jihan and then in the pipelines from Jihan to the Mediterranean and sold to the international market.”

“Money and dollars generated by selling Iraqi and Syrian oil on the Turkish black market  is like the oxygen supply to ISIS and it’s operation,” he added. “Once you cut the oxygen then ISIS will suffocate.”

‘Commercial scale’ oil smuggling into Turkey becomes priority target of anti- #ISIS strikes https://t.co/5PGSeyqAft pic.twitter.com/uQuBLK4eS0

— RT (@RT_com) November 27, 2015

The Iraqi MP said there is “no shadow of a doubt” that the Turkish government knows about the oil smuggling operations. “The merchants, the businessmen [are buying oil] in the black market in Turkey under the noses – under the auspices if you like – of the Turkish intelligence agency and the Turkish security apparatus,” he said.

Citing Iraqi intelligence services, Mowaffak al Rubaie also accused Turkey of providing medical treatment to terrorists in hospitals along the border and at times even in “Istanbul itself.”

“There are security officers who are sympathizing with ISIS in Turkey,” the Iraqi politician believes. “They are allowing them to go from Istanbul to the borders and infiltrate … Syria and Iraq.”

“There is no terrorist organization which can stand alone, without a neighboring country helping it – in this case Turkey,” Rubaie said, urging Ankara to come clean and join the international efforts to destroy the terror group.

Russia considers ISIS oil smuggling operations to be one of the highest priority targets in crippling the terror group’s finances and capabilities. Moscow has long been requesting that Ankara properly addresses reports of its alleged involvement with ISIS oil smuggling.

President Putin himself noted that it was “hard to believe, but it is theoretically possible” that the Turkish leadership knows nothing about oil flowing into Turkey illegally. However he noted that the operations are too daring and obvious to ignore.

“Vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” said Putin, comparing the views seen by Russian pilots and drones to a “living oil pipe” stretched from ISIS and rebel controlled areas of Syria into Turkey. “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there – empty,” Putin said earlier this week.

A six-month investigation finds that the revolving door between government and the chemical industry has led the EPA to rely on easily manipulated toxicology research carried out entirely on computers – and this ‘in silico’ science often trumps both biology and epidemiology when it comes to regulatory action, or lack of it. The result? Toxic substances remain in everyday products.

Scientists are trained to express themselves rationally. They avoid personal attacks when they disagree. But some scientific arguments become so polarized that tempers fray. There may even be shouting.

Such is the current state of affairs between two camps of scientists: health effects researchers and regulatory toxicologists.

Both groups study the effects of chemical exposures in humans. Both groups have publicly used terms like “irrelevant”, “arbitrary”, “unfounded” and “contrary to all accumulated physiological understanding” to describe the other’s work.

Privately, the language becomes even harsher, with phrases such as “a pseudoscience”, “a religion” and “rigged”. The rift centers around the best way to measure the health effects of chemical exposures.

The regulatory toxicologists typically rely on computer simulations called ‘physiologically based pharmacokinetic‘ (PBPK) modeling. The health effects researchers – endocrinologists, developmental biologists and epidemiologists, among others – draw their conclusions from direct observations of how chemicals actually affect living things.

The debate may sound arcane, but the outcome could directly affect your health. It will shape how government agencies regulate chemicals for decades to come: how toxic waste sites are cleaned up, how pesticides are regulated, how workers are protected from toxic exposure and what chemicals are permitted in household items.

Those decisions will profoundly affect public health: the rates at which we suffer cancer, diabetes, obesity, infertility, and neurological problems like attention disorders and lowered IQ.

The health impacts are real and dangerous

The link from certain chemicals to these health effects is real. In a paper published earlier this year, a group of leading endocrinologists concluded with 99% certainty that environmental exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals causes health problems. They estimate that this costs the European Union healthcare system about $175 billion a year.

Closer to home, Americans are routinely sickened by toxic chemicals whose health effects have been long known. To cite one infamous example, people exposed to the known carcinogen formaldehyde in FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina suffered headaches, nosebleeds and difficulty breathing. Dozens of cancer cases were later reported.

Then there are workplace exposures, which federal government estimates link to as many as 20,000 cancer deaths a year and hundreds of thousands of illnesses.

“We are drowning our world in untested and unsafe chemicals, and the price we are paying in terms of our reproductive health is of serious concern”, wrote the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics in a statement released on October 1.

Yet chemical regulation in the United States has proceeded at a glacial pace. And corporate profit is at the heart of the story.

That the chemical industry exerts political influence is well documented. What our investigation reveals is that, 30 years ago, corporate interests began to control not just the political process but the science itself. Industry not only funds research to cast doubt on known environmental health hazards. It has also shaped an entire field of science-regulatory toxicology – to downplay the risk of toxic chemicals.

Digital modelling allows risks to be systematically downplayed

Our investigation traces this web of influence to a group of scientists working for the Department of Defense (DOD) in the 1970s and 1980s – the pioneers of PBPK modeling. It quickly became clear that this type of modeling could be manipulated to minimize the appearance of chemical risk.

PBPK methodology has subsequently been advanced by at least two generations of researchers-including many from the original DOD group – who move between industry, government agencies and industry-backed research groups, often with little or no transparency.

The result is that chemicals known to be harmful to human health remain largely unregulated in the United States-often with deadly results.

For chemicals whose hazards are just now being recognized, such as the common plastics ingredient bisphenol A (BPA) and other endocrine disruptors, this lack of regulation is likely to continue unless the federal chemical review process becomes more transparent and relies less heavily on PBPK modeling.

Here we lay out the players, the dueling paradigms and the high-stakes health consequences of getting it wrong.

The dawn of PBPK simulation

The 1970s and 1980s saw a blizzard of environmental regulation. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act, along with the laws that established Superfund and Community Right-to-Know Programs, for the first time required companies- and military bases – using and producing chemicals to account for their environmental and health impacts.

This meant greater demand for chemical risk assessments as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to establish safety standards for workplace exposures and environmental cleanups.

In the 1980s, the now-defunct Toxic Hazards Research Unit at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, was investigating the toxicity and health effects of chemicals used by the military.

Of particular concern to the DOD were the many compounds used by the military to build, service and maintain aircraft, vehicles and other machinery: fuels and fuel additives, solvents, coatings and adhesives. The military is responsible for about 900 of the approximately 1,300 currently listed Superfund sites, many of which have been contaminated by these chemicals for decades.

In the mid-1980s, scientists at the Wright-Patterson Toxic Hazards Research Unit began using PBPK simulations to track how chemicals move through the body. Known as in silico (in computers) models, these are an alternative to testing chemicals in vivo (in live animals) or in vitro (in a test tube).

They allow scientists to estimate what concentrations of a chemical (or its breakdown products) end up in a particular organ or type of tissue, and how long they take to exit the body. The information can then be correlated with experimental data to set exposure limits-or not.

Making testing fast, cheap, and wrong

PBPK simulations made testing faster and cheaper, something attractive to both industry and regulators. But the PBPK model has drawbacks. “It tells you nothing about effects”, says Linda Birnbaum, director of both the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and National Toxicology Program (NTP).

Observational studies and laboratory experiments, on the other hand, are designed to discover how a chemical affects biological processes.

Even regulatory toxicologists who support PBPK acknowledge its limitations: “[PBPK models] are always going to be limited by the quality of the data that go into them”, says toxicologist James Lamb, who worked for the NTP and EPA in the 1980s and is now principal scientist at the consulting firm Exponent.

The late health effects researcher Louis Guillette, a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina famous for studies on DDT’s hormonedisrupting effects in Florida alligators, put it more bluntly: “PBPK? My immediate response: Junk in, junk out. The take-home is that most of the models [are] only as good as your understanding of the complexity of the system.”

Many biologists say PBPK-based risk assessments begin with assumptions that are too narrow, and thus often fail to fully capture how a chemical exposure can affect health.

For example, a series of PBPK studies and reviews by toxicologist Justin Teeguarden of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, and his colleagues suggested that BPA breaks down into less harmful compounds and exits the body so rapidly that it is essentially harmless.

Their research began with certain assumptions: that BPA only mimics estrogen weakly, that it affects only the body’s estrogen system, and that 90% of BPA exposure is through digestion of food and beverages.

However, health effects research has shown that BPA mimics estrogen closely, can affect the body’s androgen and thyroid hormone systems, and can enter the body via pathways like the skin and the tissues of the mouth. When PBPK models fail to include this evidence, they tend to underestimate risk.

Because of its reliance on whatever data are included, PBPK modeling can be deliberately manipulated to produce desired outcomes. Or, as University of Notre Dame biologist Kristin Shrader-Frechette, who specializes in human health risk assessment, says: “Models can offer a means of avoiding the conclusions derived from actual experiments.”

In other words, PBPK models can be customized to provide results that work to industry’s advantage.

That’s not to say PBPK itself is to blame. “Let’s not throw the baby out completely with the bathwater”, says New York University associate professor of environmental medicine and health policy Leo Trasande. “However, when you have biology telling you there are basic flaws in the model, that’s a compelling reason that it’s time for a paradigm shift.”

Case study: methylene chloride

That PBPK studies could be used to make chemicals appear safer was as clear in the 1980s as it is now. In a 1988 paper touting the new technique, Wright-Patterson scientists explained how their modeling had prompted the EPA to stop its regulation process for a chemical of great concern to the military: methylene chloride.

Methylene chloride is widely used as a solvent and as an ingredient in making plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other industrial products. By the 1990s, the US military would be the country’s second greatest user. Methylene chloride was – and remains – regulated under the Clean Air Act as a hazardous air pollutant because of its carcinogenic and neurotoxic effects.

Between 1985 and 1986, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated that about 1 million workers a year were exposed to methylene chloride, and the EPA classified the compound as a “probable human carcinogen.” A number of unions, including United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, also petitioned OSHA to limit on-the-job exposure to methylene chloride.

In 1986, OSHA began the process of setting occupational exposure limits. Stakeholders were invited to submit public comments.

Among the materials submitted was a PBPK study by Melvin Andersen, Harvey Clewell-both then working at Wright-Patterson – and several other scientists, including two employed by methylene chloride product manufacturer Dow Chemical. Published in 1987, this study concluded, “Conventional risk analyses greatly overestimate the risk in humans exposed to low concentrations [of methylene chloride].”

Later that year, the EPA revised its previous health assessment of methylene chloride, citing the Wright-Patterson study to conclude that the chemical was nine times less risky than previously estimated. The EPA “has halted its rulemaking on methylene chloride [based on our studies]”, wrote Wright-Patterson scientists in 1988.

OSHA, too, considered the Wright-Patterson study in its methylene chloride assessment – and its rulemaking dragged on another 10 years before the agency finally limited exposure to the chemical.

A very useful tool for industry

The usefulness of PBPK modeling to industry did not escape the Wright-Patterson researchers. “The potential impact”, wrote Andersen, Clewell and their colleagues in 1988, “is far reaching and not limited to methylene chloride.”

Using PBPK models to set exposure limits could help avoid setting “excessively conservative” – that is, protective – limits that could lead to “unnecessary expensive controls” and place “constraints on important industrial processes.” In other words, PBPK models could be used to set less stringent environmental and health standards, and save industry money.

So far, they’ve been proven right. The work done at Wright-Patterson set the stage for the next 30-plus years. Results obtained using PBPK modeling – especially in industry-funded research, often conducted by former Wright-Patterson scientists – have downplayed the risk and delayed the regulation of numerous widely used and commercially lucrative chemicals.

These include formaldehyde, styrene, tricholorethylene, BPA and the pesticide chlorpyrifos. For many such chemicals, PBPK studies contradict what actual biological experiments conclude. Regulators often defer to the PBPK studies anyway.

A web of influence …

At the time that PBPK modelling was being developed, the chemical industry was struggling with its public image. The Bhopal, India, disaster-the methyl isocyanate release that killed and injured thousands – happened in 1984. The following year, a toxic gas release at a West Virginia Union Carbide plant sent about 135 people to hospitals.

In response to these incidents, new federal regulations required companies to account for the storage, use and release of hazardous chemicals. The minutes from a May 1988 Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) meeting show industry was feeling the pressure. Noting the federal scrutiny and the growing testing requirements, the CMA recommended that industry help “develop exposure data” and “explore innovative ways to limit required testing to that which is needed.”

Industry had already begun to do this by founding a number of research institutes such as the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT), a nonprofit toxicology research institute (renamed the Hamner Institutes in an act of linguistic detoxification in 2007).

This period also saw the rise of for-profit consulting firms like Environ (1982), Gradient (1985), ChemRisk (1985) and K.S. Crump and Company (1986), with which industry would collaborate advantageously in the following decades.

“Our goal was to do the science that would help the EPA and other regulatory bodies make the policies”, explained William Greenlee, Hamner president and CEO, in an interview for a business website. Indeed, over the past 30 years, Hamner and these consultancies have produced hundreds of PBPK studies, often with the support of chemical companies or trade groups. Overwhelmingly, these studies downplay or cast doubt on chemicals’ health effects-and delay regulation.

“I have seen how scientists from the Hamner Institutes can present information in a way that carefully shapes or controls a narrative”, says Laura Vandenberg, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

She explains that Hamner scientists often use narrow time windows or present data in a limited context, rejecting information that does not conform to their models. “These are the kinds of tactics used to manufacture doubt”, she says.

A close look at the authors of studies produced by these industry-linked research groups reveals a web of influence traceable to Wright-Patterson (see chart, above right). At least 10 researchers employed at or contracted by Wright-Patterson in the 1980s went on to careers in toxicology at CIIT/Hamner, for-profit consulting firms or the EPA.

About half have held senior positions at Hamner, including the co-authors of many of the early Wright-Patterson PBPK studies: Melvin Anderson, now a chief scientific officer at Hamner, and Harvey Clewell, now a senior investigator at Hamner and principal scientist at the consulting firm ENVIRON. “I’m probably given credit as the person who brought PBPK into toxicology and risk assessment”, Andersen told In These Times.

… Extending deep into government

A revolving door between these industry-affiliated groups and federal regulators was also set in motion. More than a dozen researchers have moved from the EPA to these for-profit consultancies; a similar number have gone in the other direction, ending up at the EPA or other federal agencies.

Further blurring the public-private line, CIIT/Hamner has received millions of dollars in both industry and taxpayer money. The group stated on its website in 2007 that $18 million of its $21.5 million annual operating budget came from the “chemical and pharmaceutical industry.“

Information about its corporate funders is no longer detailed there, but Hamner has previously listed as clients and supporters the American Chemistry Council (formerly the CMA, and one of the most powerful lobbyists against chemical regulation), American Petroleum Institute, BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow, ExxonMobil, Chevron and the Formaldehyde Council.

At the same time, over the past 30 years, CIIT/Hamner has received nearly $160 million in grants and contracts from the EPA, DOD and Department of Health and Human Services. In sum, since the 1980s, these federal agencies have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to industry-affiliated research institutes like Hamner.

But the federal reliance on industry-linked researchers extends further. Since 2000, the EPA has signed a number of cooperative research agreements with the ACC and CIIT/ Hamner. All involve chemical toxicity research that includes PBPK modeling. And in 2014, Hamner outlined additional research it will be conducting for the EPA’s next generation of chemical testing-the ToxCast and Tox21 programs. Over the past five years, Hamner has received funding for this same research from the ACC and Dow.

Meanwhile, the EPA regularly contracts with for-profit consultancies to perform risk assessments, assemble peer review panels and select the scientific literature used in chemical evaluations. This gives these private organizations considerable sway in the decision-making process, often with little transparency about ties to chemical manufacturers. The upshot: Experts selected to oversee chemical regulation often overrepresent the industry perspective.

These cozy relationships have not gone unnoticed; the EPA has been called to task by both its own Office of Inspector General and by the US Government Accountability Office. “These arrangements have raised concerns that ACC or its members could potentially influence, or appear to influence, the scientific results that may be used to make future regulatory decisions”, wrote the GAO in a 2005 report.

Asked for comment by In These Times, the EPA said these arrangements do not present conflicts of interest.

Decades of deadly delay – methylene chloride remains in use

PBPK studies have stalled the regulation of numerous chemicals. In each case, narrowly focused models developed by industry-supported research concluded that risks were lower than previously estimated or were not of concern at likely exposure levels.

Take, for example, methylene chloride, the subject of the 1987 paper Wright-Patterson scientists bragged had halted the EPA’s regulatory process. Despite the chemical being identified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the UN International Agency for Research on Cancer, a “reasonably anticipated” human carcinogen by the US National Toxicology Program, and an “occupational carcinogen” by OSHA, the EPA has yet to limit its use.

EPA researchers noted this year that the 1987 PBPK model by the Wright-Patterson scientists remains the basis for the agency’s risk assessment.

Today, methylene chloride remains in use – to produce electronics, pesticides, plastics and synthetic fabrics, and in paint and varnish strippers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, OSHA and NIOSH have issued health warnings, and the FDA bars methylene chloride from cosmetics – but no US agency has totally banned the chemical. The EPA estimates that some 230,000 workers are exposed directly each year.

According to OSHA, between 2000 and 2012, at least 14 people died in the United States of asphyxiation or heart failure after using methylene chloride-containing products to refinish bathtubs. The Center for Public Integrity reports that methylene chloride exposure prompted more than 2,700 calls to US poison control centers between 2008 and 2013.

Case study: formaldehyde

Another telling example of industry-funded PBPK studies’ influence is formaldehyde. This chemical remains largely unrestricted in the United States, despite being a well-recognized respiratory and neurological toxicant linked to nasal cancer and leukemia, as well as to allergic reactions and skin irritation.

The EPA’s toxicological review of formaldehyde, begun in 1990, remains incomplete, in no small part because of delays prompted by the introduction of studies – including PBPK models conducted by CIIT/Hamner – questioning its link to leukemia.

If that link is considered weak or uncertain, that means formaldehyde – or the companies that employ the sickened workers – won’t be held responsible for the disease. The chemical industry is well aware that “more people have leukemia … than have nasal tumors”, says recently retired NIEHS toxicologist James Huff.

Some of this CIIT/Hamner research was conducted between 2000 and 2005 with funding from an $18,750,000 EPA grant. In 2010, Hamner received $5 million from Dow, a formaldehyde product manufacturer, for toxicity testing, including PBPK modeling. The ACC, which opposes formaldehyde restriction, also supported this research.

Consequently, apart from a few state regulations and a pending EPA proposal to limit formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products like plywood, companies can still use the chemical – as in the FEMA trailers.

Cosmetics and personal care products can also be sources of formaldehyde exposure. This made headlines in 2011 after hair salon workers using a smoothing product called Brazilian Blowout reported nausea, sore throats, rashes, chronic sinus infections, asthma-like symptoms, bloody noses, dizziness and other neurological effects.

“You can’t see it … but you feel it in your eyes and it gives you a high”, salon owner and hair stylist Cortney Tanner tells In These Times. “They don’t teach this stuff in beauty school”, she says, and no one warns stylists about these products or even suggests using a ventilator.

OSHA has issued a hazard alert for these products and the FDA has issued multiple warnings, most recently in September, but regulations prevent federal agencies from pulling the products from store shelves. So, for formaldehyde, as in the case of the paint strippers containing methylene chloride, exposures continue.

BPA rings alarm bells

The chemical currently at the center of the most heated debates about consumer exposure is BPA. The building block of polycarbonate plastics, BPA is used in countless products, including the resins that line food cans and coat the thermal receipt paper at cash registers and ATMs.

While scientific evidence of adverse health effects from environmentally typical levels of BPA mounts, and many manufacturers and retailers have responded to public concern by changing their products, federal regulatory authorities still resist restricting the chemical’s use.

BPA does not produce immediate, acute effects, like those experienced by salon workers exposed to formaldehyde or machinists working with methylene chloride. But in laboratory tests on animals, BPA is a known endocrine disruptor. Structurally similar to natural hormones, endocrine disruptors can interfere with normal cellular processes and trigger abnormal biochemical responses.

These can prompt numerous health problems, including cancer, infertility, and metabolic and neurological disorders. BPA has also been linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.

To promote the idea that BPA is safe, the chemical industry routinely lobbies policymakers and ‘educates’ consumers. What has not been widely discussed, however, is how industry has backed PBPK studies that marginalized research showing risks from environmentally typical levels of BPA.

Many of these doubt-inducing studies have been conducted by researchers whose careers can be linked to the PBPK work done at Wright-Patterson. In published critiques, health effects researchers-among them Gail Prins and Wade Welshons-have detailed the many ways in which these PBPK models fail to accurately reflect BPA exposure.

PBPK and endocrine disruption

Over the past several decades, our evolving understanding of our bodies’ responses to chemicals has challenged previous toxicological assumptions- including those that are fed into PBPK models. This is particularly true of endocrine disruptors.

‘Cause and effect’ relationships between endocrine disruptors and health problems can be hard to pinpoint. We now know that early – even prenatal – exposure to endocrine disruptors can set the stage for adult disease. In addition, a pregnant woman’s exposures may affect not only her children but also her grandchildren.

These transgenerational effects have been documented in animal experiments. The classic human evidence came from victims of DES, a drug prescribed in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to prevent miscarriages. Daughters of women who took the endocrine disruptor developed reproductive cancers, and preliminary research suggests their daughters may be at greater risk for cancer and other reproductive problems.

“The transgenerational work raises an incredible specter”, says Andrea Gore, who holds the Vacek Chair in Pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and edits the influential journal Endocrinology. “It’s not just what you’re exposed to now, it’s what your ancestors were exposed to.”

Complicating PBPK modeling further, hormone-mimicking chemicals, just like hormones, can have biological effects at concentrations as low as parts per trillion. In addition, environmental exposures most often occur as mixtures, rather than in isolation. And each individual may respond differently.

“PBPK doesn’t come close” to capturing the reality of endocrine disruption, the late developmental biologist Louis Guillette told In These Times, in part because modelers are “still asking questions about one chemical exposure with one route of exposure.” Even for health effects researchers, understanding of mixtures’ effects is in its infancy.

The debate over how endocrine disruption can be represented in PBPK models has intensified the unease between regulatory toxicologists and health effects researchers. That tension is particularly well-illustrated by a recent series of events that also reveal how some journal editors privilege the industry’s point of view.

A life-and-death debate

In February 2012 the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) published a report intended to inform regulation worldwide. The authors were an international group of health effects researchers with long experience studying endocrine disruption.

“There is an increasing burden of disease across the globe in which [endocrine disruptors] are likely playing an important role, and future generations may also be affected”, said the report.

These diseases, it continued, are being seen in humans and wildlife, and include male and female reproductive disorders, changes in the numbers of male and female babies born, thyroid and adrenal gland disorders, hormone-related cancers and neurodevelopmental diseases.

The backlash from toxicologists was immediate. Over the next few months – as the EU prepared to begin its regulatory decision-making on endocrine disruptors – the editors of 14 toxicology journals each published an identical commentary harshly criticizing the WHO/UNEP conclusions.

The commentary included a letter from more than 70 toxicologists urging the EU not to adopt the endocrine disruption framework. The letter said that the WHO / UNEP report could not be allowed to inform policy because its science is “contrary to all accumulated physiological understanding.” This commentary was followed by further attacks. One critique, published in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology, was funded and vetted by the ACC.

These commentaries infuriated health effects researchers. Twenty endocrine journal editors, 28 associate editors and 56 other scientists – including several WHO / UNEP report authors-signed a statement in Endocrinology, saying in part:

“The dismissive approach to endocrine disruption science put forth … is unfounded, as it is [not] based on the fundamental principles of how the endocrine system works and how chemicals can interfere with its normal function.”

Endocrinology editor Andrea Gore tells In These Times that she and other health effects researchers don’t think the scientifically demonstrated dangers of endocrine disruptors are subject to debate. “There are fundamental differences between regulatory toxicologists and what I refer to as ‘people who understand the endocrine science.’ “

The outcome of this debate and the structure of future regulatory toxicity testing in the United States and Europe is not yet clear. The EPA appears to be attempting to incorporate endocrine disruption into PBPK models, but many scientists are skeptical the process will produce reliable results, given the models’ limitations and the complexity of endocrine effects.

From science to activism

Although couched in complex language, these arguments are not academic, but have profound implications for public health. Disorders and diseases, increasingly linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors – including metabolic, reproductive, developmental and neurological problems – are widespread and increasing.

About 20% of US adults show at least three of the five indicators of metabolic syndrome: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease. Neurological problems, including behavioral and learning disabilities in children as well as Parkinson’s disease, are increasing rapidly. Fertility rates in both men and women are declining. Globally, the average sperm count has dropped 50% in the last 50 years.

Scientists typically shy away from activism, but many now believe it’s what’s needed to punch through the machinations and inertia regarding chemical regulation. Shanna Swan, Mount Sinai professor of preventive medicine, obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive medicine, notes that some of the biggest reductions in chemical exposures have happened in response to consumer pressure on both industry and policymakers. Or, as the University of California’s Bruce Blumberg says, “I think we need to take the fight to the people.”

The Endocrine Society stressed the urgency of addressing these public health impacts in a statement released September 28. Not surprisingly, industry disagreed, calling this science “unsupported” and “still-unproven.”

Meanwhile, PBPK studies continue to succeed in sowing doubt about adverse health effects of endocrine disorders. Their extremely narrow focus leads to narrow conclusions that often result in calls for more research before regulation. In regulatory decisions, “the assumption is that if we don’t know something, it won’t hurt us”, says University of Massachusetts, Amherst professor of biology R. Thomas Zoeller.

In other words, the burden of proof remains on health effects researchers to prove harm, not on industry to prove safety – and proving harm is difficult, especially when other scientists are seeding doubt.

But the clock is ticking. As Washington State University geneticist Pat Hunt told In These Times, “If we wait [to make regulatory decisions] for ‘proof’ in the form of compelling human data, it may be too late for us as a species.”

Valerie Brown is a journalist specializing in environmental health, climate change and microbiology. In 2009 she was honored by the Society of Environmental Journalists for her writing on epigenetics. Follow here on Twitter @sacagawea.

Elizabeth Grossman is an award-winning journalist specializing in science and environmental issues. She is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, Watershed: The Undamming of America, Adventuring Along the Lewis & Clark Trail, and co-editor of Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion.

This investigation was supported by the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting. It was originally published by In These Times and republished by Independent Science News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

GR Editor’s Note: the sources of this article are not indicated

If you are a policymaker in Washington; it has to be a difficult week for you, as the U.S. backed “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) and their Islamist allies fight the U.S. backed “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) in the northern Aleppo countryside.

