Global Research

Three weeks of state-sponsored violence left 53 Palestinians murdered (including 11 children), over 2,000 injured by live fire, rubber-coated steel bullets or security force beatings, 5,500 needing treatment for toxic tear gas inhalation, and nearly 900 arrested.

Detainees undergo grueling interrogations, violent beatings and other forms of torture and abuse.

Numerous Palestinian homes are being violently entered daily pre-dawn – occupants terrorized, children traumatized, possessions ransacked, damaged and stolen, family members arrested on phony charges or none at all.

Israel’s solution for ending violence is inciting more of it, its pogrom against Palestinians ongoing throughout the West Bank, East Jerusalem and parts of Gaza.

Noted peace and Palestinian justice advocate Dr. Hashem al-Azzeh died after collapsing from tear gas inhalation in Hebron’s Old City.

On Wednesday, he experienced chest pains at home. An ambulance his family called couldn’t reach him because Israel obstructed area movement.

He began walking toward the Bab al-Zawiya checkpoint for help. Fierce clashes were ongoing. Soldiers blocked his passage. He became engulfed in tear gas, couldn’t breathe, collapsed and died.

When finally taken to Hebron’s hospital, it was too late to save him. His wife suffered two miscarriages from settler attacks. Earlier, he said they “attacked us inside our houses” – destroying furniture and striking his head and teeth with their rifle butts.

Months before his death, he explained Israeli-imposed harshness in Hebron. “(T)o get to your house you need a permit. You need all your baggage checked.”

“You can’t drive a car. There’s no clinic, no ambulance (service). You are harassed by soldiers all the time,” everywhere you go. Life for Palestinian residents is unbearable. Israeli harshness aims to drive them out, making way for exclusive Jewish development.

Hebron’s Old City has some of the West Bank’s most violent settlers, using armed force to evict Palestinians from their homes. Around 500 Jews live separated from thousands of Palestinians, protected by Israeli soldiers and police.

B’Tselem said Israel’s “legal and physical segregation between the settlers and the Palestinian majority” left more than 1,000 area homes vacated in Hebron’s center, and over 1,800 Palestinian businesses closed.

(S)ettlers “routinely” use violence against area residents…(S)oldiers and police (cause) violence, excessive and unjustified use of force, and abuse of the powers granted by law.

Daily accounts of reality on the ground report more Palestinian deaths, countless injuries and arrests, as well as extreme state-sponsored brutality.

A handful of Israelis died – until a few days ago, none from stabbings. Claims otherwise are maliciously inflammatory, capturing world headlines unjustly while extreme Palestinian suffering goes virtually unreported – prisoners on their own land, victims of Israeli savagery.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said areas of the West Bank where they’re working experienced a five-fold increase in mental trauma since October 1.

Psychologist Marcos Matias Moyano said isolation, restricted movement, night raids, home demolitions, settler violence and vandalism, as well as mass kidnappings and detentions left Palestinian communities deeply scared.

“Our patients are suffering from fear, psychosomatic complaints, anger, frustration and hopelessness,” he said. “Children suffer from bedwetting. They are scared to leave home to go to school. They lack energy to study and cannot concentrate.”

Many adults (have) sleeping and eating problems, (experience) crying, fear and despair. (T)he level of acute stress we have seen among our patients in the past weeks is concerning. It (has) a serious impact on people’s ability to cope.

Since Israeli state-sponsored terror began weeks earlier, MSF provided mental health treatment for over 500 Palestinian patients. If protracted violence continues, numbers could increase exponentially, young children in their formative years harmed most.

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.

The long-awaited Final Report on MH17 crash released by the Dutch Safety Board’ International Commission last week has only left a cold scent in the headlines. The reason is hardly the booming Syrian epic. The Dutch report lacked the substance so vigorously expected by all concerned parties: direct indication to the perpetrator. The legally impeccable statement about Ukraine’s failure to comply with its obligation to close the sky over the war-torn area for civilian aircraft was important, but did not answer the key question: who pushed the button?

The 279-page report is full of commonplace charts and infographics, but when it comes to principal data and assessments, it exposes a 320 sqr km zone of the “possible launching site” and mispresents the type of BUK missile which hit the Malaysian Boeing (“9M38 and 9M38M1 missiles” while no signs of specific I-beam striking elements of 9M38M1 missile were found on the wrecked parts of fuselage). At one point it regretfully slips into the outright forgery when publishing a visualization map (p.146, fig.64) claiming that the marked area was determined by BUK manufacturer (Concern Almaz-Antey) as the most likely launching spot zone (in reality that map from a slide presented during June 2, 2015 press-conference by Almaz-Antey was to illustrate a hypothesis that the missile was launched from Snezhnoe location, subsequently declined by further computation of the manufacturer).

On the contrary, the new Almaz-Antey investigation report made public almost simultaneously last Tuesday, gives a comprehensive and detailed footage for categoric conclusion: the missile was launched from the Zaroshchenskoe location under Ukrainian Armed Forces’ control at that time. The conclusion was based on the thorough and transparent research including computer modelling and a full-scale real-life experiment conducted on Oct 7, 2015:

As the result of this experiment the hypothesis that the missile came from the Snezhnoe location (under republican’s control) was definitely discarded by the missile producer.

As far as the missile type dilemma is concerned, the difference between 9M38 and 9M38M1 striking elements was clearly exposed by Concern Almaz-Antey:

P.74 of Almaz-Antey report demonstrates the difference between striking elements inside 9М38 (diamond type, above) and 9М38М1 (I-beam type, below) BUK missiles.

The fact is that there were no holes caused by I-Beam type elements on the fuselage of the Malaysian Boeing. That means that it was downed by 9M38 missile compatible with only the first-generation  BUK 9К37 launcher which was produced in Soviet Union in 1978-1986. A large number of BUK complexes were on service in the Ukraine-based Soviet Army Air Defense regiments and were left there after the collapse of Soviet Union. Since 1983 the Soviet (and later Russian army) was receiving the modernized 9K37M1 Buk-M1 modification equipped with 9М38М1 missiles, while the latter is being replaced by a newer modification, 9K37M1-2 Buk-M1-2 (missile code 9M317) since 1998. As a matter of fact by 2011, the ultimate life limit for the last 9M38 missiles produced in 1986, there were no BUKs of that type on active service in the Russian Army.

Meanwhile according to documented data, in 2005 there were 502  units of 9M38 missiles still serving in Ukraine(inspection report in disposal of Concern Almaz-Antey). The main task of any international commission to investigate the air accident of this nature should be scrutinising the Ukrainian munition stock records of the Air Defense units for the last 10 years.

Now, going to the probable launching pad in Zaroshchenskoe. The first remark about this location was made by Lieutenant-General Andrey Kartopolov from the Russian Army General Staff on July 21, 2014 when he introduced the original space surveillance evidence of the presence of Ukrainian BUK launchers near Zaroshchenskoe in the morning July 17, 2014:

Russian satellite image of the area ‎47° 59’N, ‎38° 27′ 05”E taken at 11.32AM (msk) 17.07.2014. Two Ukrainian BUKs seen in the sector A. Photo courtesy of the Russian Defense Ministry.

Ukrainian Army BUKs locations map, July 2014. Zaroshchenskoe underlined in red.