Perhaps, what is even more odd about the U.S. backed rebels fighting the U.S. backed rebels in northern Aleppo is the fact that at least two parties from the opposing sides are factions of the Free Syrian Army; this means the rebels combatting both the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) are actually fighting one another with the same weapons transported to them from the Gulf States and the west.

Instead of fighting ISIS in northern Aleppo like they were originally propagated to do, the SDF and the FSA are fighting one another, while ISIS attempts to regroup and relaunch their offensive on the rural city of Mar’e.

On Saturday morning, the SDF declared they control 9 new villages in northern Aleppo after a series of firefights with the Islamist rebels of the FSA, the Syrian Al-Qaeda group “Jabhat Al-Nusra”, and Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham.

The villages captured by the SDF in the last 48 hours are the following:

– Al-Faysal
– Al-Malkiyah
– Al-Kashta’ar
– Tanab
– Maryamayn
– Mirash
– Maryamayn Inab
– Shawarss
– Al-Shawarighat

As part of its collective punishment policy against the Palestinian people, Israel has refused to deliver the bodies of 38 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Since the beginning of what some are calling a new Palestinian Intifada (uprising), Israel has held the bodies of 48 slain Palestinians, 38 of which remain at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute morgue in Israel.

Maisa al-Khateeb is the mother of 17-year-old slain Palestinian Mustafa Al-Khateeb, who was executed in cold blood by the Israeli army near the El-Isbat (Lions) Gate in East Jerusalem last month.

She told Anadolu Agency that she has not been able to see her son since he was killed.

“My heart is bleeding everyday when I realise that I am warm and my love Mustafa is cold inside a morgue,” Maisa said. “This fact wrenches my heart.”

“I want the body of my son to be returned so I can bury him with dignity,” she said, with tears flowing down her face. “I want to hug and kiss my baby, who was stolen from me by the human monsters.”

The Palestinian National Committee for Retrieving Bodies of Martyrs said Israeli authorities are refusing to hand over the bodies under the pretext that their families will hold funerals for them, which will serve as a catalyst for “Palestinian violence.”

“Israel is using a humanitarian issue for political gains and that reflects the racism of the Israeli occupation amid the silence of the international community,” Salem Khalleh, the group’s coordinator, said. “The world has to pressure Israel to adhere to international human rights laws and the Geneva Convention, which obliges contracting states to respect war victims and to ensure they are honourably interred by family members.”

According to official Palestinian figures, Israel is still holding the bodies of 325 Palestinians and Arabs killed during several wars, in addition to the 38 bodies of Palestinians killed in recent weeks.

The dead are buried in two Israeli facilities, each known as the Cemetery of Numbers. The first, located in the Galilee area in northern Israel, holds 243 bodies. The second facility in the Jordan valley holds 92 bodies.

The Israeli government considers the cemeteries closed military areas and prevents Palestinian and Arab families from accessing them.

The Israeli cabinet last month approved Likud-Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan’s proposal to refuse to return the bodies of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.

The Palestinian families realise that Israel may want to use the bodies of their loved ones in future negotiations in exchange of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers held by Hamas since the last Gaza war.

Mahmoud Ellian, father of 22-year-old Baha Ellian, who was killed last month, told Anadolu Agency that the “Israeli occupation is mistaken in thinking that it can blackmail us by using this card.”

“All the families of detained slain Palestinians are in agreement to sacrifice the corpses of their loved ones if the price is the freedom of Palestinian prisoners,” Ellian said. “We will fight and win our battle against the racist Israeli occupation and we will retrieve the bodies of our sons.”

As Prime Minister David Cameron attempts to persuade Parliament to back another illegal assault on a country posing no threat to the UK, Syria, it transpires that Britain may anyway face war crimes charges for arms sales to Saudi Arabia, arms being used to decimate civilians and civilian infrastructure in Yemen.

“Advisers to Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, have stepped up legal warnings that the sale of specialist missiles to the Saudis, deployed throughout nine months of almost daily bombing raids in west Yemen … may breach international humanitarian law”, states a report in the Independent. (1)

“Since March this year, bombing raids and a blockade of ports imposed by the Saudi-led coalition of Sunni Gulf states have crippled much of Yemen … thousands of Yemeni civilians have been killed, with schools, hospitals and non-military infrastructure hit. Fuel and food shortages, according to the United Nations, have brought near famine to many parts of the country.”

Moreover: “The UN estimates that twenty one million people are now without basic life sustaining services and over 1.5 million are displaced. Unicef estimates that as many as ten children a day are being killed.”

Given that the population of Yemen is just over twenty four million, the figures demonstrate that almost the entire population is experiencing unimaginable devastation in an onslaught on which the governments of “international community” has simply turned it’s back – except those bombing with US and UK supplied missiles.

In a statement laughable was the situation not so devastatingly tragic:

… there is concern within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that the Saudi military’s attitude to humanitarian law is careless. Officials fear that the combination of British arms sales and technical expertise used to assist bombing raids on Yemen could result in the UK being hauled before the International Criminal Court on charges relating to direct attacks on civilians.

“Pot calling kettle back” comes to mind. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and British government’s attitude to humanitarian law has been arguably been beyond criminally “careless” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and they now aim to attack Syria in retaliation for an action in France, committed by French and Belgian born terrorists of North African descent, some of whom had been equally terrorizing in Syria and then allowed to return home, seemingly untroubled by law enforcement agencies – as their British counterparts.

Highlighting this “carelessness”, Oliver Sprague, Amnesty International’s arms trade director, told The Independent:

“There is a blatant rewriting of the rules inside the (Foreign Office). We are not supposed to supply weapons if there is a risk they could be used to violate humanitarian laws and the international arms trade treaty – which we championed. It is illogical for (Foreign Secretary) Philip Hammond to say there is no evidence of weapons supplied by the UK being misused, so we’ll keep selling them to the point where we learn they are being used.”

Last July a transfer of Paveway IV missiles was authorized from the (Royal Air Force) to Saudi, boosting the order book of arms manufacturer Raytheon UK.

The near £200 million contract: “ secured the supply of hundreds of the air-launched missiles to the Saudi air force over the next two years.” The Raytheon bombs will be dropped on Yemen by Typhoon and Tornado fighter jets, supplied by Britain’s BAE Systems.

“The (contract) ensured that the Saudi arsenal, depleted through multiple daily bombing raids on Yemen over the past nine months, would not be exhausted.” So much for “humanitarian laws.”

Away from Foreign Secretary Hammond it seems there are deep concerns in parts of the Foreign Office, which are being compared to the crisis over legality during the period before the invasion of Iraq which led to the resignation of senior legal advisor Elizabeth Wilmshurs, concerned at the legality of such action.

The Independent asked the Foreign Office: “whether the UK government regarded relations with the Saudis as too important to risk by asking awkward questions about the bombing of Yemeni civilian targets.” An adviser responded: “There are many Elizabeth Wilmshursts around here at the moment. Not all are being listened to.”

A government spokeswoman responded, depressingly predictably, relating to a State which has beheaded more souls than ISIS:

(Her Majesty’s Government) takes its arms export responsibilities very seriously and operates one of the most robust arms export control regimes in the world. We rigorously examine every application on a case-by-case basis against the Consolidated EU and National Arms Export Licensing Criteria. Risks around human rights abuses are a key part of our assessment.

Given also the filing cabinets stuffed also with cases of alleged British human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan in lawyers’ offices in the UK such as Birmingham’s Public Interest Lawyers and London’s Leigh Day, the latter comment defies derision.

This latest issue of legal embarrassment for David Cameron’s government relates to a Report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (2) issued on 25^th November alleging that: “The Saudi Arabia-led coalition used a British-made missile to destroy” Yemen’s Radfan Ceramics factory, “a civilian object, on 23 September, 2015.”

The findings were based: “on field research and interviews with eyewitnesses at the scene.”

This strike, using a British missile … undermines the claim of Ministers that the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s use of UK military equipment is consistent with (International Humanitarian Law) and that the UK monitors such compliance ‘very carefully.’

“The UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond claims he favours ‘proper investigations’ into possible breaches of the laws of war in Yemen. This strike provides a perfect test case – the UK should urgently press the Saudi Arabia-led coalition to open a credible investigation into this strike, as well as others that appear to have violated the laws of war,” said Lama Fakih, Senior Crisis Advisor at Amnesty International.

“The latest revelations show UK policy to be both misleading and seriously ineffective. Despite multiple, well-documented cases of violations of the laws of war by the Gulf coalition in Yemen, UK Ministers have consistently refused to acknowledge this. The UK should suspend further sales of aerial munitions to coalition members pending a thorough investigation into this case, and other apparently unlawful air strikes,” said David Mepham, UK Director at Human Rights Watch.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch examined the weapon used in the 23^rd September destruction of the ceramics factory: “and identified the munition used as a PGM-500 ‘Hakim’ air-launched missile … manufactured by the UK firm Marconi Dynamics.”

Marconi markings are clearly visible on a component part recovered from the Sana’a strike site. Stocks of this missile are in service with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Air Force, which has the capability to fire them from both Mirage 2000s and F-16F aircraft.

Ibrahim Ghaleb Mohammad al-Sawary, the son of one of the factory Directors, who was in the vicinity during the attack, told Human Rights Watch: “ … suddenly I heard whizzing followed by a very loud explosion. I started running away but less than two minutes later we heard the second explosion. I saw people running away from their homes – kids, older people and young people – all of them scared like us and running away without knowing where.”

Ali Ahmad al-Faqih, 55, who was injured in the attack, said that he had been on a motorbike trying to check on his family who live next to the factory during a brief lull between airstrikes – not realizing the attack had not finished: “I heard a whizz and knew it was a rocket coming,” he said. “I lay down and prayed out loud. I saw all my body covered in blood.” He underwent surgery to remove shrapnel from his chest.

A fourteen year old girl, Elham Hussein Hussein Taher, was also injured in the attack, according to locals.

No evidence of any military usage of the factory was evident or found. The factory, opened in 1994, was the only one of it’s kind in the country, employing around 330 people. It had already suffered one tragedy, having had to suspend operations in April, due to security fears from bombing for the employees – and difficulty in obtaining fuel for the machines. Now it lies mostly in ruins.

“Such attacks are serious violations of International Humanitarian Law and … can constitute war crimes”, states the Amnesty Report.

Further:

“All countries have legal responsibilities under international law to control the transfer of weapons and to restrict or prohibit their transfer in certain circumstances. The UK is a party to the Arms Trade Treaty which came into force in late 2014 … article 7 of the ATT requires that States assess the potential that the arms being exported could be used to commit a serious violation of international human rights or humanitarian law; if there is an overriding risk of this, their export shall not be authorized.”

The Amnesty Report concludes:

An independent international inquiry should be established to investigate alleged violations by all parties to the conflict in Yemen, establish the facts, and identify those responsible for violations with a view to ensuring that they are held accountable.

As Prime Minister Cameron contemplates committing more war crimes in Syria, he might perhaps ponder on those he may already have on his plate and reconsider.

He may already be set to follow his admired “mentor” Tony Blair in having to consult a lawyer before he boards a flight, lest he be arrested. And as someone remarked over another atrocity in another land, the Yemen bomb seemingly “has a British accent.”

Notes

1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-could-be-prosecuted-for-war-crimes-over-missiles-sold-to-saudi-arabia-that-were-used-to-kill-a6752166.html

2. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/11/yemen-coalition-used-uk-cruise-missile-in-unlawful-airstrike/

The world leader of Syria’s besieged Christians has issued a heartfelt plea to the West to “stop arming and supporting terrorist groups that are destroying our countries and massacring our people.”

The Patriarch of Antioch, Moran Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, said he was not asking the West for military intervention to defend Christians.

If the West wants to do something about the present crisis, the most effective thing would be to support local governments, which need sufficient armies and forces to maintain security and defend respective populations against attacks.

“State institutions need to be strengthened and stabilised. Instead, what we see is their forced dismemberment being fuelled from the outside,” he told Vatican Insider.

Patriarch Aphrem, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church, said the most blasphemous thing a person can do is to call suicide bombers “martyrs”.

“Throughout its journey through history the Church has also been a suffering Church,” he added. Speaking in the days after meeting the Pope in Rome, he had just returned from Qamishli, his home town, where he met thousands of new Christian refugees who fled after Islamic State jihadists attacked Hassake, in Jazira province.

Islamic State terrorists who die while carrying out their atrocities regard such deaths as martyrdom. They believe it secures them passage to paradise.

The Patriarch contradicted this view. He said: “Martyrdom is not a sacrifice offered to God, like those sacrifices which are offered to pagan gods. Christian martyrs do not seek martyrdom to demonstrate their faith. And they do not wilfully shed their blood in order to obtain God’s favour or some other prize, like Paradise.”

Along with bishops of his church he recently had talks with President Assad of Syria. “President Assad urged us to do everything in our hands to prevent Christians from leaving Syria. ‘I know you are suffering,’ he said, ‘but please don’t leave this land, which has been your home for thousands of years, even before Islam came.’ He said that Christians will also be needed when the time comes to rebuild this devastated country.”

He said the majority of Syrian citizens support Assad’s government and have always supported it.

We recognise legitimate rulers and pray for them, as the New Testament teaches us. We also see that on the other side there is no democratic opposition, only extremist groups. Above all, we see that in the past few years, these groups have been basing their actions on an ideology that comes from the outside, brought here by preachers of hatred who have come from and are backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. These groups receive arms through Turkey too, as the media have shown us.

He said Islamic State was not the Islam that Syrians have learned about andlived alongside for hundreds of years. “There are forces that fuel it with arms and money because it is useful in what Pope Francis calls the ‘war fought piecemeal’. But all this also draws on a perverse religious ideology that claims to be inspired by the Koran.”

Par Michel Collon, 26 novembre 2015

It has been said “truth” is a funny concept. What is truth to one may not be to another because opinions vary from one person to another. “Truth” in this context consists of one’s opinion or point of view. By this definition truth can be altered, changed or even “made”. For example, the truth believed and espoused by MSNBC is far different than that of FOX News, both by the reporters themselves and by viewers. Real truth however cannot be “made”, massaged or opined as it is mathematical in origin and more an issue of black and white.

The global financial system has gone awry where economic truth must be masked and hidden to cover the reality. Somehow our central planners think if the people “believe” something …then it “is”. I am here to tell you, no it is not. A perfect example of something completely out of whack but melded into the new “normal” are negative interest rates throughout much of Europe. These negative interest rates are no longer for only short dated maturities. Rates are negative in some cases out past 7-10 years!

How can this be? Investors are willing to lock in a guaranteed loss for 10 years or more? Rates have been pushed negative of course because the central planners want people to spend their money rather than save it.

You see, “velocity” has crashed because people have tightened their belts in a move toward austerity …something the sovereign treasuries and central banks cannot even spell. Please keep in mind whether it be euros, yen or dollars, the central banks have the ability to print as many of these currency units as they choose to. Negative interest rates guarantee less “units” returned upon maturity and give less than zero risk compensation to offset the “printing” that has already been promised. In essence, savers are PAYING for the privilege to lose “units” even when central banks are promising to do their best to reduce the value of these units. The madness of crowds I guess?

Another example “truth” just does not add up is in the area of “swaps”.

Just as GOFO rates in gold should never ever be negative, this also holds true for the swaps market. Currently, rates have gone negative which means the bankers and brokers perceived credit quality is actually rated higher than the issuing Treasury. Common sense would tell you if the U.S. Treasury were to default then no bank or broker with Treasuries in their portfolio would be left standing. I do not believe swaps have gone negative out of value “judgment”, I believe unencumbered collateral has become so scarce that mathematical insanity has become reality. Six months ago we were given a tip off this was coming. I wrote about it here titled “The Mother of all Margin Calls” http://silverseek.com/commentary/mother-all-margin-calls-14328   …and now the ugly truth has arrived!

I would of course be remiss commenting without including the farce in the gold and silver markets. Yesterday’s post Thanksgiving and illiquid trading day saw some 18,000 contracts sold at the COMEX within a 30 minute timeframe.

In fact, there were 4 single minutes which saw a total 7,000 contracts dumped on the market. For perspective, 18,000 contracts represents 1.8 million ounces of gold …while COMEX claims to have a grand total of 150,000 ounces available for delivery! 1.8 million ounces of gold is equal to well over one week’s production of every gold mine on the planet, 150,000 on the other hand is just over 16 hours! For further perspective, China has been importing over 1.3 million ounces of real physical gold each and every week and amounts to nearly 80% of all gold produced. Why is this important? China is importing each week nearly 10 times the total amount of gold COMEX has for delivery in total. Put another way, COMEX gold “pricing” rests on a foundation 10 times smaller than what China imports each and every week! How is it credible that COMEX can sell 12 times as much “gold” …in just 30 minutes as they claim to have available for delivery?

COMEX currently has a problem in my opinion. Their registered (dealer deliverable) category has not received any gold over the last two plus months and has done nothing but shrink to a level equal to just 16 hours of global production.  First notice day for December gold is this coming Monday. With just one day left there are still 24,000 contracts open. If history is any guide, Monday will see a drop of 12,000 contracts and a 40% bleed down during the month. If this were to occur, we will see over 600,000 ounces standing with only 150,000 ounces available for delivery. We have seen this potential situation several times over the last couple of years but never with an available inventory as feeble as it is now.

My point to writing about the current COMEX conditions is simple. Though COMEX currently “prices” gold, they have little to no inventory to back them up. China imports more in a single day than what COMEX claims they have to deliver. Nearly any Black Swan, be it a financial, geopolitical or military event will strip the COMEX of any ability or credibility to continue as “manipulator in charge”. I have asked in several writings why the CFTC has allowed the pricing mechanism to be so corrupt after each blatant raid such as this past Friday’s. They found “nothing actionable” in the silver market which in my opinion is code speak for “we can’t arrest the government” …therefore “not actionable” in the interest of national security.

As for COMEX, I would ask this. Why is it allowed for any institution or group of institutions to sell in 30 minutes, twelve times the amount of paper contract gold than is claimed to exist for delivery? The December month alone looks to be quite problematic, why is this practice allowed as a failure to deliver could be created by a mere 1,500 contracts? Is the final solution a force majeure and just go on down the road?

As for you as an individual investor, can you see the danger here? A failure to deliver or a “caused” failure ending in a force majeure will be catastrophic. The candy store will be closed …and then what? Do you really believe metal will be available for you to purchase at any price even resembling the current? I have said all along, the entire game will change when the last ounce available for delivery is gone. When I say the “entire game” I am speaking to ALL of it.

When the fraud in gold is exposed and understood, do you understand that the confidence in the entire financial system of dollars, Treasuries and all the rest will be broken for our lifetimes?

To finish, much of what we see in our daily lives is nothing more than a fraudulent mirage. Our way of life and standard of living depends entirely on this mirage and collective madness to continue. However, some very ugly truths that come naturally as a gift from Mother Nature herself have been appearing. These “ugly truths”, each and every one of them should be an impossibility in logical nature but they exist and are appearing with more frequency. Can you handle the ugly truth?

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.

The President of France and I have just completed substantive talks, which were held in a trust-based, constructive tone. Naturally, we gave the greatest attention to the issue of jointly combating international terrorism.

The barbaric attack on Russia’s airplane over the Sinai Peninsula, the horrible events in Paris and the terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Nigeria and Mali have left many people dead, including hundreds of Russian and French citizens. This is our common tragedy and we stand united in our commitment to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

We have already intensified the Russian Armed Forces operation against terrorists in Syria. Our military actions are effective; militants from the so-called Islamic State and other radical groups are suffering heavy losses. We have disrupted the extremists’ operating mechanisms, damaged their military infrastructure and significantly undermined their financial base – I am referring first and foremost to illicit trade in oil, which generates immense profits for the terrorists and their sponsors.

COMPLETE VIDEO, WITH ENGLISH VOICE OVER  (small pause at beginning)

(TRANSCRIPT CONTINUED)

Those who apply double standards when dealing with terrorists, using them to achieve their own political aims and engaging in unlawful business with them, are playing with fire. History shows that sooner or later such actions will backfire against those who abet criminals.

Russia and France know what it means to act in the spirit of alliance; we have come together more than once throughout our history. Today, we agreed to step up our joint efforts on the anti-terrorist track, to improve the exchange of operational information in the fight against terrorism and establish constructive work between our military experts in order to avoid overlapping incidents and to focus our efforts on ensuring that our work in fighting terror is more effective, avoiding any strikes against territories and armed forces that are themselves fighting terrorists.

The barbaric attack on Russia’s airplane over the Sinai Peninsula, the horrible events in Paris and the terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Nigeria and Mali have left many people dead. This is our common tragedy and we stand united in our commitment to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

Mr Hollande and I are looking at this kind of cooperation as concrete and practical input towards forming a broad anti-terrorist coalition, a broad anti-terrorist front under the auspices of the United Nations. I will note that the number of nations sharing this initiative is growing.

We are confident that eradicating terrorism in Syria will create the necessary conditions for achieving a final and long-term settlement of the Syrian crisis. We agreed to continue working together very actively within the framework of the International Syria Support Group and promote the fulfilment of all agreements reached within this group, first and foremost with regard to the deadlines and parameters for holding intra-Syrian talks.

In today’s talks, we could not ignore the situation in Ukraine; in this context, we discussed prospects of cooperating in the Normandy format. We will continue to insist on the implementation of all provisions of the Minsk Agreements of February 12.

The Russian Armed Forces operation against terrorists in Syria is effective; militants from the so-called Islamic State and other radical groups are suffering heavy losses. We have significantly undermined their financial base – I am referring first and foremost to illicit trade in oil, which generates immense profits for the terrorists and their sponsors.

In conclusion, I would like to thank Mr President and all his French colleagues for an open, substantive dialogue. We agreed to continue our discussion in Paris within the framework of the UN Climate Change Conference.

Thank you for your attention.

President of France (retranslated): Ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to meet with Mr Putin as part of the diplomatic and political initiative that I made the following day after the terrible terrorist attacks in Paris.

I would like to thank Mr Putin and the Russian people for their expression of condolences, sympathy and friendship towards the victims and their families, as well as towards the entire French people.

I personally told Mr Putin again that he can count on my support following the attack on the Russian airliner over the Sinai that took over 220 lives.

We all suffer from terrorism. Terrorism can strike in any part of the world, so it is critical to act. And this is the whole point of our meeting in Moscow. We must respond together.

Last week, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution that all countries in the world should take the necessary measures to coordinate their efforts to eliminate the Islamic State, and we must pursue this process.

 

Press statements and answers to journalists’ questions following meeting with President of France Francois Hollande.

This is the most important reality in today’s world, that is, a broad coalition, to which France will also be a party, a global coalition in the fight against terror. This consensus is essential, but it is not enough. We also need to assume responsibility.

This is precisely what France is doing when it attacks ISIS operations centres, when it attacks the oil wells that the terrorists use to smuggle oil and obtain financial resources.

We intensified our efforts. We deployed the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Mediterranean and we’ve done everything we can to ensure that our military will be actively involved in eliminating ISIS.

We agree with Mr Putin that it is essential to cut this evil off. Since 2011, the chaos in Syria has created a huge wave of refugees, over 300,000 people have been killed, and so now we must find a political solution to this crisis, but there are requirements for this that should be followed.

We believe that the following conditions should be met if we are to ensure a political transition process. A coalition government, an independent government, should be formed during a transition period.

This transitional period should lead to the adoption of a new constitution, elections should be held with the participation of all political factions, groups and members of the expatriate community. And it goes without saying that Assad does not have any role to play in the future of his country.

However, in order to achieve this, it is imperative that Russia should play the main, one of the main roles in this process. I’ve told Mr Putin that France is ready and willing to work with Russia hand in hand towards our common objective, which is to fight terrorist groups, above all ISIS. It is for this reason that I believe our meeting today to be of outmost importance. Mr Putin and I have agreed on three main points.

First, we intend to step up the exchange of intelligence and any other information between our respective forces.

Second, we will intensify strikes against ISIS and coordinate them so as to enhance their efficiency.

Third, as Mr Putin has also pointed out, we must make sure that our air strikes concentrate on the Islamic State and terrorist groups.

 

 

Let me emphasise that Europe is about to mobilise its forces to combat terrorism. I would like to ask defence ministers from across Europe to take the necessary decisions for coordinating their actions. The United Kingdom will also participate. I spoke with Mr Cameron about this. I also discussed a number of issues with Ms Merkel yesterday. Mr Putin and I have also agreed that we will exchange information and specific actions as regards another important issue – the developments in eastern Ukraine. We will continue to work on that within the Normandy format.

Last time we met in Paris, all four of us, we touched upon the Syrian issue and spoke about the need for coordinated actions. Today, we took this issue even further. Our fight against terrorism in Syria does not affect France’s commitment to find a political solution to the Ukrainian crisis.

We must fully implement all the measures that are stipulated in the Minsk Agreements. This is why I wanted to come to Moscow today to meet with Mr Putin. Mr Putin will come to Paris on Monday to participate in the Climate Change Conference. I think the current situation and the fight against terrorism required my visit to Moscow today.

Question (retranslated): Good evening. A question for Mr Putin. Mr President, do you agree that Mr Assad remaining in office hinders the achievement of your common goals? Have you agreed about which groups should and should not be the targets of air strikes?

Vladimir Putin: I believe that the fate of the President of Syria should be entirely in the hands of the Syrian people.

Moreover, we all agree that it is impossible to successfully fight terrorism in Syria without ground operations, and no other forces exist today that can conduct ground operations in the fight against ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist organisations aside from the Syrian government army.

We are confident that eradicating terrorism in Syria will create the necessary conditions for achieving a final and long-term settlement of the Syrian crisis.

In this respect, I feel that President Assad’s army and he himself are our natural allies in the fight against terrorism. There may be other forces there that talk about their readiness to fight terror. We are currently attempting to establish ties with them, have already done so with some of them, and as I have said many times, we will be prepared to support their efforts in the fight against ISIS and other terrorist organisations, as we support Assad’s army.

We agreed – I feel this is a very important part of our agreements with Mr President today – that just as with certain other countries in the region, we will exchange information on which territories are occupied by healthy opposition groups, rather than terrorists, and will avoid air strikes there. We will also exchange information when we – France and Russia – are absolutely certain that particular territories are occupied by terrorist organisations and we will coordinate our efforts in those areas.

Question: I have a question for the President of Russia. Mr President, we are currently talking about a broad-based coalition and in this regard, I have a question about Turkey’s particular place in this story. Today, for example, the Russian military reported that they intensified strikes on the Syrian quadrant where the Russian plane was downed.