The MH17 Shootdown – Origin of Equipment and Military Control of the Area of the Zaroshchens’ke Ukrainian Armed Forces BUK Deployment, a private report released in October 2015 by an American civil engineer;Besides the “official” reports, there are a number of independent researchers from Malaysia, Netherlands, United States, Germany, Russia and elsewhere who have already published their own forensic reports on the incident based on data they could collect. Among them we would draw your attention to the following:

Confidential Report on the Circumstances of the MH17 Shootdown, made public by the Russian forensic expert Albert Naryshkin (aka Albert_Lex) in July 2015. As the latter was in Russian only, hereby is the conclusion:

Accomplished forensic research suggests that the fragments of fuselage of Boeing 777-200 board number 9M-MRD which collapsed during flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, have  damages caused by the combat weapons. The locations of holes and other damages indicate that the aircraft was hit in the air by a weapon equipped with high-explosive fragmentation warhead with ready strike elements.

The explosion took place at the distance 0.8-1.6 m outside the glass cover of the pilot’s cabin. The warhead weight did not exceed 40 kg. It contained 2000-4000 individual fragments (submunitions) in form of rectangular blocks with physical dimensions 8x8x6 mm, around 3 g each.

The targetting was carried out by either radiolocation or thermovision devices of the warhead. According to available data, the specific weapon used to attack Boeing 777-200 cannot be determined univocally, but the most probable option basing on the parametres of the warhead, is the Israel-made Python air-to-air missile.

While analysing air-to-air version of the MH17 tragedy is beyond the line of this article, it should be noted that 4th and 5th generation of the Python missile was adapted for SU-25 “Scorpion” fighter and exported to several post-Soviet states in early 2000s. More details on Albert’s report can be found here. Considering the exposed facts it is at least surprising that the Dutch report does not contain a scrupulous review of all warheads produced worldwide with similar striking elements inside.

Evidently, the main issue – who is the criminal perpetrator – is still unsolved 15 months after MH17 shootdown as it was at the very first day. The quality and professionalism  of the costly clandestine investigation carried out by the Dutch Safety Board is now questioned not only by Russian and international observers, but the members of the International Commission itself. After the prejudiced allegations about “Russia protecting the guilty” made by DSB chief Tjibbe Joustra last Friday, we can’t bear more illusions about impartiality of this Commission (if they ever were the case). Important point in this regard is that the absense of any direct accusation of Russia or “pro-Russian rebels” in the DSB report means that the Commission could not find (or fabricate) a single evidence which could be presented as a “prove” of Russian involvement.

So the next logical step should be opening the case within the jurisdiction of International Criminal Court. According to Rome Statute, the tragedy over Ukraine is clearly a war crime case:

Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;

(Article 8, paragraph 2, b(ii))

The international investigation under ICC should be initiated by Prosecutor of ICC (article 15). To open the case, a State Party of the ICC should  refer a situation to him (article 14). In this particular situation Ukraine is not a Party of ICC (Rome Statute not ratified by Ukraine yet), so the options on the table are Netherlands (ICC State Party) giving the formal request to ICC or Ukraine accepting an Act of recognition of ICC jurisdiction over MH17 incident (article 12, paragraph 3) and thus referring to the Prosecutor. Quite noteworthy is that during 2014-2015 the incumbent Kiev’s authorities have already twice (!) accepted acts of recognition of ICC jurisdiction over “crimes against humanity, committed by senior officials of the state… within the period Nov 21, 2013 – Febr 22, 2014” (February 25, 2014) and over “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by senior officials of the Russian Federation and leaders of terrorist organization DNR and LNR” (February 4, 2015).  (The latter does not contain a single reference to MH17 shootdown, by the way.) So what impedes Ukrainians, in case they feel themselves absolutely clean in the situation around MH17, to adopt another act of recognition? We have strong confidence that they perfectly know that any serious international criminal investigation would inevitably lead to the real perpetrator of this crime: Ukrainian Air Defense and current regime in Kiev.

So  only one chance for justice for the victims of MH17 is left: Malaysia, being a non-Party of ICC as well, adopts the same Act of recognition of ICC jurisdiction over MH17 case and secures the investigation till the final verdict.

RELEVANT VIDEOS:

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is a part of the Law of Peace and the Law of War. However, the obligations included in the treaty are dependent upon states’ attitudes regarding other issues. Non-use of nuclear weapons is directly related to negotiations done for the purpose of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, non-production or accumulation through other ways and disarmament. In our day, prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been one of the current issues of international law.