At the same time, the Turkish media are practically accusing Russia of bombing a humanitarian convoy. In this context, did you discuss Turkey during your talks with Francois Hollande? And what can you say about Turkey’s role in this whole story and in our relations with it?

Vladimir Putin: As you know, Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; France is also a NATO member, so we understand France’s position in this situation. But Mr President expressed his condolences following the death of our servicemen, and we are grateful to him for that.

It is impossible to successfully fight terrorism in Syria without ground operations, and no other forces exist today that can fight on the ground aside from the Syrian government army. President Assad’s army and he himself are our natural allies in the fight against terrorism.

As for the territory you mentioned, where our servicemen died, indeed, Syria’s armed forces used multiple rocket launchers which we supplied recently to the Syrian army, in coordinated actions with our Air Force, and intensified strikes in this area right after we received credible information that one of our servicemen was killed and we were able to save the second one. How could it be otherwise? That is how it should be.

In this regard, I want to comment on what we are hearing about certain tribes close to Turkey, the Turkmens and so on. First of all, a question arises: what are representatives of Turkish terrorist organisations, who show themselves on camera and post themselves all over the Internet, doing in these territories?

Second, what are nationals of the Russian Federation, whom we are seeking because of their crimes and who are clearly classified as international terrorists, doing in that territory? Our servicemen were working in this quadrant to prevent the possible return of these people to Russia’s territory to commit crimes; they were fulfilling their duties to their Fatherland, to Russia directly. Directly! Question: what are these people doing there? And we feel it is absolutely justified to intensify the efforts of our aviation there and support the intensification of the Syrian forces’ efforts.

As for shelling a humanitarian convoy, as far as I know, the humanitarian organisation that the Turkish authorities are referring to has already stated that its convoys and representatives were not in that area at the time. There may have been some sort of convoy there, but it certainly wasn’t peaceful. If there was some sort of convoy, then I suppose, in accordance with international law, it was necessary to determine what kind of convoy it was, where it was headed and what it was doing. And if none of this was done, then we suspect that this convoy was not carrying a purely humanitarian cargo. This serves as another piece of evidence of abetting international terrorists.

Question (retranslated): Good evening, I’m addressing both presidents. Mr Putin, why have you deployed S-400 multiple launch rocket systems? Mr Hollande, is the deployment of the S-400s in keeping with the spirit of the international coalition’s efforts?

Vladimir Putin: S-400 is not a multiple rocket launcher system but an anti-aircraft missile system. We did not have these systems in Syria because our aviation is working at heights where the terrorists’ criminal hand cannot reach. They do not have the corresponding military technology that is capable of taking down planes at a height of more than three or four thousand metres. It had never occurred to us that we could be hit by a country that we considered our ally.

 

Press statements and answers to journalists’ questions following meeting with President of France Francois Hollande.

After all, our planes, flying at a height of five to six thousand metres, were absolutely unprotected; they were not protected against possible attacks by fighter jets. If we had even thought this might be possible, then first of all, we would have long ago established systems there to protect our planes against possible attacks.

Moreover, there are other forms of technology and military protection, for example, fighter escorts, or at least technical means of defence against missile attacks, including thermal guards. Experts know how this can be done.

I repeat, we did not do any of this because we believed Turkey to be a friendly state and simply did not expect an attack from that country. That is precisely why we consider what has happened to be a treacherous blow.

Now we have seen that this is possible; we have lost people there. We are obligated to ensure the safety of our aircraft. So we have deployed a modern S-400 system there. It operates at a long distance and is one of the most effective systems in the world of its kind.

But we will not limit ourselves to that. If necessary, we will complement the activity of our aircraft by fighters and other means, including electronic warfare. There are actually many kinds, and now we will be applying them.

This does not in any way contradict what we are doing with the coalition headed by the United States. We are exchanging information with it, but we are very concerned by the nature of the exchanges and the results of our joint work.

We believed Turkey to be a friendly state and did not expect an attack from that country. That is precisely why we consider what has happened to be a treacherous blow.

Just look: we warned our US partners in advance about where our pilots would be operating, when, and at what flight levels. The American side, which heads the coalition that includes Turkey, knew about the location and time of the flights. And that is precisely where and when we were hit.

So I ask you: why did we provide this information to the Americans? Either they cannot control what their allies are doing, or they are handing out the information left and right, without understanding the consequences. Naturally, we will need to have some serious consultations with our partners on this matter. But the air defence system is not in any way directed against our partners, with whom we are fighting terrorists in Syria.

Francois Hollande (retranslated): If I may, I’d like to comment on the incident that took place on Tuesday as a result of which a Russian bomber was shot down by Turkey. This is a very serious incident, and I regret that it happened. I’ve said this to President Erdogan and to the Russian President.

It is absolutely clear that it is necessary to avoid any risk and any possible repetition of this sort of thing at this time and place. It is critical that we refrain from escalating the situation. The only goal that we should all set for ourselves is the fight against ISIS and the elimination of the terrorists. We have no other goals.

Therefore, we should draw the following conclusions. We must enhance coordination between our countries so that the armed forces present in the region and the aircraft capable of conducting air strikes do not interfere with each other so as to prevent any encounters leading to deplorable consequences and collisions. We must do our outmost to prevent this from happening again. It is for this reason that I have taken initiatives aimed at stepping up joint efforts and cooperation. I have been doing it for the very purpose I’ve just stated.

Finally, what have President Putin and I agreed upon? This is a very important point: we have agreed on the need to carry out strikes against terrorists only, only against ISIS and jihadist groups. It is crucial in this respect that groups that are also combating terrorists are not targeted by air strikes. It is in this area that we intend to share information with each other, as was discussed during the meeting.

We have to understand who can fight and who can’t, who should or should not be targeted. Consequently, our current objective is to try to avoid any incidents of this kind between the countries that are engaged in counter-terrorist efforts in Syria. Second, we must identify goals that would be clear to everyone.

Question: You spoke of the need to establish a broad coalition. Is this the kind of coalition you spoke about at the UN conference, or will competition continue between coalitions? If competition does continue, we would have to wonder about just how effective such coalitions can be, especially after the incident with the Russian plane. Or do you envisage a new common coalition, and if so, is it possible that such a coalition could potentially act in other countries also under threat from ISIS, and not just in Syria?

Coming back to the incident with the Russian plane, just a few hours ago, the Turkish President said in an interview that if the Turkish Air Force had known that the plane was Russian, they would not have acted as they did. He also said that the Turkish forces destroy all oil shipments they seize from ISIS, and that if Russia has other information and can prove otherwise, the President is ready to step down. I would like to hear your comments on these statements.

Vladimir Putin: Regarding the coalition, President Hollande and I discussed this issue today. We respect the coalition the United States is heading and are ready to work with this coalition. We think it would be best to establish a unified, common coalition. This would make it simpler and easier, and, I think, more effective to coordinate our common efforts in this situation. But if our partners are not ready for this… In fact, this was what I spoke about at the UN. But if our partners are not ready for this, fine, we are ready to work in other formats, in whatever format our partners would find acceptable. We are ready to cooperate with the US-led coalition.

We are obligated to ensure the safety of our aircraft and have deployed a modern S-400 system there. It operates at a long distance and is one of the most effective systems in the world of its kind.

But of course, incidents such as the destruction of our plane and the death of our servicemen – the pilot, and a marine who was attempting to rescue his brothers in arms – are completely unacceptable. Our position is that this must not happen again. If this is not the case, we do not need such cooperation, with anyone, any coalition or country.

I discussed all of this in detail with the President of France. We agreed to work together over this coming time, in bilateral format, and with the US-led coalition in general.

The question is one of delineating the territories that are targets for strikes and those where it is better to refrain from launching strikes, exchanging information on these and other matters, and coordinating action in the combat zone.

As for the oil question and the assertion that it is destroyed on Turkish territory, at the G20 summit, which took place in Turkey as it happens, in Antalya, I showed a photograph (I had already spoken publicly about this) taken by our pilots at a height of 5,000 metres. Vehicles transporting oil made a long line that vanished over the horizon. It looks like a living oil pipeline. These are industrial-scale oil supplies coming in from parts of Syria now in the terrorists’ hands. This oil comes from these regions, not from other places. We see from the air where these vehicles are heading. They are heading for Turkey day and night. I can imagine that perhaps Turkey’s senior leaders are not aware of this situation. It is hard to believe, but theoretically, it is possible.

This does not mean that the Turkish authorities should not attempt to put an end to this illegal trade. The UN Security Council passed a special resolution that bans direct purchase of oil from terrorists, because these barrels coming in are filled not just with oil but with our citizens’ blood, and because terrorists use the money from this trade to buy arms and munitions and then carry out bloody attacks such as those against our plane in the Sinai, and the attacks in Paris and other cities and countries.

Incidents such as the destruction of our plane and the death of our servicemen are completely unacceptable. Our position is that this must not happen again.

If the Turkish authorities are destroying this oil, why do we not see smoke from the fires? Let me say again that this is oil supply on an industrial scale. You would need to build entire special facilities to destroy this oil. Nothing of this sort is taking place. If Turkey’s senior leadership is not aware of the situation, let them open their eyes to it now.

I would be willing to believe that some corruption and shady deals might be involved. Let them sort out just what is going on there. But there is absolutely no question that the oil is heading for Turkey. We see this from the air. We see that loaded vehicles are heading there in a constant stream and returning empty. These vehicles are loaded in Syria, in territory controlled by the terrorists, and they go to Turkey and return to Syria empty. We see this every day.

Regarding the question of whether or not the Turkish President should step down, this is absolutely no concern of ours but is the Turkish people’s affair. We have never meddled in others’ affairs and will not do so now. It is a great pity though to lose the unprecedented level of bilateral relations that we developed with Turkey over these last years. We really did reach a very high level of relations and we looked at Turkey not just as our neighbour but also as a friendly country and practically an ally. It is very sad to see this so heedlessly and brutally destroyed.

 

 

Francois Hollande (retranslated): If you’ll allow me, Mr Putin, I’d like to respond to the question that was addressed to you, but from the French perspective.

There is a coalition. It has been around for several months. France is a member of it. The coalition’s main field of activity was Iraq. Together with the Iraqi government, we’ve sought to provide essential support to all those fighting ISIS and terrorism, which, unfortunately, is bleeding the country dry – that is, Iraq.

Then the geographical scope of the coalition’s operations expanded to include Syria’s territory. France is also operating in Syria in keeping with coalition policy and the decision that I made in September. At first, we conducted reconnaissance flights and now we’ve moved on to air strikes. This is being done under the right to self-defence. And we have this right because we know for a fact that the terrorists who acted in Paris and in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis were trained in Syria and, unfortunately, were trained very well to carry out these heinous terrorist attacks.

Now we want coordination. This is critical. We absolutely need it. First, to avoid these kinds of incidents, and second, to fight ISIS, terrorism more effectively. This coordination should be a form of collaboration – the sharing of intelligence and the exchange of information regarding terrorist concentration areas. All of this will enable us to act effectively. The UN Security Council resolution calls for this kind of action, and I welcome the European countries that have assumed responsibility for this as part of their commitment.

Regarding further action on our part, it is necessary to attack ISIS, its training centres, the centres where this terrorist army is being trained, but most importantly, attack its sources of financing, the sources of its livelihood – primarily oil.

If there is some other way of improving cooperation it is difficult to think of one without effectively engaging the trucks carrying oil that goes to those who’ve appropriated the right to buy it, thus providing ISIS with uncountable amounts of money. We don’t want to stop and will continue to attack these convoys and the oil processing plants or refineries – oil that, without a doubt, serves as the main source of financial income for ISIS.

Finally, I cannot help but reiterate that we should support the groups that can reverse the situation on the ground and recover this territory. It is very important for France, as well as for the other coalition members, to support such groups in fighting ISIS. They have the same goal – to fight ISIS and destroy this terrorist group.

Vladimir Putin: As for the idea that the Turkish air force did not recognise our plane, this is simply not possible. It is out of the question. Our planes have identification marks that are easily visible. They were obviously our planes and not anyone else’s.

At the G20 summit in Antalya I showed a photograph taken by our pilots. Vehicles transporting oil made a long line that vanished over the horizon. These are industrial-scale oil supplies coming in from parts of Syria now in the terrorists’ hands. These vehicles are heading for Turkey day and night.

Furthermore, let me say again that in accordance with our agreements with the Americans, we always gave prior information on where our planes will operate, on the formations, locations and times. Our position is that this is a working coalition, and Turkey, as a member of this coalition, should have known that Russian aircraft were operating in this location at that moment. Who else’s planes could they have been? What would they have done if they discovered that it was an American plane? Would they have fired at an American plane? This is all a load of nonsense, just an attempt to make excuses. It is a shame that instead of making a thorough investigation of the situation and taking steps to make sure such things never happen again, we hear from them these unclear explanations and statements to the effect that there is nothing even to apologise for. Well, this is not our choice, but Turkey’s choice.

The four USAF military drone operators who recently blew the whistle and exposed the callousness and complete lack of concern for civilian casualties of the US drone assassination programme, (and received very little mainstream media exposure), yesterday found their bank accounts and credit cards all blocked by the US government. The effects of that on daily life are devastating. My source is their lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, through the Sam Adams Associates (of which we are both members).

No criminal charges have been brought against any of the men, despite numerous written threats of prosecution. Their finances appear to have been frozen by executive action under anti-terrorist legislation. This is yet a further glaring example of the use of “anti-terror” powers against people who are not remotely terrorist.

More whistleblowers have been jailed under Obama than under all previous US Presidents combined. Even so, the US authorities seem wary of the publicity that might surround prosecution of these servicemen, who only spoke of the effect upon their own health of having repeatedly to carry out heartless and often untargeted killings.

So their lives are being destroyed in other ways. You will forgive me for recalling that I know how they feel because I have been through just the same thing myself.

When I blew the whistle on UK complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition, I received numerous written threats from the FCO under the Official Secrets Act, and for a while I lived in daily expectation of arrest. Still more hurtful were the constant denials from Jack Straw and his repeated assertion that the UK was never complicit in torture, that there was no such thing as extraordinary rendition, together with the frequent imputations to journalists and politicians that I was in poor mental health and an alcoholic. I never had my bank account suspended, but there were interventions with prospective employers that prevented my getting another job.

Still, I had it easy. Chelsea Manning will celebrate her birthday in jail on 17 December.

It is worth recalling what these drone operators told us:

Bryant said the killing of civilians by drone is exacerbating the problem of terrorism. “We kill four and create 10 [militants],” Bryant said. “If you kill someone’s father, uncle or brother who had nothing to do with anything, their families are going to want revenge.”

The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to keep details of the drone program secret, but in their statements today the former operators opened up about the culture that has developed among those responsible for carrying it out. Haas said operators become acculturated to denying the humanity of the people on their targeting screens. “There was a much more detached outlook about who these people were we were monitoring,” he said. “Shooting was something to be lauded and something we should strive for.”

The deaths of children and other non-combatants in strikes was rationalized by many drone operators, Haas said. As a flight instructor, Haas claimed to have been non-judicially reprimanded by his superiors for failing a student who had expressed “bloodlust,” an overwhelming eagerness to kill.

Haas also described widespread alcohol and drug abuse among drone pilots. Drone operators, he said, would frequently get intoxicated using bath salts and synthetic marijuana to avoid possible drug testing and in an effort to “bend that reality and try to picture yourself not being there.” Haas said that he knew at least a half-dozen people in his unit who were using bath salts and that drug use had “impaired” them during missions.

There are some inside Hollywood, who are trying to wake up the world – Donald Sutherland is one of them.

The young people who see this film must recognize that for the future ‘blind faith in their leaders,’ as Bruce Springsteen said, ‘will get you dead.’

Hollywood actor, Donald Sutherland just dropped a bombshell on the military industrial complex. Sutherland, who plays President Coriolanus Snow in the blockbuster movie series Hunger Games, was recently asked what the movie was really about – he held no punches in his answer.

If there’s any question as to what it’s an allegory for I will tell you.

It is the powers that be in the United States of America.

It’s profiteers.

War is for profit. It’s not “to save the world for democracy” or “for king and country.”

No, bulls**t.

It’s for the profit of the top 10%, and the young people who see this film must recognize that for the future ‘blind faith in their leaders,’ as Bruce Springsteen said, “will get you dead.

Those who are awake to the war machine, and have watched the movies or read the books, have undoubtedly seen the underlying anti-establishment theme within. However, those who do not notice it should heed Sutherland’s words.

It is no question that war is for the profit of very few people. In fact, as the famous, two-time Medal of Honor recipient, Major General Smedley Butler of the USMC said,

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Sutherland does get one thing wrong, however, and that is the percentage that he assigns to those who profit from war. It is nowhere near 10% as he states. Those who profit from war, as Smedley Butler points out above, are a tiny group of people. The ruling elite.

It’s the weapons manufacturers, the arms dealers, the inside politicians, and the state itself. Everyone else involved in war, including those who die for it, are merely pawns. They are cogs in the machine whose only purpose is to spread death and destruction.

Please share this article and video so that others, who may have missed the point of this movie series, may see its true purpose – calling out the elite for the criminals that they are.

Zero Hedge reports a story from “Keep Talking Greece” that first appeared in The Times  

According to the story, the plummeting living standards forced on the Greek people by German chancellor Merkel and the European banks have forced large numbers of young Greek women into prostitution.

The large increase in the number of women offering sexual services has dropped the price to 4 euros an hour. According to this cynical report in The London Times, that’s $4.24, enough for a cheese pie or a sandwich, the value that bankster-imposed austerity has placed on an hour’s use of a woman’s body. 

When one reads a story such as this, one hopes it is a parody or a caricature. Although the London Times has fallen a long way, it is not yet the kind of newspaper that can be purchased at grocery store checkout counters.

The story gains credence from the websites in the US on which female university students advertise their availability as mistresses to men who have the financial means to help them with their expenses. From various news reports, mistress seems to be a main occupation of female students at high-cost universities such as NYU.

The NYU girls have it far better than the Greek ones. The mistress relationship is monogamous and can be long-lasting and loving. Prudes make an issue of the disparity in ages, but disparity in age was long a feature of upper class marriages. Prostitutes have large numbers of partners, each possibly carrying disease, and they receive nothing in return except cash. In Greece, if the report is correct, the payment is so low that the women cannot survive on the money beyond lunchtime.

This is capitalism at work. In the US the hardship comes from escalating tuition costs, with 75% of the university budget spent on administration, rather than on faculty or student aid, and from the lack of jobs available to graduates that pay enough to service the student loans. These days your waiter in the restaurant might be an adjunct or part-time university professor hoping to get a full-time job as an actor. As mistresses, the NYU girls will be doing better.

In Greece the hardship is imposed from outside the country by the European Union, which Greece foolishly joined, giving away its sovereignty in exchange for austerity. The banksters and their agents in the EU and German governments claim that the Greek people benefitted from the loans and, therefore, are responsible for paying back the loans.

But the loans were not made to the Greek people. The loans were made to corrupt Greek governments who were paid bribes by the lenders to accept the loans, and the proceeds often were used for purchases from the country from which the loan originated. For example, Greek governments were paid bribes to borrow money from German or other foreign banks in order to purchase German submarines. It is through this type of corruption that the Greek debt grew.

The story told by the financial media and neoliberal economists who shill for the banksters is that the Greek people irresponsibly borrowed the money and spent it on welfare for themselves, and having enjoyed the fruits of the loans don’t want to repay them. This story is a lie. But the lie serves to ensure that the Greek people are looted in order to make good the banks’ own mistakes in overlending. The banks got both the loan fees and the kickbacks from the submarine producers. (I am using submarine producers as a generic for the range of outside goods and services on which the loans were spent.)

In Greece the loans are being paid by money “saved” by cutting Greek pensions, education and social services, and public employment, and by money raised from selling off public assets such as ports, municipal water systems and protected islands. The cutbacks in pensions, education, social services and employment drain money from the economy, and the sale of public assets drains money from the government’s budget. Michael Hudson tells the story brilliantly in his new book, Killing The Host.

The result is widespread hardship, and the result of the hardship is that young Greek women have to sell themselves.

It is just as Marx, Engels, and Lenin said.

One would think that people everywhere would be outraged. But to most of those who commented on Zero Hedge (and who represent the vaunted “Western Values”) they see nothing to be outraged about.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-28/meanwhile-greece-price-prostitute-drops-€4-hour

The percentage of pro-Western Russians who look to the West for leadership must be rapidly approaching zero.

What’s more important? The dignity of women or another billion dollars for the banksters?

Western “civilization” has given its answer: Another billion dollars for the banksters.

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

The war drums are getting louder in the aftermath of ISIS attacks in Paris, as Western countries gear up to launch further airstrikes in Syria. But obscured in the fine print of countless resolutions and media headlines is this: the West has no legal basis for military intervention. Their strikes are illegal.

“It is always preferable in these circumstances to have the full backing of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) but I have to say what matters most of all is that any actions we would take would…be legal,” explained UK Prime Minister David Cameron to the House of Commons last Wednesday.

Legal? No, there’s not a scrap of evidence that UK airstrikes would be lawful in their current incarnation.

Then just two days later, on Friday, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2249, aimed at rallying the world behind the fairly obvious notion that ISIS is an “unprecedented threat to international peace and security.”

“It’s a call to action to member states that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures against (ISIS) and other terrorist groups,” British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft told reporters.

The phrase “all necessary measures” was broadly interpreted – if not explicitly sanctioning the “use of force” in Syria, then as a wink to it.

Let’s examine the pertinent language of UNSCR 2249:

The resolution “calls upon Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular with the United Nations Charter…on the territory under the control of ISIL also known as Da’esh, in Syria and Iraq.

Note that the resolution demands “compliance with international law, in particular with the UN Charter.” This is probably the most significant explainer to the “all necessary measures” phrase.  Use of force is one of the most difficult things for the UNSC to sanction – it is a last resort measure, and a rare one.  The lack of Chapter 7 language in the resolution pretty much means that ‘use of force’ is not on the menu unless states have other means to wrangle “compliance with international law.”

What you need to know about international law

It is important to understand that the United Nations was set up in the aftermath of World War 2 expressly to prevent war and to regulate and inhibit the use of force in settling disputes among its member states. This is the UN’s big function – to “maintain international peace and security,” as enshrined in the UN Charter’s very first article.

There are a lot of laws that seek to govern and prevent wars, but the Western nations looking to launch airstrikes in Syria have made things easy for us – they have cited the law that they believe justifies their military intervention: specifically, Article 51 of the UN Charter. It reads, in part:

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.

So doesn’t France, for instance, enjoy the inherent right to bomb ISIS targets in Syria as an act of self-defense – in order to prevent further attacks?

And don’t members of the US-led coalition, who cite the “collective self-defense” of Iraq (the Iraqi government has formally made this request), have the right to prevent further ISIS attacks from Syrian territory into Iraqi areas?

Well, no. Article 51, as conceived in the UN Charter, refers to attacks between territorial states, not with non-state actors like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Syria, after all, did not attack France or Iraq – or Turkey, Australia, Jordan or Saudi Arabia.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

Western leaders are employing two distinct strategies to obfuscate the lack of legal justification for intervention in Syria. The first is the use of propaganda to build narratives about Syria that support their legal argumentation. The second is a shrewd effort to cite legal “theory” as a means to ‘stretch’ existing law into a shape that supports their objectives.

The “Unwilling and Unable” Theory – the “Unable” argument

The unwilling and unable theory – as related to the Syria/ISIS situation – essentially argues that the Syrian state is both unwilling and unable to target the non-state actor based within its territory (ISIS, in this case) that poses a threat to another state.

Let’s break this down further.

Ostensibly, Syria is ‘unable’ to sufficiently degrade or destroy ISIS because, as we can clearly see, ISIS controls a significant amount of territory within Syria’s borders that its national army has not been able to reclaim.

This made some sense – until September 30 when Russia entered the Syrian military theater and began to launch widespread airstrikes against terrorist targets inside Syria.

As a major global military power, Russia is clearly ‘able’ to thwart ISIS –certainly just as well as most of the Western NATO states participating in airstrikes already. Moreover, as Russia is operating there due to a direct Syrian government appeal for assistance, the Russian military role in Syria is perfectly legal.

This development struck a blow at the US-led coalition’s legal justification for strikes in Syria. Not that the coalition’s actions were ever legal – “unwilling and unable” is merely a theory and has no basis in customary international law.

About this new Russian role, Major Patrick Walsh, associate professor in the International and Operational Law Department at the US Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Virginia, says:

The United States and others who are acting in collective defense of Iraq and Turkey are in a precarious position. The international community is calling on Russia to stop attacking rebel groups and start attacking ISIS. But if Russia does, and if the Assad government commits to preventing ISIS from attacking Syria’s neighbors and delivers on that commitment, then the unwilling or unable theory for intervention in Syria would no longer apply. Nations would be unable to legally intervene inside Syria against ISIS without the Assad government’s consent.

In recent weeks, the Russians have made ISIS the target of many of its airstrikes, and are day by day improving coordination efficiencies with the ground troops and air force of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies -Iran, Hezbollah and other foreign groups who are also in Syria legally, at the invitation of the Syrian state.

Certainly, the balance of power on the ground in Syria has started to shift away from militants and terrorist groups since Russia launched its campaign seven weeks ago – much more than we have seen in a year of coalition strikes.

Militant Islamist fighters. © Stringer / Reuters

The “Unwilling and Unable” Theory – the “Unwilling” argument

Now for the ‘unwilling’ part of the theory. And this is where the role of Western governments in seeding ‘propaganda’comes into play.

The US and its allies have been arguing for the past few years that the Syrian government is either in cahoots with ISIS, benefits from ISIS’ existence, or is a major recruiting magnet for the terror group.

Western media, in particular, has made a point of underplaying the SAA’s military confrontations with ISIS, often suggesting that the government actively avoids ISIS-controlled areas.

The net result of this narrative has been to convey the message that the Syrian government has been ‘unwilling’ to diminish the terror group’s base within the country.

But is this true?

ISIS was born from the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in April, 2013 when the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a short-lived union of ISI and Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch, Jabhat al-Nusra. Armed militants in Syria have switched around their militia allegiances many times throughout this conflict, so it would be disingenuous to suggest the Syrian army has not fought each and every one of these groups at some point since early 2011.

If ISIS was viewed as a ‘neglected’ target at any juncture, it has been mainly because the terror group was focused on land grabs for its “Caliphate” in the largely barren north-east areas of the country – away from the congested urban centers and infrastructure hubs that have defined the SAA’s military priorities.