The present study is of crucial significance due its endeavor to clarify the general principles of Humanitarian Law in relationship with nuclear weapons threat. Until this moment, a special norm significantly limiting or completely prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons has not been accepted in international law; however, customary international humanitarian law regarding the use of nuclear weapons holds a great value because of its purpose to eliminate nuclear weapons as means of war through ascertaining their non-use and also to appease the importance of nuclear ascendency. In this context, the NPT regime and its relationship with international humanitarian law will be argued in this paper. Firstly, the NPT background, emergence process, main purposes and principles will be analyzed considering the legal framework of NPT. One of the main parts of the study is the legal framework of the NPT regime. In this section, especially Atoms for Peace will be evaluated in detail.

The United State as the first country to produce nuclear weapons used them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However when the United States came face to face with the effects of this technology, it asked for prevention of nuclear weapons’ proliferation and in this accordance it refused to share its nuclear information with other states and kept it secret. In 1949, after the Soviet Union attained the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, the United States shared its technological developments regarding nuclear weapons for the first time with its British ally[1]

After the United States’ decision to share its nuclear information, a nuclear proliferation racing began. Afterwards, testing process of the nuclear weapons started. As a result, following the United States SSCB, Britain and France realized their first nuclear tests. During early 1960s, in a study done at US president Kennedy’s order, in the coming 20 years, which is until 1980s, almost 40 states would be able to produce nuclear weapons. [2] This issue caused a lot of concern especially for the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, between the two states consensus has not been achieved on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. This has been the case until 1964 when the People’s Republic of China performed its first nuclear weapons’ test. But, since this date the United States and the Soviet Union could come to the point on the same side. In the end, having already begun with Ireland’s attempts and under the UN nuclear disarmament as a result of the ongoing negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was opened for signature on July 1^st, 1968 on the proposal of Ireland and has been signed by majority of the sovereign states. NPT whose main purpose is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons developed through the softening of the Cold War. Except for the UN Security Council’s five permanent members, all the states who have signed the NPT are forbidden to accumulate nuclear weapons (Article II). By signing this Treaty, nuclear powers have accepted to give technical support to those states which seek peaceful nuclear technology, to negotiate for nuclear disarmament, to decrease number of nuclear weapons and finally complete disarmament.

Non–nuclear weapon states who intend to accumulate nuclear energy are obliged to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) [3] to control nuclear plants in order to make sure of preventing deflection of nuclear materials into weapons (Article III). States possessing nuclear weapons stipulate not to transfer nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states and non-nuclear states stipulate not to accept nuclear weapons if proposed by armed states (Article II and III).

Preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, disarmament and the peaceful use of nuclear energy, constitute the three main objectives of the NPT.

The NPT has accepted the advantages of nuclear technology used for peaceful purposes but has not clarified if the same technology can be used in making nuclear weapons. In this regard Nuclear Weapon States and Non-Nuclear Weapon States have been differentiated in the NPT. In the Treaty, Nuclear Weapon States have been identified as states that have tested one nuclear weapon before January 1^st, 1967.

At the time that the NPT was signed the five permanent UN Security Council members, the U.S., USSR, Britain, France and China are the five official nuclear weapon states. India and Pakistan were known to have nuclear weapons and Israel’s nuclear weapons were deemed to hold a strong suspicion, however, none of these countries have signed the NPT. According to this embodiment, before the emergence of the Treaty the states which have exploded a nuclear device would not give up this capability by developing controlled nuclear chain reaction.

In Article VI of the NPT, despite “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament …” phrase these states have not allowed a provision which would bind themselves. Some states, particularly India have described this differentiation inherent in the NPT as discrimination and clearly announced that it will not be a party to the Treaty and conducted its first nuclear weapons tests in 1974.

Pakistan also announced that it will not be a party to the NPT and has carried out its first nuclear test in 1998. These two states are not party to the NPT thus do not have the status of “nuclear weapon states” but rather are called “de facto nuclear weapons state” or “states which are going to get nuclear weapons” are recognized capacity.[4]

In recent years, nuclear disarmament, developed out of concern for humanitarian suffering, has failed. But a genuine nuclear disarmament process has not been realized and none of the nuclear weapons states has left their nuclear weapons and after the many of disarmament conferences and treaties (such as START I and SART II) coordinated so far, nuclear weapons have not been completely eliminated. Although mentioned treaties can be considered as an important step towards the reduction of nuclear weapons, but the path to nuclear disarmament is long.

This means that the nuclear disarmament targeted by Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has not been realized. Article VI of the treaty explicitly commits all states to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament”. In this respect, the most important problem is that the nuclear weapons states have assimilated the nuclear deterrence politics. Accordingly, the nuclear disarmament process would be completely undermined as long as the states continue to adopt deterrence policy.

One question is if International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and NPT are directly bound. One of the most important goals of the NPT regime is achieving nuclear disarmament. Article VI of the NPT commits all of the states parties to pursue negotiations in good faith on nuclear disarmament. Therefore, it seems far from in appropriate to ask if nuclear disarmament  is one of the humanitarian goals of the NPT regime.

IHL provision in the Final Document agreed by the 2010 NPT Review Conference reads as follows: “The Conference expresses its deep concern at the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and reaffirms the need for all States at all times to comply with applicable international law, including international humanitarian law”.[5]As a consequence, all of the NPT parties have obligated themselves to comply with IHL regardingan NPT commitment for nuclear weapons due to their accountability within the NPT review process. The combination of committments in NPT includes the fundamental NPT Article VI obligation of good faith negotiation of nuclear disarmament. This provision is important as it enables a critic to better read between the lines of the provision and make better sense of it; it comes in a section of the Final Document entitled “Conclusions and recommendations for follow-on actions” and is inserted in Part I of that section, “Nuclear Disarmament” under “Principles and Objectives”. The heading for Part I reads:

Effective and urgent implementation of article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and paragraphs 3 and 4(c) of the 1995 decision entitled ‘Principles and objectives for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament’, and building upon the practical steps agreed to in the Final Document of the 2000 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Conference agrees on the following action plan on nuclear disarmament which includes concrete steps for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.[6]

Annex of 1995 Review and Extension Conference of the Parties to the NPT reads:

“The Conference further agreed that Review Conferences should look forward as well as back. They should evaluate the results of the period they are reviewing, including the implementation of undertakings of the States parties under the Treaty, and identify the areas in which, and the means throug hwhich, further progress should be sought in thefuture”.[7]Substantially IHL supports non use of nuclear weapons. This fact has been realized in the Preamble of the NPT. First Preamble of NPT reads: “Considering the devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war and the consequent need to make every effort to avert the danger of such a war and to take measures to safeguard the security of peoples …”.[8]

Consequently we can see the connection between non-use of nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament in the origins of the NPT. In this context, both of the Soviet Union and the United States after opening of the NPT for signature, proposed an agenda including “the cessation of testing, the non-use of nuclear weapons, the cessation of production of fissionable materials for weapons use, the cessation of manufacture of weapons and reduction and subsequent elimination of nuclear stockpiles …”.[9]

The action plan was adopted by a review proceeding provided for by the treaty, as part of the strengthened review process agreed to in connection with the 1995 legally binding decision to extend the treaty indefinitely. It represents states parties’ collective understanding of the appropriate means for implementation of Article VI. Implementation of action plan commitments consequently would be strong evidence that states parties are complying with Article VI and the NPT. This point certainly applies to the IHL commitment, due to the close interconnection with the application of IHL to the realization of core purposes of the NPT, prevention of nuclear war, and disarmament.[10] Meanwhile, International Court of Justice (ICJ), in 1996 advisory opinion on legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, predicated the application of IHL to nuclear weapons.[11] In this context, it would not be wrong if we say that ICJ has a humanitarian approach to nuclear disarmament as an NPT commitment.