But ISIS has always remained a fixture in the SAA’s sights. The Syrian army has fought or targeted ISIS, specifically, in dozens of battlefields since the organization’s inception, and continues to do so. In Deir Hafer Plains, Mennagh, Kuweires, Tal Arn, al-Safira, Tal Hasel and the Aleppo Industrial District. In the suburbs and countryside of Damascus – most famously in Yarmouk this year – where the SAA and its allies thwarted ISIS’ advance into the capital city. In the Qalamun mountains, in Christian Qara and Faleeta. In Deir Ezzor, where ISIS would join forces with the US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA): al-Husseiniyeh, Hatla, Sakr Island, al-Hamadiyah, al-Rashidiyah, al-Jubeileh, Sheikh Yasseen, Mohassan, al-Kanamat, al-Sina’a, al-Amal, al-Haweeqa, al-Ayyash, the Ghassan Aboud neighborhood, al-Tayyim Oil Fields and the Deir ez-Zor military airport. In Hasakah Province – Hasakah city itself, al-Qamishli, Regiment 121 and its environs, the Kawkab and Abdel-Aziz Mountains. In Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital in Syria, the SAA combatted ISIS in Division 17, Brigade 93 and Tabaqa Airbase. In Hama Province, the entire al-Salamiyah District – Ithriyah, Sheikh Hajar, Khanasser. In the province of Homs, the eastern countryside: Palmyra, Sukaneh, Quraytayn, Mahin, Sadad, Jubb al-Ahmar, the T-4 Airbase and the Iraqi border crossing. In Suweida, the northern countryside.

If anything, the Russian intervention has assisted the Syrian state in going on the offensive against ISIS and other like-minded terror groups. Before Russia moved in, the SAA was hunkering down in and around key strategic areas to protect these hubs. Today, Syria and its allies are hitting targets by land and air in the kinds of coordinated offensives we have not seen before.

Seeding ‘propaganda’

The role of propaganda and carefully manipulated narratives should not be underestimated in laying the groundwork for foreign military intervention in Syria.

From “the dictator is killing his own people” to the “regime is using chemical weapons” to the need to establish “No Fly Zones” to safeguard “refugees fleeing Assad”…propaganda has been liberally used to build the justification for foreign military intervention.

Article 2 of the UN Charter states, in part:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

It’s hard to see how Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity has not been systematically violated throughout the nearly five years of this conflict, by the very states that make up the US-led coalition. The US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, the UAE and other nations have poured weapons, funds, troops and assistance into undermining a UN member state at every turn.

“Legitimacy” is the essential foundation upon which governance rests. Vilify a sitting government, shut down multiple embassies, isolate a regime in international forums, and you can destroy the fragile veneer of legitimacy of a king, president or prime minister.

But efforts to delegitimize the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have also served to lay the groundwork for coalition airstrikes in Syria.

If Assad is viewed to lack “legitimacy,” the coalition creates the impression that there is no real government from which it can gain the necessary authority to launch its airstrikes.

This mere ‘impression’ provided the pretext for Washington to announce it was sending 50 Special Forces troops into Syria, as though the US wasn’t violating every tenet of international law in doing so. “It’s okay – there’s no real government there,”we are convinced.

Media reports repeatedly highlight the ‘percentages’ of territory outside the grasp of Syrian government forces – this too serves a purpose. One of the essentials of a state is that it consists of territory over which it governs.

If only 50 percent of Syria is under government control, the argument goes, “then surely we can just walk into the other ‘ungoverned’ parts” – as when US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and US Senator John McCain just strolled illegally across the border of the sovereign Syrian state.

Sweep aside these ‘impressions’ and bury them well. The Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad is viewed by the United Nations as the only legitimate government in Syria. Every official UN interaction with the state is directed at this government. The Syrian seat at the UN is occupied by Ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari, a representative of Assad’s government. It doesn’t matter how many Syrian embassies in how many capitals are shut down – or how many governments-in-exile are established. The UN only recognizes one.

As one UN official told me in private: “Control of surface territory doesn’t count. The government of Kuwait when its entire territory was occupied by Iraq – and it was in exile – was still the legitimate government of Kuwait. The Syrian government could have 10 percent of its surface left – the decision of the UN Security Council is all that matters from the perspective of international law, even if other governments recognize a new Syrian government.”

Countdown to more illegal airstrikes?

If there was any lingering doubt about the illegality of coalition activities in Syria, the Syrian government put these to rest in September, in two letters to the UNSC that denounced foreign airstrikes as unlawful:

If any State invokes the excuse of counter-terrorism in order to be present on Syrian territory without the consent of the Syrian Government whether on the country’s land or in its airspace or territorial waters, its action shall be considered a violation of Syrian sovereignty.

Yet still, upon the adoption of UNSC Resolution 2249 last Friday, US Deputy Representative to the United Nations Michele Sison insisted that “in accordance with the UN Charter and its recognition of the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense,” the US would use “necessary and proportionate military action” in Syria.

The website for the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) promptly pointed out the obvious:

The resolution is worded so as to suggest there is Security Council support for the use of force against IS. However, though the resolution, and the unanimity with which it was adopted, might confer a degree of legitimacy on actions against IS, the resolution does not actually authorize any actions against IS, nor does it provide a legal basis for the use of force against IS either in Syria or in Iraq.

On Thursday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron plans to unveil his new “comprehensive strategy” to tackle ISIS, which we are told will include launching airstrikes in Syria.

We already know the legal pretext he will spin – “unwilling and unable,” Article 51, UN Charter, individual and collective self-defense, and so forth.

But if Cameron’s September 7 comments at the House of Commons are any indication, he will use the following logic to argue that the UK has no other choice than to resort to ‘use of force’ in Syria.  In response to questions about two illegal drone attacks targeting British nationals in Syria, the prime minister emphasized:

These people were in a part of Syria where there was no government, no one to work with, and no other way of addressing this threat…When we are dealing with people in ISIL-dominated Syria—there is no government, there are no troops on the ground—there is no other way of dealing with them than the route that we took.

But Cameron does have another route available to him – and it is the only ‘legal’ option for military involvement in Syria.

If the UK’s intention is solely to degrade and destroy ISIS, then it must request authorization from the Syrian government to participate in a coordinated military campaign that could help speed up the task.

If Western (and allied Arab) leaders can’t stomach dealing with the Assad government on this issue, then by all means work through an intermediary – like the Russians – who can coordinate and authorize military operations on behalf of their Syrian ally.

The Syrian government has said on multiple occasions that it welcomes sincere international efforts to fight terrorism inside its territory. But these efforts must come under the direction of a central legal authority that can lead a broad campaign on the ground and in the air.

The West argues that, unlike in Iraq, it seeks to maintain the institutions of the Syrian state if Assad were to step down. The SAA is one of these ‘institutions’ – why not coordinate with it now?

But after seven weeks of Russian airstrikes coordinated with extensive ground troops (which the coalition lacks), none of these scenarios may even be warranted. ISIS and other extremist groups have lost ground in recent weeks, and if this trend continues, coalition states should fall back and focus on other key ISIS-busting activities referenced in UNSCR 2249 – squeezing terror financing, locking down key borders, sharing intelligence…”all necessary measures” to destroy this group.

If the ‘international community’ wants to return ‘peace and stability’ to the Syrian state, it seems prudent to point out that its very first course of action should be to stop breaking international law in Syria.

Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Middle East geopolitics. She is a former senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and has a master’s degree in International Relations from Columbia University. Sharmine has written commentary for a wide array of publications, including Al Akhbar English, the New York Times, the Guardian, Asia Times Online, Salon.com, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera English, BRICS Post and others. You can follow her on Twitter at @snarwani

For years, NATO has granted impunity to convoys packed with supplies bound for ISIS and Al Qaeda. Russian airstrikes have stopped them dead in their tracks. If a legitimate, well-documented aid convoy carrying humanitarian supplies bound for civilians inside Syria was truly destroyed by Russian airstrikes, it is likely the world would never have heard the end of it.

Instead, much of the world has heard little at all about a supposed “aid” convoy destroyed near Azaz, Syria, at the very edge of the Afrin-Jarabulus corridor through which the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda’s remaining supply lines pass, and in which NATO has long-sought to create a “buffer zone” more accurately described as a Syrian-based, NATO-occupied springboard from which to launch terrorism deeper into Syrian territory.

The Turkish-based newspaper Daily Sabah reported in its article, “Russian airstrikes target aid convoy in northwestern Syrian town of Azaz, 7 killed,” claims:

At least seven people died, 10 got injured after an apparent airstrike, reportedly by Russian jets, targeted an aid convoy in northwestern Syrian town of Azaz near a border crossing with Turkey on Wednesday.

Daily Sabah also reported:

Speaking to Daily Sabah, Serkan Nergis from the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) said that the targeted area is located some 5 kilometers southwest of the Öncüpınar Border Crossing. 

Nergis said that IHH has a civil defense unit in Azaz and they helped locals to extinguish the trucks. Trucks were probably carrying aid supplies or commercial materials, Nergis added.

Daily Sabah’s report also reveals that the Turkish-Syrian border crossing of Oncupinar is held by what it calls “rebels.” The border crossing of Oncupinar should be familiar to many as it was the scene of Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s (DW) investigative report where DW camera crews videotaped hundreds of trucks waiting at the border, bound for ISIS territory, apparently with full approval of Ankara.

The report was published in November of 2014, a full year ago, and revealed precisely how ISIS has been able to maintain its otherwise inexplicable and seemingly inexhaustible fighting capacity. The report titled, “‘IS’ supply channels through Turkey,” included a video and a description which read:

Every day, trucks laden with food, clothing, and other supplies cross the border from Turkey to Syria. It is unclear who is picking up the goods. The haulers believe most of the cargo is going to the “Islamic State” militia. Oil, weapons, and soldiers are also being smuggled over the border, and Kurdish volunteers are now patrolling the area in a bid to stem the supplies.

The report, and many others like it, left many around the world wondering why, if the US is willing to carry out risky military operations deep within Syrian territory to allegedly “fight ISIS,” the US and its allies don’t commit to a much less riskier strategy of securing the Turkish-Syrian border within Turkey’s territory itself – especially considering that the United States maintains an airbase, training camps, and intelligence outposts within Turkish territory and along the very border ISIS supply convoys are crossing over.

Ideally, NATO should have interdicted these supply convoys before they even crossed over into Syria – arresting the drivers and tracking those who filled the trucks back to their source and arresting them as well. Alternatively, the trucks should have been destroyed either at the border or at the very least, once they had entered into Syria and were clearly headed toward ISIS-occupied territory.

That none of this took place left many to draw conclusions that the impunity granted to this overt logistical network was intentional and implicated NATO directly in the feeding of the very ISIS terrorists it claimed to be “fighting.”

Russia Steps In 

Obviously, any nation truly interested in defeating ISIS would attack it at its very source – its supply lines. Military weaponry may have changed over the centuries, but military strategy, particularly identifying and severing an enemy’s supply lines is a tried and true method of achieving victory in any conflict.

Russia, therefore, would find these convoys a natural target and would attempt to hit them as close to the Syrian-Turkish border as possible, to negate any chance the supplies would successfully reach ISIS’ hands. Russian President Vladmir Putin noted, regarding the Azaz convoy in particular, that if the convoy was legitimately carrying aid, it would have been declared, and its activities made known to all nations operating military aircraft in the region.

The trucks hit in the recent airstrikes, just as they were during the DW investigation, were carrying concrete and steel, not “milk and diapers” as the West would lead audiences to believe. That the supplies were passing through a “rebel” controlled crossing means that the supplies were surely headed to “rebel” controlled territory – either Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front in the west, or ISIS in the east.

Russian airstrikes insured that the supplies reached neither.

Strangling NATO’s Terrorists at the Border 

Russia’s increased activity along the Syrian-Turkish border signifies the closing phases of the Syrian conflict. With Syrian and Kurdish forces holding the border east of the Euphrates, the Afrin-Jarabulus corridor is the only remaining conduit for supplies bound for terrorists in Syria to pass. Syrian forces have begun pushing east toward the Euphrates from Aleppo, and then will move north to the Syrian-Turkish border near Jarabulus. Approximately 90-100 km west near Afrin, Ad Dana, and Azaz, it appears Russia has begun cutting off terrorist supply lines right at the border. It is likely Syrian forces will arrive and secure this region as well.

For those that have criticized Russia’s air campaign claiming conflicts can’t be won from the air without a ground component, it should be clear by now that the Syrian Arab Army is that ground component, and has dealt ISIS and Al Qaeda its most spectacular defeats in the conflict.

When this corridor is closed and supplies cut off, ISIS, Nusra, and all associated NATO-backed factions will atrophy and die as the Syrian military restores order across the country. This may be why there has been a sudden “rush” by the West to move assets into the region, the impetus driving the United States to place special forces into Syrian territory itself, and for Turkey’s ambush of a Russian Su-24 near the Syrian-Turkish border.

What all of this adds up to is a clear illustration of precisely why the Syrian conflict was never truly a “civil war.” The summation of support for militants fighting against the Syrian government and people, has come from beyond Syria’s borders. With that support being cut off and the prospect of these militants being eradicated, the true sponsors behind this conflict are moving more directly and overtly to salvage their failed conspiracy against the Syrian state.

What we see emerging is what was suspected and even obvious all along – a proxy war started by, and fought for Western hegemonic ambitions in the region, intentionally feeding the forces of extremism, not fighting them.

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

The following text is Chapter IV of  Professor Anderson’s forthcoming book entitled The Dirty War on Syria, Global Research Publishers, Montreal, 2016 (forthcoming).

Image. Arms seized by Syrian security forces at al Omari mosque in Daraa, March 2011. The weapons had been provided by the Saudis. Photo: SANA

“The protest movement in Syria was overwhelmingly peaceful until September 2011”- Human Rights Watch, March 2012, Washington

“I have seen from the beginning armed protesters in those demonstrations … they were the first to fire on the police. Very often the violence of the security forces comes in response to the brutal violence of the armed insurgents” – the late Father Frans Van der Lugt, January 2012, Homs Syria

“The claim that armed opposition to the government has begun only recently is a complete lie. The killings of soldiers, police and civilians, often in the most brutal circumstances, have been going on virtually since the beginning”. – Professor Jeremy Salt, October 2011, Ankara Turkey

A double story began on the Syrian conflict, at the outset of the armed violence in 2011, in the southern border town of Daraa. The first story comes from independent witnesses in Syria, such as the late Father Frans Van der Lugt in Homs. They say that armed men infiltrated the early political reform demonstrations to shoot at both police and civilians. This violence came from sectarian Islamists. The second comes from the Islamist groups (‘rebels’) and their western backers. They claim there was ‘indiscriminate’ violence from Syrian security forces to repress political rallies and that the ‘rebels’ grew out of a secular political reform movement.

Careful study of the independent evidence, however, shows that the Washington-backed ‘rebel’ story, while widespread, was part of a strategy to delegitimise the Syrian Government, with the aim of fomenting ‘regime change’. To understand this it is necessary to observe that, prior to the armed insurrection of March 2011 there were shipments of arms from Saudi Arabia to Islamists at the al Omari mosque. It is also useful to review the earlier Muslim Brotherhood insurrection at Hama in 1982, because of the parallel myths that have grown up around both insurrections.

US intelligence (DIA 1982) and the late British author Patrick Seale (1988) give independent accounts of what happened at Hama. After years of violent, sectarian attacks by Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, by mid-1980 President Hafez al Assad had ‘broken the back’ of their sectarian rebellion, which aimed to impose a Salafi-Islamic state. One final coup plot was exposed and the Brotherhood ‘felt pressured into initiating’ an uprising in their stronghold of Hama. Seale describes the start of that violence in this way:

At 2am on the night of 2-3 February 1982 an army unit combing the old city fell into an ambush. Roof top snipers killed perhaps a score of soldiers … [Brotherhood leader] Abu Bakr [Umar Jawwad] gave the order for a general uprising … hundreds of Islamist fighters rose … by the morning some seventy leading Ba’athists had been slaughtered and the triumphant guerrillas declared the city ‘liberated’ (Seale 1988: 332).

However the Army responded with a huge force of about 12,000 and the battle raged for three weeks. It was a foreign-backed civil war, with some defections from the army. Seale continues:

As the tide turned slowly in the government’s favour, the guerrillas fell back into the old quarters … after heavy shelling, commandos and party irregulars supported by tanks moved in … many civilians were slaughtered in the prolonged mopping up, whole districts razed (Seale 1988: 333).

Two months later a US intelligence report said: ‘The total casualties for the Hama incident probably number about 2,000. This includes an estimated 300 to 400 members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s elite ‘Secret Apparatus’ (DIA 1982: 7).

Seale recognises that the Army also suffered heavy losses. At the same time, ‘large numbers died in the hunt for the gunmen … government sympathizers estimating a mere 3,000 and critics as many as 20,000 … a figure of 5,000 to 10,000 could be close to the truth’ He adds:

‘The guerrillas were formidable opponents. They had a fortune in foreign money … [and] no fewer than 15,000 machine guns’ (Seale 1988: 335). Subsequent Muslim Brotherhood accounts have inflated the casualties, reaching up to ‘40,000 civilians’, thus attempting to hide their insurrection and sectarian massacres by claiming that Hafez al Assad had carried out a ‘civilian massacre’ (e.g. Nassar 2014). The then Syrian President blamed a large scale foreign conspiracy for the Hama insurrection. Seale observes that Hafez was ‘not paranoical’, as many US weapons were captured and foreign backing had come from several US collaborators: King Hussayn of Jordan, Lebanese Christian militias (the Israeli-aligned ‘Guardians of the Cedar’) and Saddam Hussein in Iraq (Seale 1988: 336-337).

The Hama insurrection helps us understand the Daraa violence because, once again in 2011, we saw armed Islamists using rooftop sniping against police and government officials, drawing in the armed forces, only to cry ‘civilian massacre’ when they and their collaborators came under attack from the Army. Although the US, through its allies, played an important part in the Hama insurrection, when it was all over US intelligence dryly observed that: ‘the Syrians are pragmatists who do not want a Muslim Brotherhood government’ (DIA 1982: vii).

In the case of Daraa, and the attacks that moved to Homs and surrounding areas in April 2011, the clearly stated aim was once again to topple the secular or ‘infidel-Alawi’ regime. The front-line US collaborators were Saudi Arabia and Qatar, then Turkey. The head of the Syrian Brotherhood, Muhammad Riyad Al-Shaqfa, issued a statement on 28 March which left no doubt that the group’s aim was sectarian. The enemy was ‘the secular regime’ and Brotherhood members ‘have to make sure that the revolution will be pure Islamic, and with that no other sect would have a share of the credit after its success’ (Al-Shaqfa 2011). While playing down the initial role of the Brotherhood, Sheikho confirms that it ‘went on to punch above its actual weight on the ground during the uprising … [due] to Turkish-Qatari support’, and to its general organisational capacity (Sheikho 2013). By the time there was a ‘Free Syrian Army Supreme Military Council’ in 2012 (more a weapons conduit than any sort of army command), it was said to be two-thirds dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood (Draitser 2012). Other foreign Salafi-Islamist groups quickly joined this ‘Syrian Revolution’. A US intelligence report in August 2012, contrary to Washington’s public statements about ‘moderate rebels’, said:

The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq, later ISIS] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria … AQI supported the Syrian Opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media (DIA 2012).

In February 2011 there was popular agitation in Syria, to some extent influenced by the events in Egypt and Tunisia. There were anti-government and pro-government demonstrations, and a genuine political reform movement which for several years had agitated against corruption and the Ba’ath Party monopoly. A 2005 report referred to ‘an array of reform movements slowly organizing beneath the surface’ (Ghadry 2005), and indeed the ‘many faces’ of a Syrian opposition, much of it non-Islamist, had been agitating since about that same time (Sayyid Rasas 2013). These political opposition groups deserve attention, in another discussion (see Chapter Five). However only one section of that opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Salafists, was linked to the violence that erupted in Daraa. Large anti-government demonstrations began, to be met with huge pro-government demonstrations. In early March some teenagers in Daraa were arrested for graffiti that had been copied from North Africa ‘the people want to overthrow the regime’. It was reported that they were abused by local police, President Bashar al Assad intervened, the local governor was sacked and the teenagers were released (Abouzeid 2011).

Yet the Islamist insurrection was underway, taking cover under the street demonstrations. On 11 March, several days before the violence broke out in Daraa, there were reports that Syrian forces had seized ‘a large shipment of weapons and explosives and night-vision goggles … in a truck coming from Iraq’. The truck was stopped at the southern Tanaf crossing, close to Jordan. The Syrian Government news agency SANA said the weapons were intended ‘for use in actions that affect Syria’s internal security and spread unrest and chaos.’ Pictures showed ‘dozens of grenades and pistols as well as rifles and ammunition belts’. The driver said the weapons had been loaded in Baghdad and he had been paid $5,000 to deliver them to Syria (Reuters 2011). Despite this interception, arms did reach Daraa, a border town of about 150,000 people. This is where the ‘western-rebel’ and the independent stories diverge, and diverge dramatically. The western media consensus was that protestors burned and trashed government offices, and then ‘provincial security forces opened fire on marchers, killing several’ (Abouzeid 2011). After that, ‘protestors’ staged demonstrations in front of the al-Omari mosque, but were in turn attacked.

The Syrian government, on the other hand, said there were unprovoked attacks on security forces, killing police and civilians, along with the burning of government offices. There was foreign corroboration of this account. While its headline blamed security forces for killing ‘protesters’, the British Daily Mail (2011) showed pictures of guns, AK47 rifles and hand grenades that security forces had recovered after storming the al-Omari mosque. The paper noted reports that ‘an armed gang’ had opened fire on an ambulance, killing ‘a doctor, a paramedic and a policeman’. Media channels in neighbouring countries did report on the killing of Syrian police, on 17-18 March. On 21 March a Lebanese news report observed that ‘Seven policemen were killed during clashes between the security forces and protesters in Syria’ (YaLibnan 2011), while an Israel National News report said ‘Seven police officers and at least four demonstrators in Syria have been killed … and the Baath party headquarters and courthouse were torched’ (Queenan 2011). These police had been targeted by rooftop snipers.

Even in these circumstances the Government was urging restraint and attempting to respond to the political reform movement. President Assad’s adviser, Dr Bouthaina Shaaban, told a news conference that the President had ordered ‘that live ammunition should not be fired, even if the police, security forces or officers of the state were being killed’. Assad proposed to address the political demands, such as the registration of political parties, removing emergency rules and allowing greater media freedoms (al-Khalidi 2011). None of that seemed to either interest or deter the Islamists.

Several reports, including video reports, observed rooftop snipers firing at crowds and police, during funerals of those already killed. It was said to be ‘unclear who was firing at whom’ (Al Jazeera 2011a), as ‘an unknown armed group on rooftops shot at protesters and security forces’ (Maktabi 2011). Yet Al Jazeera (2011b) owned by the Qatari monarchy, soon strongly suggested that that the snipers were pro-government. ‘President Bashar al Assad has sent thousands of Syrian soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Derra for an operation the regime wants nobody in the word to see’, the Qatari channel said. However the Al Jazeera suggestion that secret pro-government snipers were killing ‘soldiers and protestors alike’ was illogical and out of sequence. The armed forces came to Daraa precisely because police had been shot and killed.

Saudi Arabia, a key US regional ally, had armed and funded extremist Salafist Sunni sects to move against the secular government. Saudi official Anwar Al-Eshki later confirmed to BBC television that his country had sent arms to Daraa and to the al-Omari mosque (Truth Syria 2012). From exile in Saudi Arabia, Salafi Sheikh Adnan Arour called for a holy war against the liberal Alawi Muslims, who were said to dominate the Syrian government: ‘by Allah we shall mince [the Alawites] in meat grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs’ (MEMRITV 2011). The Salafist aim was a theocratic state or caliphate. The genocidal slogan ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave’ became widespread, a fact reported by the North American media as early as May 2011 (e.g. Blanford 2011). Islamists from the FSA Farouq brigade would soon act on these threats (Crimi 2012). Canadian analyst Michel Chossudovsky (2011) observed: ‘The deployment of armed forces including tanks in Daraa [was] directed against an organised armed insurrection, which has been active in the border city since March 17-18.”

After those first few days in Daraa the killing of Syrian security forces continued, but went largely unreported outside Syria. Nevertheless, independent analyst Sharmine Narwani wrote about the scale of this killing in early 2012 and again in mid-2014. An ambush and massacre of soldiers took place near Daraa in late March or early April. An army convoy was stopped by an oil slick on a valley road between Daraa al-Mahata and Daraa al-Balad and the trucks were machine gunned. Estimates of soldier deaths, from government and opposition sources ranged from 18 to 60. A Daraa resident said these killings were not reported because: ‘At that time, the government did not want to show they are weak and the opposition did not want to show they are armed’. Anti-Syrian Government blogger, Nizar Nayouf, records this massacre as taking place in the last week of March. Another anti-Government writer, Rami Abdul Rahman (based in England, and calling himself the ‘Syrian Observatory of Human Rights’) says:

‘It was on the first of April and about 18 or 19 security forces … were killed’ (Narwani 2014). Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad, himself a resident of Daraa, confirmed that: ‘this incident was hidden by the government … as an attempt not to antagonize or not to raise emotions and to calm things down – not to encourage any attempt to inflame emotions which may lead to escalation of the situation’ (Narwani 2014).

Yet the significance of denying armed anti-Government killings was that, in the western media, all deaths were reported as (a) victims of the Army and (b) civilians. For well over six months, when a body count was mentioned in the international media, it was usually considered acceptable to suggest these were all ‘protestors’ killed by the Syrian Army. For example, a Reuters report on 24 March said Daraa’s main hospital had received ‘the bodies of at least 37 protestors killed on Wednesday’ (Khalidi 2011). Notice that all the dead had become ‘protestors’, despite earlier reports on the killing of a number of police and health workers.

Another nineteen soldiers were gunned down on 25 April, also near Daraa. Narwani obtained their names and details from Syria’s Defence Ministry, and corroborated these details from another document from a non-government source. Throughout April 2011 she calculates that eighty-eight Syrian soldiers were killed ‘by unknown shooters in different areas across Syria’ (Narwani 2014). She went on to refute claims that the soldiers killed were ‘defectors’, shot by the Syrian army for refusing to fire on civilians. Human Rights Watch, referring to interviews with 50 unnamed ‘activists’, claimed that soldiers killed at this time were all ‘defectors’, murdered by the Army (HRW 2011b). Yet the funerals of loyal officers, shown on the internet at that time, were distinct. Even Rami Abdul Rahman (the SOHR), keen to blame the Army for killing civilians, said ‘this game of saying the Army is killing defectors for leaving – I never accepted this’ (Narwani 2014). Nevertheless the highly charged reports were confusing.

The violence spread north, with the assistance of Islamist fighters from Lebanon, reaching Baniyas and areas around Homs. On 10 April nine soldiers were shot in a bus ambush in Baniyas. In Homs, on April 17, General Abdo Khodr al-Tallawi was killed with his two sons and a nephew, and Syrian commander Iyad Kamel Harfoush was gunned down near his home. Two days later, off-duty Colonel Mohammad Abdo Khadour was killed in his car (Narwani 2014). North American commentator Joshua Landis (2011a) reported the death of his wife’s cousin, one of the soldiers in Baniyas. These were not the only deaths but I mention them because most western media channels maintain the fiction, to this day, that there was no Islamist insurrection and the ‘peaceful protestors’ did not pick up arms until September 2011.

Al Jazeera, the principal Middle East media channel backing the Muslim Brotherhood, blacked out these attacks, as also the reinforcement provided by armed foreigners. Former Al Jazeera journalist Ali Hashem was one of many who resigned from the Qatar-owned station (RT 2012), complaining of deep bias over their presentation of the violence in Syria. Hashem had footage of armed men arriving from Lebanon, but this was censored by his Qatari managers. ‘In a resignation letter I was telling the executive … it was like nothing was happening in Syria.’ He thought the ‘Libyan revolution’ was the turning point for Al Jazeera, marking the end of its standing as a credible media group (Hashem 2012).

Provocateurs were at work. Tunisian jihadist ‘Abu Qusay’ later admitted he had been a prominent ‘Syrian rebel’ charged with ‘destroying and desecrating Sunni mosques’, including by scrawling the graffiti ‘There is no God but Bashar’, a blasphemy to devout Muslims. This was then blamed on the Syrian Army, with the aim of creating Sunni defections from the Army. ‘Abu Qusay’ had been interviewed by foreign journalists who did not notice by his accent that he was not Syrian (Eretz Zen 2014).

US Journalist Nir Rosen, whose reports were generally critical of the Syrian Government, also attacked the western consensus over the early violence:

The issue of defectors is a distraction. Armed resistance began long before defections started … Every day the opposition gives a death toll, usually without any explanation … Many of those reported killed are in fact dead opposition fighters but … described in reports as innocent civilians killed by security forces … and every day members of the Syrian Army, security agencies … are also killed by anti-regime fighters (Rosen 2012).

A language and numbers game was being played to delegitimise the Syrian Government (‘The Regime’) and the Syrian Army (‘Assad loyalists’), suggesting they were responsible for all the violence. Just as NATO forces were bombing Libya with the aim of overthrowing the Libyan Government, US officials began to demand that President Assad step down. The Brookings Institution (Shaikh 2011) claimed the President had ‘lost the legitimacy to remain in power in Syria’. US Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman said it was time ‘to align ourselves unequivocally with the Syrian people in their peaceful demand for a democratic government’ (FOX News 2011). Another ‘regime change’ campaign was out in the open.

In June, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton dismissed the idea that ‘foreign instigators’ had been at work, saying that ‘the vast majority of casualties have been unarmed civilians’ (Clinton 2011). In fact, as Clinton knew very well, her Saudi Arabian allies had armed extremists from the very beginning. Her casualty assertion was also wrong. The United Nations (which would later abandon its body count) estimated from several sources that, by early 2012, there were more than 5,000 casualties, and that deaths in the first year of conflict included 478 police and 2,091 from the military and security forces (OHCHR 2012: 2; Narwani 2014). That is, more than half the casualties in the first year were those of the Syrian security forces. That independent calculation was not reflected in western media reports. Western groups such as Human Rights Watch, along with US columnists (e.g. Allaf 2012) continued to claim, even after the early 2012 defeat of the sectarian Farouq-FSA in Homs, and well into 2012, that Syrian security forces had been massacring ‘unarmed protestors’, that the Syrian people ‘had no choice’ but to take up arms, and that this ‘protest movement’ had been ‘overwhelmingly peaceful until September 2011’ (HRW 2011a, HRW 2012). The evidence cited above shows that this story was quite false.

In fact, the political reform movement had been driven off the streets by Salafi-Islamist gunmen, over the course of March and April. For years opposition groups had agitated against corruption and the Ba’ath Party monopoly. However most did not want destruction of what was a socially inclusive if authoritarian state, and most were against both the sectarian violence and the involvement of foreign powers. They backed Syria’s protection of minorities, the relatively high status of women and the country’s free education and health care, while opposing the corrupt networks and the feared political police (Wikstrom 2011; Otrakji 2012).

In June reporter Hala Jaber (2011) observed that about five thousand people turned up for a demonstration at Ma’arrat al-Numan, a small town in north-west Syria, between Aleppo and Hama. She says several ‘protestors’ had been shot the week before, while trying to block the road between Damascus and Aleppo. After some negotiations which reduced the security forces in the town, ‘men with heavy beards in cars and pick-ups with no registration plates’ with ‘rifles and rocket-propelled grenades’ began shooting at the reduced numbers of security forces. A military helicopter was sent to support the security forces. After this clash ‘four policemen and 12 of their attackers were dead or dying. Another 20 policemen were wounded’. Officers who escaped the fight were hidden by some of the tribal elders who had participated in the original demonstration. When the next ‘demonstration for democracy’ took place, the following Friday, ‘only 350 people turned up’, mostly young men and some bearded militants (Jaber 2011). Five thousand protestors had been reduced to 350, after the open Salafist attacks.

After months of media manipulations, disguising the Islamist insurrection, Syrians such as Samer al Akhras, a young man from a Sunni family, who used to watch Al Jazeera because he preferred it to state TV, became convinced to back the Syrian government. He saw first-hand the fabrication of reports on Al Jazeera and wrote, in late June 2011:

I am a Syrian citizen and I am a human. After 4 months of your fake freedom … You say peaceful demonstration and you shoot our citizen. From today … I am [now] a Sergeant in the Reserve Army. If I catch anyone … in any terrorist organization working on the field in Syria I am gonna shoot you as you are shooting us. This is our land not yours, the slaves of American fake freedom (al Akhras 2011).

References:

Abouzeid, Rania (2011) ‘Syria’s Revolt, how graffiti stirred an uprising’, Time, 22 March

Al Akhras, Samer (2011) ‘Syrian Citizen’, Facebook, 25 June, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/sam-al-akhras/syrian-citizen/241770845834062?pnref=story

Al Jazeera (2011a) ‘Nine killed at Syria funeral processions’, 23 April, online: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/04/20114231169587270.html

Al Jazeera (2011b) ‘Deraa: A city under a dark siege’, 28 April, online: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/04/2011427215943692865.html

Al-Shaqfa, Muhammad Riyad (2011) ‘Muslim Brotherhood Statement about the so-called ‘Syrian Revolution’’, General supervisor for the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, statement of 28 March, online at: http://truthsyria.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/muslim-brotherhood-statement-about-the-so-called-syrian-revolution/

Allaf, Rime (2012) ‘This Time, Assad Has Overreached’, NYT, 5 Dec, online: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/02/06/is-assads-time-running-out/this-time-assad-has-overreached

Blanford, Nicholas (2011) ‘Assad regime may be gaining upper hand in Syria’, Christian Science Monitor, 13 may, online: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0513/Assad-regime-may-be-gaining-upper-hand-in-Syria

Chossudovsky, Michel (2011) ‘Syria: who is behind the protest movement? Fabricating a pretext for US-NATO ‘Humanitarian Intervention’’, Global Research, 3 May, online: http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-who-is-behind-the-protest-movement-fabricating-a-pretext-for-a-us-nato-humanitarian-intervention/24591

Clinton, Hilary (2011) ‘There is No Going Back in Syria’, US Department of State, 17 June, online: http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2011/06/166495.htm

Maktabi, Rima (2011) ‘Reports of funeral, police shootings raise tensions in Syria’, CNN, 5 April, online: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/04/05/syria.unrest/

Crimi, Frank (2012) ‘Ethnic Cleansing of Syrian Christians’, Frontpagemag, 29 March, online: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frank-crimi/ethnic-cleansing-of-syrian-christians/

Daily Mail (2011) ‘Nine protesters killed after security forces open fire by Syrian mosque’, 24 March

DIA (1982) ‘Syria: Muslim Brotherhood Pressure Intensifies’, Defence Intelligence Agency (USA), May, online: https://syria360.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/dia-syria-muslimbrotherhoodpressureintensifies-2.pdf

DIA (2012) ‘Department of Defence Information Report, Not Finally Evaluated Intelligence, Country: Iraq’, Defence Intelligence Agency, August, 14-L-0552/DIA/297-293, Levant report, online at: http://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/

Draitser, Eric (2012) ‘Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood: Syria, Egypt and beyond’, Global Research, 12 December, online: http://www.globalresearch.ca/unmasking-the-muslim-brotherhood-syria-egypt-and-beyond/5315406

Eretz Zen (2014) ‘Tunisian Jihadist Admits: We Destroyed & Desecrated Mosques in Syria to Cause Defections in Army’, Youtube Interview, 16 March, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ8awN8GLAk

FOX News (2011) ‘Obama Under Pressure to Call for Syrian Leader’s Ouster’, 29 April, online: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/29/obama-pressure-syrian-leaders-ouster/

Ghadry, Farid N. (2005) ‘Syrian Reform: What Lies Beneath’, Middle East Quarterly, Vol 12 No 1, Winter, online: http://www.meforum.org/683/syrian-reform-what-lies-beneath

Haidar, Ali (2013) interview with this writer, Damascus 28 December. [Ali Haidar was President of the Syrian Social National Party (SSNP), a secular rival to the Ba’ath Party. In 2012 President Bashar al Assad incorporated him into the Syrian government as Minister for Reconciliation.]

Hashem, Ali (2012) ‘Al Jazeera Journalist Explains Resignation over Syria and Bahrain Coverage’, The Real News, 20 March, online: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8106

HRW (2011a) ‘We’ve never seen such horror: crimes against humanity by Syrian Security Forces’, Human Rights Watch, June, online: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2011/06/01/we-ve-never-seen-such-horror-0

HRW (2011b) Syria: Defectors Describe Orders to Shoot Unarmed Protesters’, Human Rights watch, Washington, 9 July, online: http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/07/09/syria-defectors-describe-orders-shoot-unarmed-protesters

HRW (2012) ‘Open Letter to the Leaders of the Syrian Opposition, Human Rights Watch, Washington, 20 March, online: http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/03/20/open-letter-leaders-syrian-opposition

Jaber, Hala (2011) ‘Syria caught in crossfire of extremists’, Sunday Times, 26 June, online: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/Middle_East/article657138.ece

Khalidi, Suleiman (2011) ‘Thousands chant ‘freedom’ despite Assad reform offer’, Reuters, 24 March, online: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/24/us-syria-idUSTRE72N2MC20110324

Landis, Joshua (2011a) ‘The Revolution Strikes Home: Yasir Qash`ur, my wife’s cousin, killed in Banyas’, Syria Comment, 11 April, online: http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/the-revolution-strikes-home-yasir-qashur-my-wifes-cousin-killed-in-banyas/

Landis, Joshua (2011b) ‘Syria’s Opposition Faces an Uncertain Future’, Syria Comment, 26 June, online: http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/syrias-opposition-faces-an-uncertain-future/

MEMRITV (2011) ‘Syrian Sunni Cleric Threatens: “We Shall Mince [The Alawites] in Meat Grinders”‘, YouTube, 13 July, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwz8i3osHww

Nassar, Jessy (2014) ‘Hama: A rebirth from the ashes?’ Middle East Monitor, 11 July, online: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/12703-hama-a-rebirth-from-the-ashes

Narwani, Sharmine (2012) ‘Questioning the Syrian “Casualty List”, 28 Feb, online: http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/questioning-syrian-%E2%80%9Ccasualty-list%E2%80%9D

Narwani, Sharmine (2014) Syria: The hidden massacre, RT, 7 May, online: http://rt.com/op-edge/157412-syria-hidden-massacre-2011/

OHCHR (2012) ‘Periodic Update’, Independent International Commission of Inquiry established pursuant to resolution A/HRC/S – 17/1 and extended through resolution A/HRC/Res/19/22, 24 may, online:

http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoISyria/PeriodicUpdate24May2012.pdf

Otrakji, Camille (2012) ‘The Real Bashar al Assad’, Conflicts Forum, 2 April, online: http://www.conflictsforum.org/2012/the-real-bashar-al-assad/

Queenan, Gavriel (2011) ‘Syria: Seven Police Killed, Buildings torched in protests’, Israel National News, Arutz Sheva, March 21

Reuters (2011) ‘Syria says seizes weapons smuggled from Iraq’, 11 March, online: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/us-syria-iraq-idUSTRE72A3MI20110311?hc_location=ufi

Rosen, Nir (2012) ‘Q&A: Nir Rosen on Syria’s armed opposition’, Al Jazeera, 13 Feb, online: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/02/201221315020166516.html

RT (2012) ‘Al Jazeera exodus: Channel losing staff over ‘bias’’, 12 March, online: http://rt.com/news/al-jazeera-loses-staff-335/

Salt, Jeremy (2011) Truth and Falsehood in Syria, The Palestine Chronicle, 5 October, online: http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=17159

Sayyid Rasas, Mohammed (2013) ‘From 2005 to 2013: The Syrian Opposition’s Many Faces’, Al Akhbar, 19 March, online: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/15287

Shaikh, Salman (2011) ‘In Syria, Assad Must Exit the Stage’, Brookings Institution, 27 April, online: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2011/04/27-syria-shaikh

Sheikho, Youssef (2013) ‘The Syrian Opposition’s Muslim Brotherhood Problem’, Al Akhbar English, April 10, online: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/15492

Truth Syria (2012) ‘Syria – Daraa revolution was armed to the teeth from the very beginning’, BBC interview with Anwar Al-Eshki, YouTube interview, video originally uploaded 10 April, latest version 7 November, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoGmrWWJ77w

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Wikstrom, Cajsa (2011) Syria: ‘A kingdom of silence’, Al Jazeera, 9 Feb, online: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/02/201129103121562395.html

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Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (2015).

The United States has launched a new phase of training of Ukrainian servicemen, a fact, which may have negative consequences for the future of the Donbas truce, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.

“Now the Americans and their NATO colleagues, including the Lithuanians and Canadians, will train a new group of Ukrainian troopers. It is clear that such preparations are unlikely to deescalate tensions and may have a negative impact on the fragile truce in the country’s southeast,” the Russian diplomat stressed.

“The presence of foreign paratroopers and their weapons on the Ukrainian soil means gross violation of the Minsk package of measures, point 10 in particular, by the Kiev government,” Zakharova said adding that point 10 provides for the OSCE-monitored withdrawal of all foreign units, military vehicles and mercenaries from the Ukrainian territory.

“It does not say that this provision applies exclusively to (Ukraine’s) eastern provinces. The Kiev authorities unequivocally took a commitment which does not contain any reservations and concerns the entire territory under their control,” the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said.

US Navy Captain Jeff Davis, a spokesperson for the US Department of Defense, has recently said that the United States is starting a second phase of training of the Ukrainian army and is planning to train and equip six army battalions, including one special operations unit.

Ukrainian troopers will undergo training according to the US Fearless Guardian program launched in 2014. At its first stage, the United States trained and equipped the National Guard units, which are subordinate to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. Now, the US instructors will train army battalions.

Three hundred military instructors of the 173rd airborne brigade of the United States Army based in Vicenza, Italy, will undergo training at the Yavorovsky testing ground in the Lviv region, Western Ukraine. A special operations battalion will be prepared in the West Ukrainian city of Khmelnitsky.

On Tuesday, Nov. 24 the Turkish air force shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber in Syria’s Bayır Bucak region.

The Turkish president’s administration has claimed that the plane was shot down because it violated Turkish airspace.

In a letter to the UN Security Council and the UN Secretary General dated November 24, the Turkish Permanent Representative office notes that a SU-24 “violated Turkish national airspace to a depth of 1,36 miles and 1,15 miles in length for 17 seconds from 9,24’05” local time“:

We should thus presume that during these 17 seconds the Turkish military command and civil administration managed to:

– warn the Russian pilots 10 times about violation;
– take off a F16 jet and launch a missile;
– bring a TV crew to the location.

Conclusion: this echelon was used by the Russian jets on daily basis and the attack was intentional and well-prepared.

Track of the Russian SU-24 and the area of the downfall according to a Turkish source (http://www.haberiyakala.com)

This incident is clearly the thorniest issue that has arisen between Russia and Turkey in the last 15 years.

Of course, the destruction of the Russian plane was no accident.

In that area the local terrain and the contour of the Turkish-Syrian border is very complicated. It would be entirely possible for a Su-24 bomber traveling at high speed to accidentally veer off course for a few hundred meters. For example, it is equally difficult to precisely determine the boundaries of the airspace around the Greek islands that surround Turkey in the Aegean Sea: Greek sources report that Turkish aircraft violate their borders fairly often, however no one shoots down the culprits. This was a clear provocation intended to escalate the conflict in Syria.

So why did the Turks decide to shoot down the Russian jet?

The operations jointly carried out by the Syrian Army & Russian air forces for the last days were targetted against “Sultan Abdulhamid Han Brigade” along with the other Jabhat al-Nusra-linked groups. That brigade is made up of Syrian Turkmen who enjoy the strong support of the Turkish government. According to the Turkish press, the members of that brigade had to send their families into Turkey and then returned to battle the Syrian Army. Last Friday Ankara have even summonedRussia’s ambassador in protest over the intensive bombing of “Turkmen villages” in northern Syria.So this incident could be seen as Turkey’s revenge for the deaths of its clients.

Turkmen “villagers” from Sultan Abdulhamit Han Brigade. In the centre is their commander, Ömer Abdullah

Turkey will try to milk the situation for all it is worth. Immediately after the incident, they attempted to sort out the mess, not by contacting Russia, but by reaching out to NATO, counting on assistance from their allies should Moscow respond in kind. Apparently the Turks are once again raising the issue of a no-fly zone on their border, where the militants with whom they are allied – the Turkmen and the Free Syrian Army – will be able to take shelter from attacks launched by the Russian AF and SAA.

If the US dares to establish a no-fly zone, that might create a precedent for a partition of Syria – what the Western coalition is actually seeking for. Thus the militants might be able to obtain bases not vulnerable to attack by the Syrian army, in which they could rest and replenish their troops, and this would prolong the civil war indefinitely.

We should take a close look at who was behind the Turkish decision to shoot the Russian planes out of the Syrian sky. The country’s current political elite, who decided to fight in neighboring Syria down to the last opposition fighter in order to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, is responsible for this incident. They are still not backing down from this goal, although they have had at least five years to review their policy on supporting revolutions and terrorism in the Middle East. So far this stubbornness resulted in an economic crisis, millions of Syrian refugees passing through Turkish territory and a serious tensions inside society and ruling groups.

Of course, after what has happened some cooling of Russian-Turkish relations is inevitable. This would seem to doom any hope of success for the negotiations over the Turkish Stream pipeline or the completion of the nuclear power plant in Akkuyu. The Russian tourists are already advised not to travel to Antalya or Marmaris and Iran will most likely replace Turkey as a supplier of fresh fruits and vegetables to Russia.

Bilal Erdogan ( centre), son of  Turkish president, with his “business partners”  Istanbul.

And there is little Turkey can do in response. Should it join the European sanctions against Russia? Those are not having a very adverse effect on the Russian economy. Nor would they be able to significantly reduce their imports of Russian gas any time in the foreseeable future (before 2018), because their closest neighbors do not possess large working gas fields. Many experts claim the Bosporus could be closed. But the 1936 Montreux Convention would rule out any such possibility. That convention continued to govern all traffic through the straits even during WWII and the Cold War.

Here it is worth to recall how violently Turkey reacted when Israeli commandos stormed the MV Mavi Marmara, which was en route to Gaza on a humanitarian mission. That resulted in a significant chill in relations with Israel, and Turkey recalled its ambassador. In the end, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to apologize. The next day, posters depicting his sad, remorseful face were plastered all over Turkey, and Recep Erdoğan portrayed this as a personal victory.

In this recent event, there has been an attack on a Russian military plane that was carrying out its mission at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government. To mitigate the negative consequences of this provocation,
Turkey should offer an official top-level apology to Moscow and pay compensation to the families of the dead.

Alexander Sotnichenko is the Russian Turcologist, Associate Professor of the St.Petersburg University. He holds the Ph.D. in History.

Source in Russian: Izvestia

Translated, adapted and amended by ORIENTAL REVIEW

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Kiev Forces involved in Cease Fire Violations

The growing number of violations of the ceasefire regime in Donbass is caused by the lack of Kiev’ control over the territorial battalions, head of the DPR delegation at the Minsk talks, Denis Pushilin stated on Friday. The peaceful settlement of the conflict “are not the aim of the radicals in the territorial battalions and some political entities of Ukraine.” Kiev forces shelled the northern suburb of Donetsk, including the embattled airport area, overnight to Friday. The number of violations is growing.

Syria

Russian and Syrian military have killed terrorists in the search area of the downed Russian Su-24 jet. “The moment our pilot was in safety the area was heavily bombed by the Russian Air Force and shelled by Syrian government forces artillery,” ministry spokesman General-Major Igor Konashenkov told a media briefing. He stressed that terrorists and other “mysterious groups” were killed in the assault. He added the Turkish General Staff had denied Russia access to any materials related to the downing of the Russian Su-24 jet by a Turkish F-16. Turks also aren’t able to provide any recording of the radio communications between the pilots. Russia suspended all channels of the military cooperation with Turkey on Thursday.

Commercial-scale oil smuggling from ISIS controlled territory into Turkey must be stopped, Putin said after meeting French President Francois Hollande in Moscow. ISIS’ daring and impudent oil smuggling into Turkey should become a high-priority target in order to cripple the terrorist group. Hollande backs this aim agreeing that the source of terrorist financing must be hit first and foremost.

Germany has agreed to support the French aerial campaign against ISIS. Germany will send between four and six Tornado reconnaissance planes and a frigate to protect France’s Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier stationed in the Mediterranean. Germany also plans to share its satellite intelligence data on ISIS with France. The announcement comes as the French president visits Moscow. During the visit he agreed with the Russian leader that the two countries would unite their efforts against the “common enemy” and will share data on terrorist in Syria.

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The downing of the Russian Su-24 bomber cast the spotlight on Syrian Turkmen rebels and particularly Alparslan Celik, who boasted of killing the pilots of the aircraft which took part in Moscow’s counterterrorism campaign in Syria.

It was Celik, the second-in-command of the Turkmen Coastal Division, who confirmed that militants fired at the two Russian pilots as they were descending to the ground. He also claimed that both were killed, although this allegation was later disproved.

“Both of the pilots were retrieved dead. Our comrades opened fire into the air and they died in the air,” he told reporters shortly after the incident took place, showing what appeared to be a piece of a parachute as proof.

Celik, according to RT, is not a Turkmen but a Turkish national, who appears to be a son of the mayor of Keban, a small town in the province of Elazig. Celik is also said to be a member of the Grey Wolves, a youth organization often described as ultranationalist or neo-fascist.

The Grey Wolves “have tried to export their Pan-Turkish ideology and Neo-fascist propaganda to other countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, to reunite all the Turkic people, but have been banned. The reason for the ban is simple: the Grey Wolves have been responsible for a series of crimes, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Members of the organisation have killed hundreds of people in Turkey, and their willingness to resort to violence has always been pretty obvious,” International Business Times reported in June.

The organization is linked to the far-right The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the third party in the country. The MHP received nearly 12 percent of the vote in the latest parliamentary elections held in November.

On Tuesday, a Turkish F-16 shot down a Su-24, claiming that the aircraft had violated its airspace. Russian officials and the Su-24 pilot, who survived the crash, insist that the plane did not cross into Turkey. The crew, according to the pilot, did not receive any warning prior to the attack.

France is not alien to the notion of emergency powers. The French revolutionary state was very much an ongoing child of emergency, one safeguarded by the notorious and suppressing parent known as the Committee of Public Safety.  In such swaddling clothes, it was inevitable that concepts of siege and crisis would be woven into the Republic’s legal political theory.

In time, French law came up with the concept of état du siège (state of siege), which only superficially shares ties with its Anglo-American cousin, martial law.  Its motivating force is that of emergency.  The current French legal system can resort to three sources of emergency powers.  The French Constitution of 1958 and the statutory law of May 3, 1955 (Public Law 55-385) provide two of them.[1] The use of enabling laws characterised by delegations of vast power by parliament to the executive arm of government has also been another historical measure used.

The May 3, 1955 law was invoked by President François Hollande in declaring a nationwide emergency which came into effect the midnight of November 14, a state of affairs that promises to last for three months, with possible extension.[2]  It is notable for covering the entire country, going beyond Jacques Chirac’s 2005 emergency measures to combat mass riots, which were more localised.  The President may, in consultation with his Council of Ministers, declare a state of emergency in cases where “grave attacks on the public order” arise or where there is demonstrable “personal calamity”.

There was no preliminary constitutional review.  Much like the Patriot Act passed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, combing scrutiny was the last thing on the minds of France’s political establishment.  The French Parliament voted 336 to 0 to adopt the law, with 12 abstentions.  The National Assembly’s figures acme in at 556 to 1, with 1 abstention.

The function a state of siege declaration is one of transfer from formal civilian authorities to those of a military nature. Parliament effectively divests itself of keeping order by granting it to security authorities, or what is otherwise termed those powers concerning the “maintenance of order”.[3] The state of emergency, however, sees the transfer taking place upon civilian based police authorities, which gives the somewhat deceptive impression that martial law has been entirely avoided.

As the historical record shows, this transfer of power to military or police authorities has taken different forms, notably in the Algerian context. The 1955 law came into effect to exert control over the press and insinuate the security establishment into the judicial system during the FLN insurgency.

The French State proper has witnessed a few such dramatic measures.  On August 2, 1914, in anticipation of what would be imminent conflict, a state of siege covering the entire country by presidential decree was passed. It was one which was further prolonged “for the duration of the war” by a law three days later. The lead-up to World War II in 1939 saw the use of enabling laws to facilitate what were, essentially, expansions of state power in times of crisis.

The use of the emergency power provisions over the de-colonisation period tended to be externalised affairs, in so far as they applied to French territories.  As legal authorities Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Oren Gross point out in a useful discussion inJust Security, “This means that in fact, unlike many democracies who have made ample use of emergency practice at home, France is somewhat exceptional, having used ordinary French law to deal with the threats it faced over many decades.”[4]

The move by Hollande, one that sits comfortably within the more conservative ranks of French politics rather than the Socialist creed, is itself exceptional in that regard. It is not a measure that will not sit well with individuals in the legal fraternity concerned that a mammoth razor for civil liberties is being readied.

The state of siege concept has its fans, certainly in a theoretical context.  William Feldman has argued in the Cornell International Law Journal (2005) that the concept “is better to handle domestic emergencies than American martial law, in terms of its ability to strike an effective balance between protecting the nation and its interests without too greatly sacrificing the nation’s underlying values and the fundamental rights of its people.”[5]

Whether such rights have such flexible survival properties is open to doubt before the dictates of the police state.  The government has already shown such a streak by banning demonstrations on public roads in Paris while closing stadiums, cinemas and various public facilities.[6]

And for such a robust response, France, no longer exclusively sovereign, operates within a European framework of human rights its officials sometimes find inconvenient. The expected counter-argument will go that a State, placed under such strain, can engage in certain permissible rough conduct short of violating the non-derogable rights (life, torture).

Heeding a few of those concerns, the drafters felt that “all measures to control the press and publications” would be dropped, and military tribunals not authorised.  An oversight measure, making the government accountable to Parliament for actions during the state of emergency, has been included.  But these shy away from the most significant changes that have changed Madame Liberty into Madame Counter-Terrorism.

The law itself permits a range of restrictions: targeting rights of assembly (disbanding groups and associations); controlling public movement; imposition of curfews; conducting warrantless searches around the clock (though not those concerning parliamentary duties, lawyers, magistrates and journalists) and initiating house arrests as long as the government has “serious reason to think that the person’s conduct threatens the security or the public order”.  Violations can lead to prison terms not exceeding two months, a fine amounting to 3,750 Euros, or both.

The government also shows itself to be an enthusiast for electronic searches which were not covered by the 1955 law.  Computer systems or devices found on premises may be accessed in their entirety, including cloud data.[7]

In the same technological vein, controlling the Internet takes centre stage, with the Minister of the Interior empowered to take “any measure” to block social networks and sites “inciting or glorying terrorist attacks” outside the ambit of judicial scrutiny. This goes one step further than the previous year’s anti-terrorism laws, which permit the blocking of internet sites, but only after a request is made to the ISP to restrict access on their own volition.

The looming question in such instances is whether security goals can be achieved under existing laws rather than invoking extreme measures that have the effect of slamming the effigy of accountability against the wall.  Previously intrusive measures have failed to keep the terrorist genie in the bottle, let alone detecting its escape.  Concentrations of power in a few offices at the expense of others tends to repel scrutiny and conceal breaches.  It is precisely that pattern that should be feared, however grave the threat posed is deemed.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000695350

[2] http://legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000031473404

[3] https://www.justsecurity.org/27810/connecting-present-assessing-french-emergency-powers/

[4] https://www.justsecurity.org/27810/connecting-present-assessing-french-emergency-powers/

[5] http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1666&context=cilj

[6] https://www.lawfareblog.com/state-emergency-how-paris-attacks-expanded-frances-police-powers

[7] https://www.lawfareblog.com/frances-extended-state-emergency-what-new-powers-did-government-get

Interview with distinguished Belgian Scholar Jean Bricmont. Interview with Àngel Ferrero for the Spanish newspaper, Publico.

English Translation courtesy of Counterpunch.

Àngel Ferrero: It has been 10 years since Humanitarian Imperialism appeared in Spanish. What made you write the book?

It started as a reaction to the attitude of the Left during the 1999 Kosovo war, which was largely accepted on humanitarian grounds and to the rather weak opposition of the peace movement before the 2003 invasion of Iraq: for example, many “pacifists” have accepted the policy of sanctions at the time of the 1991 first Gulf war and even after it, and were favorable to inspections in the run-up to the war, without realizing that this was just a maneuver to prepare the public to accept the war (this became even public knowledge through later leaks, like the Downing Street memos).

It seemed to me that the ideology of humanitarian intervention had totally destroyed, on the left, any notion of respect for international law, as well as any critical attitude with respect to the media.

Àngel Ferrero: What do you think it has changed in this last 10 years?

A lot of things have changed, although, I am afraid, not because of my book. It is rather reality that has asserted itself, first with the chaos in Iraq, then in Libya and now in Syria and Ukraine, leading to the refugee crisis and a near state of war with Russia, which would not be a “cakewalk”.

The humanitarian imperialists are still busy pushing us towards more wars, but there is now a substantial fraction of public opinion that is against such policies; that fraction is probably more important on the right than on the left.

Àngel Ferrero: The role of the intellectuals in legitimizing Western interventions and interferences is heavily criticized, as well as their symbolic actions (signing public letters or manifestos). Why?

The problem with “intellectuals” is that they love to pretend that they are critics of power, while in reality legitimizing it. For example, they will complain that Western governments do not do enough to promote “our values” (through interventions and subversions) which of course reinforces the notion that “our side” or “our governments” mean well, a highly dubious notion, as I try to explain in my book.

Those intellectuals are sometimes criticized, but by whom? In general, by marginal figures I think. They still dominate the media and the intellectual sphere.

Àngel Ferrero: Another of the preoccupations of your book is the degradation of the public discourse. Do you think that the situation worsened? How do you assess the impact of social media?

The public discourse goes from bad to worse, at least in France. This is related to the constant censorship, either through lawsuits or through campaigns of demonization, of politically incorrect speech, which includes all the questioning of the dominant discourse about the crimes of our enemies and the justifications for wars.

The social media is the only alternative left to “dissidents”, with the drawback that there, anything goes, including the wildest fantasies.

Àngel Ferrero: Some commentators point that Russia is now using their own version of the “human rights’ ideology” to justify their intervention in Crimea or the air campaign in Syria against the Islamic State. Is it fair?

I don’t think that Russia even claims to intervene on humanitarian grounds. In the case of Crimea, it bases itself on the right of self-determination of a people which is basically Russian, has been attached to Ukraine in an arbitrary fashion in 1954 (at a time when it did not matter too much, since Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union) and had every reason to be afraid of a fanatically anti-Russian government in Kiev.

For Syria, they respond to the request for help of the government of that country in order to fight foreign supported “terrorists”. I don’t see why it is less legitimate than the intervention of France in Mali (also requested by the government of that country) or of the more recent intervention of the U.S. in Iraq, against ISIS.

Of course, those Russian moves may prove to be unwise and maybe debatable from a “pacifist” point of view. But the fundamental question is: who started the total dismantling of the international order based on the U.N. Charter and the premise of equal sovereignty of all nations? The answer, obviously, is the U.S. and its “allies” (in the old days, one used to say “lackeys”). Russia is only responding to that disorder and does so in rather legalistic ways.

Àngel Ferrero: Let’s stay in Syria. Several European politicians demand a military intervention in Syria and Libya  to restore the order and stop the influx of refugees to the European Union. What do you think of this crisis and the solutions proposed by the EU?

They do not know how to solve the problem that they have created. By demanding the departure of Assad as a precondition to solving the Syrian crisis and by supporting so-called moderate rebels (the label moderate meaning in practice that they had been chosen by “us”), they prevented any possible solution in Syria. Indeed, a political solution should be based on diplomacy and the latter presupposes a realistic assessment of forces. In the case of Syria, realism means accepting the fact that Assad has the control of an army and has foreign allies, Iran and Russia. Ignoring this is just a way to deny reality, and to refuse to give diplomacy a chance.

Then came the refugee crisis: this was probably not expected, but occurred at a time when European citizens are increasingly hostile to immigration and to the “European construction”. Most European governments face what they call “populist movements”, i.e. movements that demand more sovereignty for their own countries. The flux of refugees could not come at a worst moment, from the European governments’ point of view.

So, they try to fix the problem as they can: having peripheral countries like Hungary build walls (that they denounce in public but are probably happy about in private), reinstall border controls, pay Turkey to keep the refugees etc.

There are of course also calls to intervene in Syria to solve the problem “at the source”. But what can they do now? More support for the rebels, trough a no-fly zone for example, and running the risk of a direct confrontation with the Russians? Help the Syrian army fight the rebels, as the Russian do? But that would mean reversing years of anti-Assad propaganda and policies.

In summary, they are hoisted by the own petard, which is always an unpleasant situation.

Àngel Ferrero: Why do you think that the Greens and the new left are so adamant in defending the humanitarian interventions?

Ultimately, one has to do a class analysis of the “new left”. While the old left was based on the working class and their leaders often came from that class, the new left is almost entirely dominated by petit-bourgeois intellectuals. Those intellectuals are neither the “bourgeoisie”, in the sense of the owners of the means of production not are they exploited by the latter.

Their social function is to provide an ideology that can serve as a lofty justification for an economic system and a set of international relations that are based ultimately on brute force. The human rights ideology is perfect from that point of view. It is sufficiently “idealistic” and impossible to put consistently into practice (if one had to wage war against every “violator of human rights”, one would quickly be at war with the entire world, including ourselves) to allow those defenders the opportunity to look critical of the governments (they don’t intervene enough). But, by deflecting attention from the real relations of forces in the world, the human rights ideology offers also to those who hold real power a moral justification for their actions. So, the petit-bourgeois intellectuals of the “new left” can both serve power and pretend to be subversive. What more can you ask from an ideology?

Àngel Ferrero: In the conclusions of your book you recommend a sort of pedagogy for the Western audience, so they accept the end of the Western hegemony and the emergence of a new order in the international relations. How can we contribute to this?

As I said above, it is reality that forces the Western audience to change. It was always a pure folly to think that human rights would be fostered by endless wars, but now we see the consequences of that folly with our own eyes. There should be a radical reorientation of the left’s priorities in international affairs: far from trying to fix problems in other countries through illegal interventions, it should demand strict respect of international law on the part of Western governments, peaceful cooperation with other countries, in particular Russia, Iran and China, and the dismantling of aggressive military alliances such as NATO.

Àngel Ferrero: I would like to ask you about  the other book that made you known to the general public, Fashionable Nonsense. This book, co-written with Alan Sokal, is a critique to postmodernism. What is the influence of postmodernism amongst scholars and the public opinion today? It fades away or is it still alive and kicking?

It is difficult for me to answer that question, because it would require a sociological study that I do not have the means to undertake. But I should say that postmodernism, like the turn towards humanitarian interventions, is another way that the left has self-destructed itself, although this aspect has had less dramatic consequences than the wars and the damage was limited to “elite” intellectual circles.

But if the left wants to create a more just society, it has to have a notion of justice; if it adopts a relativist attitude with respect to ethics, how can it justify its goals? And if it has to denounce the illusions and mystifications of the dominant discourse, it better rely on a notion of truth that is not purely a “social construction”. Postmodernism has largely contributed to the destruction of reason, objectivity and ethics on the left and that leads to its suicide.

It is fascinating to watch the game afoot between Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President François Hollande. Here is a ‘partnership’ that defies conventional politics.

Both nuclear-armed nations, also both permanent members of the UN Security Council, are engaged in their own idea of a ‘war against ISIS’, but with very different strategic views.

The Russian President has been more straight-forward, backing long-standing ally Syria and eventually moving serious air power into the Levant, in coordination with the Syrian Government, consistent with international law. The French President, on the other hand, who has long backed armed Islamist groups against the Syrian Government, now finds himself looking for support in his quest for revenge on the terrorists who carried out the November 13 massacres in Paris.

Many, not least President Bashar al Assad, have said that France has now tasted the bitter medicine it has been feeding Syria for the past five years. As well as arming Islamist groups France has contributed a high proportion of the Europeans who have gone to Syria for their ‘jihad’. Yet Hollande is now compelled to act.

For his part, President Putin is clearly using the NATO rhetoric (pretending that they oppose the same Islamists they have armed and funded) to isolate and limit direct confrontations. He has done this with Israel and perhaps thought he had done it with Turkey. Drawing France into the Russian camp would imply greater respect for the Syrian state and army, while dividing and weakening NATO strategy in the region.

France was already a member of the ineffective US-led coalition against ISIS, which has become notorious for only moving against the terrorist group when it suits US interests. So, for example, the US herded the ruthless jihadists away from some Kurdish areas in north Iraq and Syria, but allowed large ISIS convoys to advance on and take over Palmyra, and allowing ISIS to drive hundreds of oil tankers, with stolen Syrian oil, up into Turkey.

Hollande clearly feels he has to distinguish himself from this game, in the wake of the Paris attacks. But what can he do? His position, as stated in the 26 November press conference (video link below) is still to demand a Syrian transitional government which excludes President Assad (most recently re-elected in June 2014) yet, at the same time, to engage with Russia (since October clearly the most powerful foreign force against ISIS) and to admit that the Syrian Army must be part of any anti-ISIS coalition. Those last two elements distinguish the French position from that of Washington.

France has not abandoned its neo-colonial view of Syria, the country it in fact colonised between the 1920s and 1946. Back then France also tried to treat Syrian communities as sectarian entities, but faced a series of national independence wars, the first led by Sultan Pasha al Atrash in 1925.

When France itself was occupied and humiliated by Nazi Germany, between 1940 and 1944, it sought refuge in an Atlantic Charter (August 1941) which proclaimed ‘the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they live’. But the big powers always practised double standards. US President Roosevelt’s secretary told French General Henri Giraud in 1942 ‘it is thoroughly understood that French sovereignty will be re-established as soon as possible throughout all the territory over which flew the French flag in 1939’. That of course included Syria.

In the current context Hollande seems to be drawing on a French mythology of semi-independence within the NATO-European context, a sort of French ‘third way’. He engages with Washington (the undisputed leader of NATO) but tries to reconcile that position with Moscow. Hollande has said he will ‘coordinate air strikes’ on ISIS with Russia (a step further than the US) and even that he will ‘reconcile the west’ with Russia.

Given the deep differences and limited French power, can he do this? Will the Putin-Hollande two-step be as fragile as the Putin-Erdogan accord? Watch the body language and reactions of these two in their most recent joint press conference.

The full press conference, with English audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwLNDXuU2Zg

“The stakes are very high for the United States…they have this agenda. I think that certain factions of the United States seem to be willing to risk World War in order to achieve it!” -Christopher Black (from this week’s interview.)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Length (59:11)

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In recent days, a NATO member country fired on and shot down a Russian jet for the first time in the almost 66 year history of the Western military alliance.[1]

The Turkish government claimed initially it was defending the nation’s airspace in the wake of an incursion by the Russian jet.[2] The Russian government categorically refuted the claim that their Russian SU-24 jet had entered Turkish airspace, accused the Turks of being “accomplices of terrorists” and warned of “serious consequences” in the wake of the incident.[3]

As of this writing, The Russian government has leveled economic sanctions against Turkey.

To date, the facts, including the testimony of one of the pilots, and a suspicious leak from a US Official  seem to support Russia’s version of events.

So what was the point of Turkey’s action? Was it intended to protect the Islamic State militants? Will this incident spark an escalation that could lead to a major theatre war?

This week’s Global Research News Hour focuses on the Syrian crisis in the context of the recent attack.

In the first half hour we hear from Christopher Black. He is an international criminal lawyer and member of the law Society of Upper Canada. He has contributed several articles for New Eastern Outlook which are re-published at the Global Research News site. Mr Black discerns the meaning of Turkish assault, the deceptions around the “campaign against ISIS” the prospects of an imminent war on Syria, and the problems of the modern anti-war movement.

In the final half hour, we are joined by Tim Anderson. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney in the Department of Political Economy. He is the author of a soon to be released book about the Dirty War on Syria. In this interview, Anderson outlines the sophistication of the Western propaganda campaign against Syria, the resilient social factors within Syrian society, the dynamics of the 2011 political revolt which led to the current conflict, and some of the players both inside and outside Syria impacting on the situation.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Monday at 3pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia Canada. – Tune in every Saturday at 6am.

Notes:  

1. Thomas Gibbons-Neff(November 24, 2015) Washington Post, “The last time a Russian jet was shot down by a NATO jet was in 1952”; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/11/24/the-last-time-a-russian-jet-was-shot-down-by-a-nato-jet-was-in-1952/
2. http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2015/11/turkeys-letter-today-to-the-un-security-council-over-russian-jet-shootdown-3248052.html
3. Kareem Shaheen et al (Nov.24, 2015), The Guardian, “Putin condemns Turkey after Russian warplane downed near Syria border” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/turkey-shoots-down-jet-near-border-with-syria

Articulo por Regeneración

Se está desarrollando una guerra discreta que podría involucrar una confrontación militar directa entre EU-OTAN y Rusia

Regeneración, 27 de noviembre de 2015.- El derribo de un avión ruso que sobrevolaba Siria fue ejecutado por Turquía en consulta con Washington y Bruselas. Turkía no emprendió esta acción sin la luz verde del Pentágono.

Así lo informó el profesor Michel Chossudovsky, un profesor emérito de economía de la Universidad de Ottawa, en su artículo para el sitio Global Research.

¿Es esto una venganza contra Rusia por bombardear al Estado Islámico, financiado por Estados Unidos, en Siria?

La verdad no dicha es que Rusia está debilitando las operaciones terrestres de la OTAN y Estados Unidos en Siria, que están compuestas por diferentes grupos afiliados a Al Qaeda. Estos grupos son los soldados de a pie de la alianza occidental.

Chossudovsky afirma que el Estado Islámico y el Frente Al-Nusra están dirigidas por operativos de inteligencia y fuerzas especiales occidentales, muchas de las cuales son desplegadas por compañías privadas de mercenarios contratadas por EU y OTAN.

El derribo del avión Ruso es un acto de provocación, pero ¿con qué propósito?

Se está desarrollando una guerra discreta que podría involucrar una confrontación militar directa entre EU-OTAN y Rusia.

Leer más en Global Research.

Alexis Tsipras who led the “left wing” SYRIZA movement against neoliberalism has revealed his true face in his recent visit to Israel.

He has joined the pro-Israeli EU political bandwagon, which pays lip service to Netanyahu.

As we recall Syriza confirmed as part of its election platform its endorsement of the rights of Palestinians against the State of Israel.

“About-turn” in Greece’s foreign policy in relation to Israel?

A recent Israeli report by Israel’s I24news TV reviews PM Tsipras’ visit to Israel (click to see complete TV report):

Meeting with the Israeli leadership, opening a two day tour in Jerusalem and Ramallah, Tzipras praised the importance of the relations between Israel and Greece and showed that the partnership has survived the political change.

While in Jerusalem for a meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Tsipras took an opportunity to sign the President’s guestbook, writing, “ With great honor to be in your historic capital and to meet your excellencies.”

Because of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and dispute over Jerusalem, many countries refuse to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, much to Israel’s displeasure.

A former Israeli diplomatic official said that Tzipras’ reference to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was “unprecedented, especially for a European leader.”

Tal Shalev/ i24news
“Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras signed President RIvlin’s guest book”

During talks with Rivlin, Tsipras also addressed the global rise in terrorism saying “in the wake of European terror, we must send a message from here in Jerusalem that cooperation can banish extremism and hatred.” (emphasis added)

The issue of Israel’s State supported terrorism against Palestine was not mentioned.

Rivlin responded saying, “ISIS is not only in Syria and Iraq, but spreading to the whole western world, who must take responsibility and say that we cannot live in a world in which ISIS exists.”

In a press conference following the meeting between the two leaders Netanyahu said, “we have a growing and enduring partnership between Greece and Israel. We are two countries with ancient roots.”

Tsipras echoed Netanyahu’s sentiments and addressed additional topics important to both nations.

…

“There is, as you said, a natural affinity between the Israelis and the Greeks. It’s very obvious when you go to either country,” Netanyahu said to Tsipras.

(Tal Shalev,  diplomatic correspondent of i24news, i24news, November 26, 2015)

Alexis Tsipras has a short memory. He remains mum on the issue of Israeli crimes against humanity. He tacitly endorses Netanyahu’s stance which casually equates the Palestinians with terrorists. He endorses Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. 

According to the i24news report: “If Jerusalem had any concerns about the the Left-wing Syrizan regime, Tzipras’ smiles appear to indicate there is no need to worry”. (emphasis added). According to WSWS analyst Jean Shaoul:

Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is using the terrorist attacks in Paris to ramp up tensions in pursuit of Israel’s geostrategic interests.

“Israel stands shoulder to shoulder with France in the battle against radical Islam,” he declared in the aftermath of Friday’s killings. “All terrorism must be condemned and fought equally with unwavering determination. It’s only with this moral clarity that the forces of civilization will defeat the savagery of terrorism.”

Netanyahu is once again seeking to equate the Palestinians with terrorism. This, after all, is the man who said, following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, that the attack was “very good” because it would “generate immediate sympathy” for Israel and its war against the Palestinians. (Jean Shaoul, WSWS and Global Research, November 18, 2015)

Since the beginning of October, Israeli forces have killed 101 Palestians in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. In the period between Thursday October 1st and Thursday November 26th, 2015, as confirmed by the Palestinian Health Ministry.  This was not the work of ISIS, which so happens to be supported by Israel, it was carried out on the orders of the Netanyahu government and implemented by Israeli security forces.  

The situation is continuing to develop fast in Syria. Since the start of full-scale military operation in late October, the pro-government forces have gained a number of success in the Aleppo province. It allowed the Assad government to strengthen its diplomatic position and encouraged its allies. Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militias led by Iranian military advicers are main supporters of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in this area. The Russian Aerospace Defence Forces are playing a crucial role in the pro-government forces’ military operations there.

The Syrian forces have been advancing through 3 main axis. First is the Latakia countryside. The Syrian forces have captured the strategic city of Gamam at this axis. It allows the SAA and allies to prevent the terrorist groups located at the Turkmen and Kurdish Mountains from creating a joint force there. It also allows the pro-government forces to threat the terrorist positions at the borders with Idlib and Hama.

Second axis is the city of Aleppo. The Syrian forces are advancing on it from the South East. In November the SAA lifted the ISIS siege from the Kuweires air base, deblocked the Damascus-Aleppo road and cut the ISIS supply line between Raqqa and Aleppo. Now the Syrian forces are advancing on the Eastern part of Aleppo. ISIS and the Jaish al-Fatah military operations coalition led by Al Nusra are main opponents of the pro-government forces in this axis.

Third axis are areas located at the Homs-Hama border. The SAA and allies have gained main successes at the South East part of the Hama province where ISIS militants operate. The Homs-Hama-Aleppo road is a main aim of the military operations there.

After the incident with a Russian Su-24 downed by Turkey, the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces have raised their activity in Syira. The areas at the border with Turkey controlled by Turkey-backed militants and al Nusra became a first target of the intensified air raids. Nonetheless, there is no background to expect that Russia will calm down its Air Force’s activity.

Meanwhile, Moscow deployed S-400 missile defense systems to its air base near Latakia. Russian guided missile cruiser «Moskva» joint with escort ships is taking location at the shore zone of Northern Latakia near the Turkish border. The Russian military will likely continue to intensify its operations in Syria. Ongoing crisis with Turkey is one of the main reaons for this step. We could expect that foreign supporters of terrorist groups such Al Nusra and ISIS will also intensify their actions in Syria. Thus, the stakes are rising up in the Syrian conflict.

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Image: Since the 1950s, the Saudi monarchy has remained Washington’s key partner in developing organised terrorism as a tool to destabilise and dominate the Middle East.

The following text is chapter two of professor Tim Anderson’s forthcoming book entitled “The Dirty War on Syria”

Prof. Tim Anderson

After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the destruction of Libya, Syria was to be the next state overthrown. Washington and its regional allies had planned this for some time.

After ‘regime change’ in Damascus, Syria’s ally Hezbollah, leader of the Lebanese Resistance to Israel, would be isolated. The Islamic Republic of Iran would remain the only Middle East country without US military bases. After Iran, Washington would control the entire region, excluding possible competitors such as Russia and China. Palestine would be lost.

This was all part of Washington’s plan for a ‘New Middle East’; but it was not to be. Determined and coordinated resistance can never be discounted. Syria’s national army has resisted wave after wave of fanatical Islamist attacks, backed by NATO and the Gulf monarchies, and Russian and Iranian support remained solid. Importantly, Syria has built new forms of cooperation with a weak but emerging Iraq. Washington had worked for decades to divide Iran and Iraq, so the strengthening ties between Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine represent a regional challenge to the new ‘Great Game’ of our times. The Middle East is not just a big power playground.

The US and its close regional collaborators (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Qatar and Jordan), we now know, have been behind every anti-Syrian extremist group since the beginning of the recent conflict. They have used the worst of reactionary and sectarian forces to pursue their ends. The Axis of Resistance, on the other hand, should not be misunderstood as a sectarian phenomenon. This group – the Islamic Republic of Iran, secular Syria, the Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah and the Palestinians – is deeply anti-imperial. Syria, the only remaining ‘secular’ state in the region has long allied itself with the Islamic Republic of Iran, including against Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq. Saddam in turn was used by Washington to degrade Iran, after that country’s 1979 revolution. On the other hand, Iran never backed the sectarian Muslim Brotherhood in any of its insurrections against secular Syria. Iran does support the Shia Muslims of Hezbollah, but it is most demonised for arming Palestine, which has hardly any Shia. This plurality disproves any claims that the Axis of Resistance is sectarian. Promotion of sectarianism in the Middle East mostly comes from Washington’s key allies, Saudi Arabia, the other gulf monarchies, and the ethnic cleansers of Israel. They share the US aim of keeping the region weak and divided.

How did Syria come to be targeted? We can chart the hostility back to Syria’s central role in the Arab-Israeli wars, especially those of 1967 and 1973, a common regional struggle against the expansionist Zionist state. After that, Syria’s support for 1979 Iranian Revolution put it offside with Washington. As far back as 1980, under the Carter administration, Washington was searching for a ‘change of regime’ in Damascus. A cable from the National Security Council to Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski urged a coordinated study, including with their European and Arab monarchy partners, of ‘identifying possible alternative regimes’ to the Government led by Hafez al Assad. They were considering how to ‘reduce the problems of ill-considered reaction [by Syria’s ally, the Soviet Union] to a change of regime in Damascus’. The memorandum also recognised that any withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon (Syria had entered Lebanon to stop the civil war, in 1975; it would stay until 2005) would run a ‘high’ risk of renewed civil war in that country and create ‘high incentives for Israeli military engagement in southern Lebanon’ (NSC 1980).

It was thus no coincidence that the Muslim Brotherhood, – always the most organised Syrian opposition group, and whose history of collaboration with outside powers dated back to the 1940s – began a series of bloody sectarian attacks from this point onwards, until their last insurrection was crushed in Hama in 1982. That insurrection had been backed by US allies Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein and Jordan (Seale 1988: 336-337). US intelligence at the time observed that ‘the Syrians are pragmatists who do not want a Muslim Brotherhood government’ (DIA 1982: vii). However US analysts, soon after, used the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood at Hama to demonstrate ‘the true establishment of Syria as a totalitarian state’ (Wikas 2007: vii). This was a useful fiction.

The next strategic shift against Syria came after the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre New York, and the decision of Bush the Second to declare a ‘war on terror’. Although various pretexts were made for the interventions which followed, an overall plan for the Middle East was very rapidly set in train. Former senior US General Wesley Clark said in his memoirs that, two weeks after the September 2001 attacks, he was told by a ‘senior general’ at the Pentagon that the attack on Iraq (which came 18 months later) was already decided. Six weeks later he says that same general told him, ‘It’s worse than that’, before indicating a memo ‘from the Office of the Secretary of Defence … [saying] we’re going to take out seven countries in five years’.

That list began with Iraq and Syria and ended with Iran (Clark 2007). Iraq’s ruler Saddam Hussein had been an enemy of Syria, through his opportunistic backing of the Syria Muslim Brotherhood and for his collaboration with the US in the long and bloody war against Iran. However the Syrian Government, led by Hafez al Assad, had supported the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait in what has been called the First Gulf War (1990-1991). That war, whatever one thought of Kuwait’s monarchy, was a clear breach of the UN doctrine of collective security and, on that basis, attracted a UN Security Council mandate to intervene. However both Syria and Iran opposed the later invasion of Iraq (2003), even though it would depose their mutual enemy Saddam. The invasion of Iraq was clearly illegal and a war of aggression.

It was the unintended consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq that led to a shift in US policy, a move which was called a ‘redirection’ (Hersh 2007). Once Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist administration had been deposed, a newly installed government in Damascus began a shift towards friendlier relations with Iran. It was not just that the majority of Iraq were Shia Muslims like, but not to as great an extent as, in Iran. Iraqis had developed a more pluralist culture, and did not want a religious state. However with Iran’s enemy Saddam out of the way, matters of genuine common concern could be discussed in a more normal climate of neighbourly relations. Yet the idea of good neighbourly relations between Iraq and Iran seriously worried Washington. They had not fuelled the Iraq-Iran war, nor invaded Iraq, to help bring about that outcome.

As early as 2005 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began to speak of spreading ‘creative chaos’ in the region, to advance President Bush’s plan for a New Middle East (Karon 2006). Drawing on the traditions of the great powers, Washington set up a new ‘divide and rule’ strategy. White House insiders called Bush’s new policy ‘the redirection’, involving a more open confrontation with Iran and attempting to drive a ‘sectarian divide between Shiite and Sunni Muslims …[Yet] to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite dominated government of Prime Minster Nuri al-Malaki’ (Hersh 2007). Rice told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee she saw ‘a new strategic alignment’ in the region, with ‘Sunni states’ [the Gulf monarchies] as the centres of moderation and Iran, Syria and Hezbollah ‘on the other side of that divide’ (Hersh 2007).

The idea was to play on community divisions to create conflict, particularly in Iraq. US Central Command’s ‘Red Team’ exercises began in 2006, with military planning focused on divisions which they characterised as Arabs versus Persians (Iranians), later asking themselves whether ‘Sunni-Shia [might be] a more appropriate framework?’ Their key assumption was that ‘there does not appear to be a scenario where Arabs and Persians will join forces against the US/West’ (Narwani 2011). The cutting edge of the operation would be the creation of al Qaeda in Iraq (IQI), funded by the Saudis and carrying out sectarian attacks on mosques and other community centres, to inflame community tensions. Senior western officials have acknowledged privately that the various billionaires of Saudi Arabia (along with the other Gulf monarchies) constitute ‘the most significant source of funding to Sunni [sic] terrorist groups worldwide’ (Jones 2014).

Although al Qaeda in Iraq, a.k.a. the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), at first claimed to be overwhelmingly Iraqi (Felter and Fishman 2008: 3), Saudi finance and recruiting significantly internationalised it. Records captured by the US military in October 2007 at Sinjar, on the Iraqi-Syrian border underline this. Those records referred to a group of about 500, half of whom were Saudi, then North African (Libyan, Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan) and then others. Other estimates between 2005 and 2007 suggested greater or lesser degrees of various nationalities, with the largest group (40-55%) being Saudis (Felter and Fishman 2008: 8, 30-31).

A notorious example of the strategy to provoke sectarian conflict was the February 2006 bombing of the al Askari mosque in Samarra, in southern Iraq, which killed over a thousand people. Despite calls for restraint by Shia leaders in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, there were sectarian reprisals. When arrests were made this act was said to have been carried out by an al Qaeda seven-man cell, led by an Iraqi with a Tunisian, four Saudis and two other Iraqis (Ridolfo 2007). Although al Qaeda was implicated from the start, US media and analyst focus shifted to what they called ‘Iraq’s sectarian divide’ (Worth 2006). Yet while Saddam Hussein had backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, he did not allow al Qaeda groups in Iraq. That was a more recent development, and not just an ‘organic’ reaction to the US occupation. Western sources sometimes acknowledge that much of the finance and the fighters for Al Qaeda have come from Saudi Arabia (Bruno 2007). However they also cloud the issue with claims that Iran and Hezbollah have, from time to time, supported al Qaeda (Kaplan 2006). Such claims are quite false.

Israel was deeply embedded with the New Middle East plan and in July-August 2006, after getting the ‘green light’ from Washington (Hersh 2006), seized on a pretext to invade southern Lebanon. The broader aim was to degrade and disarm Hezbollah. However after almost 1200 Lebanese and 165 Israelis had been killed, a UN ceasefire was brokered. Israel had failed in all its objectives. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called this tragedy, at a time when 400 had died and half a million were displaced, simply the ‘birth pangs of a New Middle East’ (Karon 2006). That statement prompted Rami Khouri of Beirut’s Daily Star to write: ‘Washington is engaged almost exclusively with Arab governments [the Gulf monarchies] whose influence with Syria is virtually nonexistent, whose credibility with Arab public opinion is zero, whose own legitimacy at home is increasingly challenged, and whose pro-US policies tend to promote the growth of those [extremist] Islamist movements’ (Khouri 2006).

During the destabilisation of post-Saddam Iraq, Syria was on Washington’s ‘back-burner’, but hardly forgotten. From cables released by Wikileaks we know that the US Embassy in Syria was concerned that, despite the sanctions imposed in 2005 for Syria’s non-cooperation over Iraq, Syria had ended 2006 ‘in a much stronger position domestically and internationally than it did in 2006’. Washington had tried to accuse Damascus of harbouring Iraqi resistance fighters (Syria had taken in well over a million refugees from Iraq, after the US invasion in 2003) but the US Embassy privately acknowledged that ‘extremist elements increasingly use Syria as a base, while the SARG [Syrian Arab Republic Government] has taken some actions against groups stating links to Al-Qaeda’. Nevertheless the Embassy suggested the State Department look for opportunities to ‘disrupt [Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s] decision making, keep him off-balance and make him pay a premium for his mistakes’ (US Embassy Damascus 2006).

Meantime the groundwork was being laid for intervention. The US State Department had allocated $5 million for ‘Syrian governance and reform programs’ in early 2006 (Wikas 2007: viii). The Bush administration was funding media channels and NGOs. US cables confirm that the US State Department had funded the London-based Barada Television and a network of Syrian exiles called the ‘Movement for Justice and Development’ (Whitlock 2011).

This was a special program set up in parallel with similar work done more widely through the State Department funded National Endowment for Democracy. This funding came through intermediary groups in the US, in particular the Democracy Council, which in turn received grants from the Middle East Partnership Initiative. Cables from the US Embassy in Damascus from 2009 onwards say the Democracy Council received $6.3 million to run a Syria program called ‘Civil Society Strengthening Initiative’, which included ‘various broadcast concepts’ including Barada TV. A higher figure of about $12 million between 2005 and 2010 was later noted, with the US Embassy in Damascus telling the State Department that the Syrian Government ‘would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change’. They were concerned that Syrian intelligence (the notorious Mukhabarat) was hot on the trail of these programs (Whitlock 2011).

Although the Bush administration imposed a series of sanctions on Syria, between 2003 and 2008, supposedly linked to its role in Lebanon and Iraq, there were also high level diplomatic contacts with the Syrian Government. Often US policy seemed incoherent, but hostility was not far below the surface. The US demanded liberalisation of Syria’s economic policy, but blocked its attempt to join the World Trade Organization (Sadat and Jones 2009). William Rugh, former US Ambassador to the UAE, characterised US policy towards Syria as one of ‘isolation and monologue’, while ex-CIA analyst Martha Kessler says the entire policy had to be based on ‘the context of a belief among many in this [US] administration that this regime [the Syrian Government] has to go’ (Sadat and Jones 2009).

That ambition included military preparation, but not just conventional military preparation. The British were on board. Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas said, two years before the violence erupted in Syria: ‘I met with top British officials who confessed to me that they were preparing something on Syria … Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister of Foreign Affairs, it I would like to participate.’ He says he refused (Lehman 2013). Just what detail there was to this 2009 plan is not clear.

Nevertheless the US had long experience in dirty, covert wars, fought through proxies, in Central America (e.g. El Salvador and Nicaragua), in Africa (e.g. Zaire and Angola) and in the Middle East (e.g. Afghanistan). After President Bush declared his ‘War On Terrorism’ in 2001, the US Army manual on ‘unconventional warfare’ (UW) was revised several times to take account of the range of activities the US needed to pursue its ambitious plans. The 2008 version of this manual quotes with approval the ancient Chinese scholar of war, Sun Tsu: ‘defeating the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill’ (US Army 2008: 1.1). That is, it is both efficient and effective to develop a range of means, short of direct military confrontation. The manual envisages ‘unconventional war’ which ‘must be conducted by, with or through surrogates’, citing the earlier examples of this in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. The manual emphasises, the ‘clearly stated purpose of UW [is] to support insurgencies, resistance movements and conventional military operations’ (US Army 2008: 1.1-1.2). That unconventional war is precisely what was in preparation for Syria, before the events of late 2010 and early 2011 in Egypt and Tunisia, which came to be known as the Arab Spring. The model would be an extension of al Qaeda (or the Islamic State) in Iraq, drawing on Syrian Muslim Brotherhood networks and the ever faithful, sectarian and vicious Saudis.

Had Syria been isolated, like Iraq and Libya, this plan might have been more straight-forward. But the NATO and Gulf Arab proxy armies would face an Axis of Resistance, with some powerful allies and with experience of sectarian provocations.

Notes:

Bruno, Greg (2007) ‘Profile: Al-Qaeda in Iraq’, Council on Foreign Relations report, Washington Post, 19 November, online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/19/AR2007111900721.html

Clark, Wesley (2007) A Time to Lead: for duty, honor and country, St. Martin’s Press, London

DIA (1982) ‘Syria: Muslim Brotherhood Pressure Intensifies’, Defence Intelligence Agency (USA), May, online: https://syria360.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/dia-syria-muslimbrotherhoodpressureintensifies-2.pdf

Felter, Josep and Brian Fishman (2008) ‘Al-Qa’idas’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: a first look at the Sinjar records’, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, New York, online: https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/al-qaidas-foreign-fighters-in-iraq-a-first-look-at-the-sinjar-records

Hersh, Seymour (2006) ‘Watching Lebanon’, The New Yorker, 21 August, online: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/08/21/watching-lebanon

Hersh, Seymour (2007) ‘The Redirection’, New Yorker, 5 March, online: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection

Jones, Owen (2014) ‘To really combat terror, end support for Saudi Arabia’, The Guardian, 1 September, online: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/combat-terror-end-support-saudi-arabia-dictatorships-fundamentalism

Kaplan, Eben (2006) ‘The Al-Qaeda-Hezbollah Relationship’, Council on Foreign Relations,

14 August, online: http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-organizations-and-networks/al-qaeda-hezbollah-relationship/p11275

Karon, Tony (2006) ‘Condi in Diplomatic Disneyland’, Time, 26 July, online: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1219325,00.html

Khouri, Rami (2006) ‘Birth pangs of a New Middle East’, Daily Star, July, online: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/GetArticleBody.aspx?id=113043

Lehmann, Christof (2013) ‘Dumas, ‘Top British officials confessed to Syria war plans two years before Arab Spring’, NSNBC, 1 June, online: http://nsnbc.me/2013/06/16/dumas-top-british-officials-confessed-to-syria-war-plans-two-years-before-arab-spring/

Narwani, Sharmine (2011) ‘Pentagon game to divide Iranians and Arabs’, Salon, 26 October, online: http://www.salon.com/2011/10/26/pentagon_game_to_divide_iranians_and_arabs/

NSC (1980) ‘Syria July 16, 1980’, National Security Council, 4203XX, Memorandum for Zbigniew Brzezinski, declassified document

Ridolfo, Kathleen (2007) ‘Iraq: Samarra Bombing Set Off Year Of Violence’, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, 12 February, online: http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1074662.html

Sadat, Mi H and Daniel B Jones (2009) ‘U.S. Foreign Policy Towards Syria: balancing ideology and national interests’, Middle East Policy Council, Summer, Volume XVI, Number 2, online: http://www.mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy-archives/us-foreign-policy-toward-syria-balancing-ideology-and-national-interests?print

Seale, Patrick (1988) Asad: the struggle for the Middle East, University of California Press, Berkeley CA

US Army (2008) ‘Army Special Operations Forces: Unconventional Warfare’, FM 3-05.130, United Stats Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Fort Bragg NC

US Embassy Damascus (2006) ‘Influencing the SARG in the end of 2006’, Cable to US State Department, Wikileaks, 13 December, online: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06DAMASCUS5399_a.html

Whitlock, Craig (2011) ‘U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by Wikileaks show’, Washington Post, 17 April, online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-secretly-backed-syrian-opposition-groups-cables-released-by-wikileaks-show/2011/04/14/AF1p9hwD_story.html

Wikas, Seth (2007) ‘Battling the Lion of Damascus: Syria’s domestic opposition and the Asad regime’, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Policy Focus #69, May, online: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/battling-the-lion-of-damascus-syrias-domestic-opposition-and-the-asad-regim

Worth, Robert F. (2006) ‘Blast Destroys Shrine in Iraq, Setting Off Sectarian Fury’, New York Times, 22 February, online: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/international/middleeast/22cnd-iraq.html?_r=0

About the author

Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2015).

Each year, tens of millions of American children are vaccinated according to the vaccination schedule set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The current CDC schedule recommends over 25 vaccines by the time a child reaches two years of age. (1) The majority of the parents of these children follow the advice of their physicians and the CDC, which state that vaccines are both safe and effective and that, in order to protect hundreds of millions of individuals against disease, we must follow their recommendations.

Our medical authorities assure us that they would never allow our children to be exposed to something unproven or known to be dangerous. They claim that vaccines, even when multiple injections are given on a single day, are safe and do “not cause any chronic health problems.” (2) Further, they claim that the ingredients contained in vaccines are either harmless or found in such miniscule quantities that they pose no health risks. The medical establishment also states unequivocally that there is no connection between vaccination and the rising incidence of autism spectrum disorder. Anyone who questions the safety of vaccination is immediately labeled as irresponsible or a quack who subscribes to pseudoscience.

Given that vaccines are mandatory for most children in public schools, it makes sense that they should be scientifically proven to be safe. However, in a careful analysis of thousands of articles in the peer-reviewed literature on toxicology and immunology, nowhere can we find evidence for these claims on vaccine safety are based upon a gold standard of clinical research: long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.

What is glaringly absent is research examining the cumulative toxicological impact of the CDC vaccine schedule over a long period of time. Never has a concise epidemiological study been published that compares the long-term health outcomes of a group of infants and children given the recommended CDC immunization schedule and a cohort of unvaccinated children. Since such research has never been carried out, our medical officials are relying on inconclusive research that is not science-based in order to create public health policy. American parents, meanwhile, are conditioned by our medical officials to bring their children in for regular vaccinations, confusing pure propaganda with scientific proof.

All humans possess a unique biochemistry that makes them more or less susceptible to various types of toxins. Whereas one child may be left with a compromised immune system after exposure to an environmental toxin, another child may experience learning problems or mild brain defects. Vaccine safety is not proved by stating the obvious – that not every child who receives the standard CDC vaccine schedule has autism. As we witness a rapidly increasing number of vaccinated children being afflicted by conditions such as autism, food allergies, encephalitis, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn’s disease, it’s critical that we investigate further the role played by environmental toxins to better understand their pathology. And when we look into the independent science on the safety of vaccines, it’s readily apparent that many of the ingredients found in vaccines are toxic, even in small amounts, and may contribute to a range of illnesses, including autism.

Here we will also take an uncompromising look at the institutions and individuals claiming that vaccines are safe for our children. We’ll find that just a brief review of our medical establishment reveals evidence of a corrupt network riddled with conflicts of interest and scandal, making it clear that we simply cannot trust our health officials on the issue of vaccine safety.

The Toxic Ingredients in Vaccines

What follows is an incomplete listing of scientific studies showing the dangers of common ingredients in vaccines. I am only citing a handful of examples from the scientific literature. Additional studies appear at the end of this document under “Supplementary Studies”.

Thimerosal

Thimerosal is an ethyl mercury-containing compound that was, up until recently, widely used in vaccines as a preservative. More than 165 studies have found Thimerosal to be harmful to human health. (3) Mercury exposure has been associated with nerve cell degeneration, adverse behavioral effects, and impaired brain development. (4) It also has been linked to degenerative chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. The developing fetal nervous system is the most sensitive to its toxic effects, and prenatal exposure to high doses of mercury has been shown to cause mental retardation and cerebral palsy. (5,6)

Despite a preponderance of evidence showing Thimerosal’s toxicity, the CDC maintains its position that Thimerosal is generally safe in small doses, citing a handful of CDC-sponsored epidemiological studies. One study found evidence of significant “methodological issues and “malfeasance” in their reporting. (7) Even though vaccine manufacturers have phased out the use of Thimerosal in most vaccines, some vaccines on the market today, including influenza, DTaP and DTaP-Hib, still contain Thimerosal. (8,9)

In a 2010 study published in the journal Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, researchers at the University of Northern Iowa evaluated dozens of studies that claimed to refute the relationship between autism and exposure to toxic metals such as mercury, found in vaccines. The analysis uncovered that several of these studies used erroneous statistics and faulty methodologies to derive their conclusions and that in fact, evidence suggests that the vaccine-autism link should not be dismissed by the scientific community. (10)

A 2004 study conducted by Northwestern University Pharmacy professor Richard Deth and researchers from the University of Nebraska, Tufts and Johns Hopkins University found that Thimerosal and other toxins contained in vaccines disrupt the biochemical process of methylation in the human body. Methylation plays a significant role in normal DNA function and neurological growth in infants and children. The group’s findings suggest that toxicants introduced through vaccinations contribute to conditions such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. (11)

The Thimerosal-autism connection is bolstered by the research of Dr. Boyd Haley, who served as the chairman of the University of Kentucky’s Department of Chemistry and spent three years as a NIH post-doctoral scholar at Yale University Medical School’s Department of Physiology. Haley’s research has identified mercury, even in minute amounts, to be a dangerous immunosuppressant that damages neurological function and is a major contributor to autism spectrum disorder. Dr. Haley’s scientific inquiries have provided strong evidence documenting how ethylmercury inhibits the process of phagocytosis (a critically important biological process of the human immune system), impairs the function of dendritic neurons in the brain and hinders the production of methyl B12. Each of these processes are significant factors in the onset of neurological illness. (12)

In a study published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health in July 2011, Australian authors David Austin and Kerrie Shandley surveyed a group of adults who were survivors of Pink Disease or Infantile Acrodynia, an ailment historically caused by exposure to mercury found in teething powder, diaper rinses and other materials. Since the survivors of Pink Disease were proven to be sensitive to mercury, the study set out to determine whether or not higher rates of autism were present among the survivors’ grandchildren. Austin and Shandley demonstrated that 1 in 25 of the survivors’ grandchildren had some form of autism spectrum disorder. The frequency of autism among children in the general population of Australia in the same age group as those surveyed is 1 in 160. The results unequivocally suggest that children with a family history of susceptibility to mercury poisoning are far more likely to develop autism. (13)

Aluminum

Aluminum is an adjuvant, a chemical booster added to vaccines to induce an immune response. Most vaccines in the CDC schedule contain an aluminum compound. Furthermore, there is a large body of scientific research to support a connection between aluminum and neurotoxicity.

The alarming health consequences of aluminum were reported in a 2011 study published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry led by Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic at the University of British Columbia. The study revealed that rates of autism spectrum disorder among children are greater in countries where children are exposed to the highest amounts of aluminum in vaccines. The authors also noted “the increase in exposure to Al [aluminum] adjuvants significantly correlates with the increase in ASD [autism spectrum disorder] prevalence in the United States observed over the last two decades”. (14) An additional article by Dr. Tomljenovic, and published in a 2014 issue of the journal Immunotherapy, discussed the neurotoxic effects of aluminum on the central nervous system. The article mentions the role played by the metal in triggering autoimmune and inflammatory responses, altering genetic expression and contributing to neurodevelopmental disorders. (15)

These findings are further supported by MIT researcher Dr. Stephanie Seneff. Seneff’s scientific investigation into the pathology of autism has turned up evidence that the neurotoxicity of aluminum is greatly increased when combined with glyphosate, Monsanto’s very widely used pesticide which is sprayed on crops around the world. Seneff posits that not only do these two agents combine to promote neurodevelopmental conditions but can also disrupt the gut’s microbiome, potentially leading to leaky gut syndrome, kidney failure, and other serious complications. (16)

It is worth noting that the federal health agencies have admitted to the many dangers posed by aluminum exposure, such as the 357 page document titled “Toxicological Profile for Aluminum” released in 2008 by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The document, which was thoroughly vetted by CDC scientists, states:

There is a rather extensive database on the oral toxicity of aluminum in animals. These studies clearly identify the nervous system as the most sensitive target of aluminum toxicity and most of the animal studies have focused on neurotoxicity and neurodevelopmental toxicity. (17)

Despite the government’s tacit recognition of aluminum’s health risks, the CDC and other federal agencies have made no effort to further investigate the cumulative toxicological impact of the current vaccine schedule.

Formaldehyde

Formaldehyde is a naturally occurring metabolite commonly added to bacterial and viral vaccines. According to the FDA “It is used to inactivate viruses so that they don’t cause disease (e.g., polio virus used to make polio vaccine) and to detoxify bacterial toxins, such as the toxin used to make diphtheria vaccine.”(18) Though formaldehyde may neutralize potentially harmful pathogens in vaccines, the World Health Organization lists it as a “known human carcinogen.”

According to a report by the US’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), ingesting “formaldehyde can be fatal, and long-term exposure to low levels in the air or on the skin can cause asthma-like respiratory problems and skin irritation such as dermatitis and itching.” The report also cites formaldehyde as “a cancer hazard”. (19) More evidence suggests formaldehyde exhibits neurotoxic properties as well (20)

The response from our health officials is that formaldehyde is contained in such small doses in vaccines that it doesn’t threaten human health. However, there is a conspicuous lack of research into the effects of formaldehyde exposure through multiple vaccines in pediatric populations. Given that infants and small children possess a much greater sensitivity to toxins compared to adults and that formaldehyde is introduced to children through immunizations containing a host of other toxic ingredients, it is crucial that we reevaluate its use in vaccines.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)

Monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG, has been used as a food additive for over a century, imparting a savory flavor that appeals to many people. It has also made its way into vaccines. Dr. Russell Blaylock notes that MSG is classified as an excitotoxin, or a compound which over stimulates cell receptors to such an extent that the cell ceases to function normally, resulting in damage to nerve cells and contributing to seizures. (21)

Animal and Human DNA

Animal and even human tissues are used as a culture medium to grow the targeted virus or bacteria used in vaccines. Today, vaccine viruses are cultured in chicken fibroblast cells and embryos, chick retinal and kidney cells, monkey and dog kidney cells, aborted human fetal lung fibroblast cells and mouse brain tissue, to name a few. (22) In 2013, the FDA approved the use of insect cells instead of chicken eggs for the influenza vaccine.

Unfortunately, viral filtration of the substrate that will be used in the vaccine is a primitive manufacturing process. A significant amount of foreign DNA and genetic debris from the culture finds its way into the vaccine that is eventually administered to children. DNA fragments can recombine with our body’s host cells thereby triggering undesirable autoimmune reactions. Considering the exponential increase in autoimmune diseases over the past 25 years, it is reasonable to suspect that the large amount of foreign genetic debris injected into our bodies is wreaking havoc with natural immune functions. There are also instances of certain vaccines causing a specific autoimmune response, such as a Haemophilus influenza B vaccine and type 1 diabetes association, and a Hepatitis B-Multiple Sclerosis relationship, which were observed after widespread administration of these vaccines. (23,24,25)

Polysorbate 80

Polysorbate 80 is a chemical agent used as an emulsifier in vaccines. Research suggests that exposure to polysorbate 80 can “cause severe nonimmunologic anaphylactoid reactions.” (26) Another study found a connection between this substance and Crohn’s disease. (27)

Triton X-100

A type of detergent used in some flu vaccines, Triton X-100 has been found to promote cell death and cause intestinal damage in animal studies. (28, 29)

Phenol

Phenol is a type of preservative commonly used in vaccines. A study looking into the viability of preservatives in vaccines noted that phenol, like Thimerosal, is neurotoxic. The authors suggested that “(f)uture formulations of US-licensed vaccines/biologics should be produced in aseptic manufacturing plants as single dose preparations, eliminating the need for preservatives and an unnecessary risk to patients.” (30)

2-Phenoxyethoanol

The compound known as 2-Phenoxyethoanol is commonly used as an antibacterial agent in vaccines. Among its known . Reports link this chemical to kidney, liver, and neurological toxicity. (31)

Real Science Indicting Vaccines and How it Has Been Suppressed

If good quality science exists that could discredit the pro-vaccine argument that there is no connection to autism, it is completely understandable that the media and the government and industry and scientists for hire continue their unrelenting attack on independent scientists, physicians, and most importantly, upon the victims themselves. To acknowledge that the entire vaccine program is unsupported by gold standard science would mean massive lawsuits, congressional investigations and discrediting the CDC, the FDA, US public health services and pharmaceutical companies. In effect, this could be the largest public health scandal in American history, and the public would be very unforgiving. Let’s now take a look at more damning evidence linking vaccines with autism and neurodevelopmental disease and the systemic suppression of this evidence.

Vaccine-Autism Research

1. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh investigated the effects of vaccination on the neurodevelopment of baby macaque monkeys. The monkeys were given a course of vaccinations typical of the 1990s vaccine schedule. In comparison with the control group, vaccinated monkeys displayed abnormal patterns of brain growth and dysfunction of the amygdala – both strong indicators of autism when they appear in children. (32)

2. In 2002, the Journal of Biomedical Science published research carried out by scientists at Utah State University’s Department of Biology analyzing the effects of the MMR vaccine on the central nervous system. In their evaluation, the group discovered that autistic children who receive the MMR possess a higher titer of certain antibody related to measles. These antibodies trigger an abnormal autoimmune response that effectively damages the brain’s myelin sheath. Evidence suggests that such damage to the myelin sheath may impair normal brain activities and cause autism. (33)

3. The University of California San Diego and San Diego State University published a study showing a higher incidence of autism among children who were given the MMR vaccine and subsequently took acetaminophen or Tylenol. Their findings were published in the medical journal Autism. (34)

4. Through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a federal program charged with the responsibility of financially compensating families of individuals injured or killed by vaccines, the US government has all but admitted to the connection between vaccines, neurological disorders and autism. A detailed research study appearing in the Pace Environmental Law Review in March 2011 revealed that the VICP has been quietly compensating 83 families for cases of vaccine-induced encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder associated with autism. In 21 of these cases, the word “autism” is actually used in court documents to describe the injuries that resulted from vaccination. The obvious conclusion is that, in paying these claims, the government has implicitly acknowledged a link between vaccination and autism. (35)

5. A recent report from the Department of Justice showed that within a three month period from November 2014- February 2015, 117 vaccine-induced injuries and deaths were compensated by VICP. The majority of the injuries listed in the report were caused by the flu vaccine and the most common injury linked to the flu vaccine was Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an uncommon illness in which the immune system attacks and damages the body’s neurons, sometimes resulting in permanent nerve damage or even death. (36)

Why Our Health Officials Can’t Be Trusted

Research indicates that conflicts of interest abound in the vaccine industry, making it difficult to have faith in our health authorities. (37) Worse still, evidence points to pervasive corruption among high profile individuals and institutions in the medical-industrial complex. Here we will look at some of the most alarming examples.

Simpsonwood

In June 2000, a group of top federal scientists, health officials, the CDC, the FDA, the British Health ministry and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry gathered for a secret meeting convened by the CDC at the Simpsonwood retreat center in Norcross, Georgia. Officially titled the Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information, the Simpsonwood conference reviewed the findings of a large epidemiological study evaluating any relationship between Thimerosal and autism. The meeting was not open to the public and was subject to a complete news embargo. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a transcript of the meeting became available.

The transcript revealed how health officials engaged in a cold-blooded cover-up of scientific evidence linking Thimerosal use in vaccine with a large spike in autism rates and other neurological illnesses. (38) The director of the Datalink study, CDC epidemiologist Dr. Tom Verstraeten, was quoted as saying, “I was actually stunned by what I saw,” citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between Thimerosal and speech delays, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. According to the transcript, Dr. John Clements, then the vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, stated in the that “perhaps this study should not have been done at all.” (39) RFK Jr. recounted in an article the lengths to which our medical establishment went prevent the scientific findings from reaching the public sphere:

The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to “rule out” the chemical’s link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten’s findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been “lost” and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism. (40)

Gerberding: The Vaccine Insider

There is a revolving door between the vaccine manufacturers and those in government who are responsible for overseeing these manufacturers. A prime example is former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who left the agency in 2010 to take a position with pharmaceutical giant Merck as the President of the company’s vaccine division. Gerberding stated in an interview that she is “very bullish on vaccines”. (41) Her admission is especially disconcerting given her long history of siding with vaccine makers. While in her position at the CDC, the organization was found to be massively exaggerating the threat of the H1N1 swine flu, and pushing largely unproven vaccines on the American public with dangerous side effects. (42)

Despite her clear alliance with Big Pharma, Dr. Julie Gerberding strongly implied a vaccine-autism link during a 2008 interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta while serving as the CDC’s director. Gerberding stated:

Well, you know, I don’t have all the facts because I still haven’t been able to review the case files myself. But my understanding is that the child has a — what we think is a rare mitochondrial disorder. And children that have this disease, anything that stresses them creates a situation where their cells just can’t make enough energy to keep their brains functioning normally. Now, we all know that vaccines can occasionally cause fevers in kids. So if a child was immunized, got a fever, had other complications from the vaccines. And if you’re predisposed with the mitochondrial disorder, it can certainly set off some damage. Some of the symptoms can be symptoms that have characteristics of autism. (43)

Thorsen: A Case of Corruption

A prime example of the corruption within the CDC around vaccine safety is the case of Dr. Poul Thorsen, a Danish researcher who coauthored 36 CDC studies, two of which are widely cited studies claiming to disprove an autism-vaccine link. From 2004 to 2010 Thorsen allegedly laundered more than $1 million in grant money allocated for research and used the funds to make personal purchases, including a home in Atlanta. (44) Thorsen is currently in Denmark awaiting extradition to the United States.

In a recent editorial, Robert F. Kennedy called into question the slow nature of US authorities in apprehending Thorsen stating that:

The fact that he is roaming free and is easy to find, despite the US Federal indictment, does not imply Thorsen’s innocence… Rather it suggests a lack of enthusiasm by HHS and CDC to press for his capture and extradition. The agency undoubtedly fears that a public trial would expose the pervasive corruption throughout CDC’s vaccine division and the fragility of the science supporting CDC’s claims about Thimerosal safety. (45)

The two autism-vaccine studies undertaken by Thorsen and his team have been decried by critics as scientific fraud. According to leaked CDC documents, the data from one of the studies, which monitored rates of autism in Denmark after a country-wide phase out of Thimerosal, were heavily manipulated to make it appear that autism rates increased its removal from vaccines, when in fact rates decreased. The research’s methodology was so unscientific that journals such as The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association rejected publishing the study, and it wasn’t until a CDC director wrote a strongly-worded letter to staff at the journal Pediatrics, that the research was actually published. (46)

The other autism-vaccine study coauthored by Thorsen, which seemingly debunked an autism link to the MMR vaccine was published in 2002. In his aforementioned editorial, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote about the study’s questionable methodology:

That study employed CDC’s trademark ruse of including many children who were too young to receive the autism diagnosis, which at that point usually occurred at age four. CDC epidemiologists have consistently used this ploy in their phony autism studies to dampen the autism signal and exonerate the vaccine.The 2002 Madsen et al. MMR study also included a substantial number of unvaccinated children and employed a suite of other statistical gimmicks to mask the association with the MMR vaccine. (47)

The Thompson Revelation

In 2014, a senior scientist at the CDC, Dr. William Thompson, went public with claims that he and his colleagues willfully omitted data from a study that supported a link between vaccines and autism. After discovering a connection between the MMR vaccine and an increased risk of autism among African American males under 36 months of age, Thompson claims that he and his fellow authors chose to exclude these data and effectively perpetrated scientific fraud by publishing research which contradicted their actual research conclusions. (48) Commenting on how he and his colleagues misrepresented their findings, Thompson stated that:

…we decided to exclude reporting any race effects, the co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can. However, because I assumed it was illegal and would violate both FOIA and DOJ requests, I kept hard copies of all documents in my office and I retained all associated computer files. I believe we intentionally withheld controversial findings from the final draft of the Pediatrics paper. (49)

In 2015, Representative Bill Posey entered a statement by Thompson about the cover-up into the Congressional record. (50)

In an interview last year, Congressman Posey commented on the “intentionally evasive” behavior of CDC spokesperson on vaccines and autism, Dr. Colleen Boyle while he questioned saying:

I asked her a very direct question. ‘Have you done a study comparing autism rates in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children?…’ She started telling us about everything she’s done …After she wasted three minutes, I cut her off and I demanded that she answer the question. And then, only then, did she admit that the federal government has never done that very simple, fundamental, basic study. (51)

In light of the growing evidence of corruption and fraud within the CDC, Representative Bill Posey has called for an investigation of the CDC on the issue of vaccine science. (52)

Reevaluating the Vaccine Safety Paradigm

Even a cursory review of the independent scientific literature on the safety of vaccines and their ingredients demonstrates clearly that our national policies on immunization are deeply flawed.

No amount of propaganda can change the fact that vaccines introduce a toxic load to the human body that can cause a wide range of harmful side effects including neurological disease. The failure of our health authorities to undertake independent, gold standard research examining the long-term effects of the CDC vaccine schedule demonstrates the extent to which our medical halls of power are plagued by depraved special interests. We must refuse to participate in this risky game which forces toxic vaccines on our children and we must demand an end to the medical fascism behind it.

Notes

1. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/downloads/parent-ver-sch-0-6yrs.pdf
2. Ibid
3. Sakamoto M, et al. Widespread neuronal degeneration in rats following oral administration of methylmercury during the postnatal developing phase: a model of fetal-type minamata disease. Brain Res. 1998; 784(1-2):351-354.
4. Echeverria D, et al. Neurobehavioral effects from exposure to dental amalgam Hg(o): new distinctions between recent exposure and Hg body burden. FASEB J. 1998; 12(11):971-980.
5. Myers GJ, et al. A review of methylmercury and child development. Neurotoxicology. 1998; 19(2):313-328.
6. Myers GJ, et al. Prenatal methylmercury exposure and children: neurologic, developmental, and behavioral research. Environ Health Perspect. 1998; 106 Suppl 3:841-847.
7. Hooker, Brian, Janet Kern, David Geier, Boyd Haley, Lisa Sykes, Paul King, and Mark Geier. “Methodological Issues and Evidence of Malfeasance in Research Purporting to Show Thimerosal in Vaccines Is Safe.” BioMed Research International, 2014, 1-8. Accessed November 8, 2015. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4065774/.
8. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/patient-ed/conversations/downloads/vacsafe-thimerosal-color-office.pdf
9. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6430a3.htm#Tab.
10. Desoto MC, Hitlan RT. Desoto MC, Hitlan RT. “Sorting out the spinning of autism: heavy metals and the question of incidence” Acta Neurobiol Exp (Wars). 2010;70(2):165-76.
11. http://vaccinechoicecanada.com/wp-content/documents/vran-interview-Dr-E-Boyd-Haley-Biomarkers-supporting-mercury-toxicity.pdf
12. Shandley, Kerrie, and David W. Austin. “Ancestry of Pink Disease (Infantile Acrodynia) Identified as a Risk Factor for Autism Spectrum Disorders.” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A 74.18 (2011): 1185-194. 28 July 2011. Web.
13. Shaw, Christopher A, Dan Li, and Lucija Tomljenovic. “Are There Negative CNS impacts of Aluminum Adjuvants Used in Vaccines and Immunotherapy?” Immunotherapy 6, no. 10 (2014): 1055-071. Accessed November 17, 2015. doi:10.2217/imt.14.81.
14. “Autism Explained: Synergistic Poisoning from Aluminum and Glyphosate”. Stephanie Seneff, May 24, 2014, http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/Seneff_AutismOne_2014.pdf
15. http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/ucm187810.htm
16.  https://www.osha.gov/OshDoc/data_General_Facts/formaldehyde-factsheet.pdf
17. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/03/14/the-danger-of-excessive-vaccination-during-brain-development.aspx
18. Roberts, Janine, Fear of the Invisible, Impact Investigative Media Productions, 2008
19. Wahlbert J, et al, “Vaccinations May Induce Diabetes-related Autoantibodies in One Year old Children,” Annals of NY Academy of Sciences, 2003 Nov; 1005; 404-88.
20. Classen JB, Classen DC, “Clustering of Cases of Insulin Dependent Diabetes Occurring Three Years After Haemophilus Influenza B Immunization Supports Causal Relationship Between Immunization and IDDM,” Autoimmunity 2002 Jul; 35 (4); 247-53.
21. Jane Doe v. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, January 16, 2009
22. Roberts, C. L., A. V. Keita, S. H. Duncan, N. O’kennedy, J. D. Soderholm, J. M. Rhodes, and B. J. Campbell. “Translocation of Crohn’s Disease Escherichia Coli across M-cells: Contrasting Effects of Soluble Plant Fibres and Emulsifiers.” Gut 59 (2010): 1331-339. doi:doi:10.1136/gut.2009.195370.
23. Strupp, W., G. Weidinger, C. Scheller, R. Ehret, H. Ohnimus, H. Girschick, P. Tas, E. Flory, M. Heinkelein, and C. Jassoy. “Treatment of Cells with Detergent Activates Caspases and Induces Apoptotic Cell Death.” Journal of Membrane Biology 173, no. 3 (2000): 181-89.
24. Oberle, R.l., T.j. Moore, and D.a.p. Krummel. “Evaluation of Mucosal Damage of Surfactants in Rat Jejunum and Colon.” Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods 33, no. 2 (1995): 75-81
25. Geier DA, Jordan SK, Geier MR “The Relative Toxicity of Compounds Used as Preservatives in Vaccines and Biologics.” Medical Science Monitor 2010;16(5): SR21-SR27.
26. http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9926486
27. Hewitson L, Lopresti BJ, Stott C, Mason NS, Tomko J. “Influence of pediatric vaccines on amygdala growth and opioid ligand binding in rhesus macaque infants: A pilot study.” Acta Neurobiol Exp (Wars). 2010;70(2):147-64.
28. Singh VK, Lin SX, Newell E, Nelson C. “Abnormal measles-mumps-rubella antibodies and CNS autoimmunity in children with autism” J Biomed Sci. 2002 Jul-Aug;9(4):359-64.
29. Schultz, S. T., H. S. Klonoff-Cohen, D. L. Wingard, N. A. Akshoomoff, C. A. Macera, and Ming Ji. “Acetaminophen (paracetamol) Use, Measles-mumps-rubella Vaccination, and Autistic Disorder: The Results of a Parent Survey.” Autism, 2008, 293-307. Accessed November 9, 2015.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18445737.
30. Holland M et al “Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury,” Pace Environmental Law Review Volume 28, Issue 2, Winter 2011.
31. http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/accvmeetingbookmarch52015.pdf
32. Delong, G. “Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Safety Research.” Accountability in Research 19, no. 2 (2012): 65-88. Accessed November 14, 2015. doi:10.1080/08989621.2012.660073.
33. http://thinktwice.com/simpsonwood.pdf
34. Ibid
35. http://www.robertfkennedyjr.com/articles/2005_june_16.html
36. http://www.xconomy.com/national/2011/06/24/mercks-julie-gerberding-former-cdc-director-on-the-future-of-vaccines/
37. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/11/24/Superstar-CBS-Reporter-Blows-the-Lid-Off-the-Swine-Flu-Media-Hype-and-Hysteria.aspx
38. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0803/29/hcsg.01.html
39. http://www.robertfkennedyjr.com/articles/forbes.082215.html
40. Ibid
41. Ibid
42. Ibid
43. http://www.morganverkamp.com/august-27-2014-press-release-statement-of-william-w-thompson-ph-d-regarding-the-2004-article-examining-the-possibility-of-a-relationship-between-mmr-vaccine-and-autism/
44. http://healthimpactnews.com/2015/will-cdc-whistleblower-on-vaccines-testify-before-congress/
45. Ibid
46. http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/04/congressman-posey-accuses-cdc-over-corruption-.html
47. Ibid
48. http://www.morganverkamp.com/august-27-2014-press-release-statement-of-william-w-thompson-ph-d-regarding-the-2004-article-examining-the-possibility-of-a-relationship-between-mmr-vaccine-and-autism/
49. http://healthimpactnews.com/2015/will-cdc-whistleblower-on-vaccines-testify-before-congress/
50. Ibid
51. http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/04/congressman-posey-accuses-cdc-over-corruption-.html
52. Ibid

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Over the past 3 days, Russian warplanes have conducted 134 sorties, hitting 449 targets in the provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Idlib, Latakia, Hama, Homs, Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. The main targets were the Al Nusra terrorist group with allies and ISIS. The Russian Air Force has targeted a number of the terrorirsts’ supply routes from Turkey.

The Syrian forces intensified their military operations in Eastern Ghouta in Damascus countryside. Pro-government sources argue the army clashed with terrorists from Jaish al-Islam to the East of Harasta city. A large group of terrorists were reportedly killed.

The Syrian army, backed by popular defense groups regained control over Tlol Um Kadom, Dahrat al-Said, Jabal al-Ramila and Tolol al-Sood in the Southeastern countryside of Homs.

Rasheed Bikdash, one of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) leaders, was killed in clashes with the Syrian army in North of Latakia. Sources said Bikdash is the highest-ranking defector from the Syrian army that has been killed in Syria. Bikdash reportedly coordinated the Turkey’s downing of the Russian Su-24 from the Turkoman terrorists’ side.

On Thursday the US-baccked group FSA issued a statement that demanded the predominately Kurdish “People’s Protection Units” (YPG) withdraw from 7 villages in northern Aleppo: Maryamin, Anab, Shawaghra, Tanib, Kashta’ar, Mirash,and Qanbriyah. The YPG has 48 hours to do this. The statement followed the recent tensions following the abduction of several members of the YPG and their allies from Jaysh Al-Thuwar in the Aleppo Governorate. If the Kurdish forces do not withdraw from the villages, the FSA and their allies from Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham and Al Nusra will start a military operation against the YPG.

Considering the US relies on the Syrian Kurds in a possible advance on Raqqa planned by the Washigton, it becomes clear that, the US-backed terrorists have no will to confront ISIS and seek only power for themselves. Separately, it confirms that the US doesn’t have any reliable force to build an alternative to Assad power in Syria.

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You won’t believe who’s on this list.

Once slavery was abolished in 1865, manufacturers scrambled to find other sources of cheap labor—and because the 13th amendment banned slavery (except as punishment for crimes), they didn’t have to look too far. Prisons and big businesses have now been exploiting this loophole in the 13th amendment for over a century.

“Insourcing,” as prison labor is often called, is an even cheaper alternative to outsourcing. Instead of sending labor over to China or Bangladesh, manufacturers have chosen to forcibly employ the 2.4 million incarcerated people in the United States. Chances are high that if a product you’re holding says it is “American Made,” it was made in an American prison.

On average, prisoners work 8 hours a day, but they have no union representation and make between .23 and $1.15 per hour, over 6 times less than federal minimum wage. These low wages combined with increasing communication and commissary costs mean that inmates are often released from correctional facilities with more debt than they had on their arrival. Meanwhile, big businesses receive tax credits for employing these inmates in excess of millions of dollars a year.

While almost every business in America uses some form of prison labor to produce their goods, here are just a few of the companies who are helping prisoners pay off their debt to society, so to speak.

1. Whole Foods. The costly organic supermarket often nicknamed “Whole Paycheck” purchases artisan cheese and fish prepared by inmates who work for private companies. The inmates are paid .74 cents a day to raise tilapia that is subsequently sold for $11.99 a pound at the fashionable grocery store.
2. McDonald’s. The world’s most successful fast food franchise purchases a plethora of goods manufactured in prisons, including plastic cutlery, containers, and uniforms. The inmates who sew McDonald’s uniforms make even less money by the hour than the people who wear them.
3. Wal-Mart. Although their company policy clearly states that “forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart”, there are items in their store supplied by third-party prison labor factories. Wal-Mart purchases its produce from prison farms where laborers are often subjected to long, arduous hours in the blazing heat without adequate sunscreen, water, or food.
4. Victoria’s Secret. Female inmates in South Carolina sew undergarments and casual-wear for the pricey lingerie company. In the late 1990’s, 2 prisoners were placed in solitary confinement for telling journalists that they were hired to replace “Made in Honduras” garment tags with “Made in U.S.A.” tags. Victoria’s Secret has declined to comment.
5. Aramark. This company, which also provides food to colleges, public schools and hospitals, has a monopoly on foodservice in about 600 prisons in the U.S. Despite this, Aramark has a history of poor foodservice, including a massive food shortage that caused a prison riot in Kentucky in 2009.
6. AT&T. In 1993, the massive phone company laid off thousands of telephone operators—all union members—in order to increase their profits. Even though AT&T’s company policy regarding prison labor reads eerily like Wal-Mart’s, they have consistently used inmates to work in their call centers since ’93, barely paying them $2 a day.
7. BP. When BP spilled 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf coast, the company sent a workforce of almost exclusively African-American inmates to clean up the toxic spill while community members, many of whom were out-of-work fisherman, struggled to make ends meet. BP’s decision to use prisoners instead of hiring displaced workers outraged the Gulf community, but the oil company did nothing to reconcile the situation.

From dentures to shower curtains to pill bottles, almost everything you can imagine is being made in American prisons. Also implicit in the past and present use of prison labor are Microsoft, Nike, Nintendo, Honda, Pfizer, Saks Fifth Avenue, JCPenney, Macy’s, Starbucks, and more. For an even more detailed list of businesses that use prison labor, visit buycott.com, but the real guilty party here is the United States government. UNICOR, the corporation created and owned by the federal government to oversee penal labor, sets the condition and wage standards for working inmates.

One of the highest-paying prison jobs in the country? Sewing American flags for the state police.

US demands Turkey to “seal” notorious 100 km border region with Syria, but may be pretext to invade and establish long-sought after “safe haven” for terrorists in Syria. 

In the most open admission yet that NATO-member Turkey has been allowing a torrent of supplies, weapons, fighters, and equipment to flow across its borders with impunity and into the hands of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS), the US has urged Ankara to seal the remaining 100 km border region yet to be closed by Syrian and Kurdish forces.

The Wall Street Journal in its article, “U.S. Urges Turkey to Seal Border,” reported that:

The Obama administration is pressing Turkey to deploy thousands of additional troops along its border with Syria to cordon off a 60-mile stretch of frontier that U.S. officials say is used by Islamic State to move foreign fighters in and out of the war zone. 

The U.S. hasn’t officially requested a specific number of soldiers. Pentagon officials estimated that it could take as many as 30,000 to seal the border on the Turkish side for a broader humanitarian mission. Cordoning off just one section alone could take 10,000 or more, one official estimated.

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal also reports that 30,000 troops are also precisely what is estimated to be needed to carve out a NATO-occupied “safe zone” within Syria, one US policymakers have plannedsince 2012 as a means of protecting Western-backed militants from Syrian – and now Russian – attacks.

The WSJ reports:

U.S. officials, including the Pentagon and the State Department, conducted an assessment this fall of how many troops it would take to create a safe zone, and concluded that it would take about 30,000 troops. Officials used that figure as a reference point to estimate the needs for a cordon, but said that could turn out to require fewer troops.

US Intentions are Dubious at Best 

Although some may find US calls for the border to be secured from the Turkish side welcomed, in reality, the summation of support for ISIS and other terrorist groups operating in Syria have long been crossing Turkey’s borders, with Ankara and Washington’s full knowledge and with Ankara and Washington having orchestrated the immense multi-year logistical operation themselves.

Image: The WSJ claims the US wants Turkey to stop ISIS transit routes. Transit routes from where to where? And is this finally an admission that the so-called “civil war” in Syria was really a NATO-sponsored invasion all along?

Not only has it been revealed that the US State Department itself was running terrorists and weapons from as far as Croatia and Libya, through Turkey, and into northern Syria, it has been reported by prominent Western newspapers, including the New York Times that both US intelligence agents and US special forces have been operating along the very Turkish-Syrian border ISIS and other terrorist organizations have been moving weapons and fighters over since the conflict began in 2011.

Increasing pressure from Washington on Ankara appears directly proportional not to America’s will to defeat ISIS, but the to the necessity of addressing growing public awareness that indeed, ISIS is being supported from beyond Syria’s borders by certain state sponsors and not from within Syria itself.

That coincidentally the same number of troops needed to invade and occupy northern Syria have been called up to line the Turkish-Syria border to “secure it” is likely not a coincidence at all. In all likelihood, the West would like to attempt to make an incursion into Syria under the guise of having been provoked at the border, and then “needing” to cross over into Syria to pursue the provocateurs.

The United States and Turkey, with their ambush of a Russian Su-24 over Syria, have proven just how far the West is willing to go to get an advantage, even superficially, over Russia, even if it means resorting to extreme treachery. Another “power move” wrung from this impending “border operation” seems all but inevitable.

This increasingly desperate geostrategic posture comes at a time when Russia has begun bombing ISIS-bound convoys emerging from Turkish territory almost on the border itself. Syrian armed forces are likewise close to closing off this very border region from within their own territory. Syrian troops have approached the Euphrates River’s west bank and will begin moving north toward the Turkish border itself. Once this region is retaken by Russian-backed Syrian troops, there will be no “safe zone” for NATO to establish.

Race to the Finish Line 

To ensure that NATO’s plans are fully derailed along the Turkish-Syrian border, Russian-backed Syrian troops much ensure a substantial deterrence exists specifically to face this threat. Diplomatically, offers to establish a border guard or peacekeeping force on the Syrian side to compliment NATO’s within Turkish territory may be the best way to ensure NATO’s ambitions remain where they are.

What the Wall Street Journal and the policy think-tanks it is repeating attempt to lay out is a narrative that claims in order to stop terrorists from passing through Turkish territory and into Syria, for some reason NATO needs to occupy Syria itself.

Image: A Russian-led multinational peacekeeping force placed along the 100 km border region facing off NATO troops in Turkey would not only put a final end to the Syrian conflict, it would wrest control of the West’s self-proclaimed role as international arbiter over the world’s affairs. Those who join the peacekeeping force would form the new face of a multipolar world order set to displace Wall Street and London’s unipolar order.

It is a narrative that defies reason and logic, and also fails to address the ports of entry terrorists, funds, and weapons are entering into Turkish territory from before heading onward to Syria – likely because those are ports – seaports and airports – controlled directly by NATO and Ankara itself.

As the conflict appears to be drawing to a conclusion favorable to Syria and its allies, Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran must remain vigilant of the West’s designated “wild cards,” Turkey in the north, and Israel to the southwest. When tensions between NATO seem at their highest, what is more likely at play is a means of creating collective “plausible deniability” for NATO ahead of another act of war by one of its individual members or allies.

For Moscow in particular, the downing of its Su-24 should be fair warning that while cooperation should continue to be sought as a matter of good diplomacy, treachery must be expected as a matter of good strategic planning.