Although there is no direct discussion and naming of IHL in the NPT, the treaty owes its validity to IHL. If the IHL aspect is excluded from the NPT the treaty and its binding value would be eradicated. Thus skipping IHL in NPT and its additional commitments would somehow be denying those commitments. As a justifying example, in Article VI the commitment of disarmament actually verifies a humanitarian law commitment. As a consequence, it is far from overestimation that IHL and NPT are directly connected. As a result, it is necessary that a clear explanation of the exact requirements to bring the current policies of nuclear weapons states into compliance with IHL rules and the NPT regime be made.

Reasonably enough, had the disarmament commitment in Article VI of NPT been applied by nuclear weapons states, the international community of the present day would not have had to deal with cases such as Iran or North Korea.

Consequently, in order to have a consistent disarmament regime some of the states have proposed that establishing of a standing body or annual meetings may be favorable. Without doubt, for realizing the objectives of Article VI of the NPT framework for governance should be reviewed. Besides, in order for disarmament process to succeed, Article VI of the NPT should be strengthened. Important than anything else, creation of a global disarmament treaty may be a considerable undertaking to develop the regime and realize the nuclear disarmament. For this reason, it is necessary that all of the states (nuclear weapons states and non nuclear weapons states) participate in negotiations on this continuum.

The contrast between Hillary Clinton’s stated positions and her actual record, is stark.

The record shows that she actually supports international trade treaties that allow the participating countries to allow international corporations to murder labor union organizers to keep wages down. Her financial backers include many of the controlling stockholders in corporations that shift jobs overseas to lower-wage nations so as to boost their stock-profits and executive compensation (those executives are paid largely by stock options in the companies they run — the more the stock rises, the bigger their pay); and portions of those takes by the top executives and other top owners of international corporations end up in the political campaign chests of conservative U.S. politicians such as of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and virtually all Republicans — i.e., of corrupt or otherwise conservative politicians. But this article will deal only with Hillary Clinton.

She also supports international trade treaties — such as Obama’s proposed TPP with Pacific countries and TTIP with Atlantic countries — that will cripple participating countries’ ability to regulate the safety of products, such as drugs, food-contamination, water-contamination, auto-safety, the environment, etc. However, her campaign rhetoric lies disfavoring such treaties, even more blatantly than Barack Obama’s rhetoric against NAFTA did, when he was running against her, in 2008.

THE TRADE DEALS

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, on Thursday October 22nd, David Axelrod, who is one of President Obama’s chief advisors inside the White House, explained Hillary’s switch, from verbally supporting, to verbally opposing, President Obama’s proposed trade deals. The interviewer noted that, “Hillary Clinton had previously spoken in favor of the Pacific trade deal [TPP], then once the details were out she said she was against it.” Axelrod asserted, to explain what happened:

“I actually think her switch of positions on trade was as much a response to Biden as it was to Sanders. She knew that the Vice President was very much tied to the President’s policy and would have to be, and she wanted to head him off at the pass particularly with organized labor.”

That separation of herself from Obama’s proposed trade deals effectively killed Biden’s opportunity to win the support of labor union leaders who don’t believe that a self-declared “socialist” such as Bernie Sanders is even electable in the United States. Biden had been hoping to wedge into the Democratic primaries as being the “centrist” Democrat who could pull lots of supporters away from both Clinton and Sanders.

The reason why organized labor is opposed to Obama’s trade deals is that (as will be shown) the deals would allow all participating countries to allow international corporations to hire hitmen to murder labor union organizers so as to keep wages down. U.S. workers would then be competing internationally against workers whose rights to participate in labor unions are merely nominal, not authentic. That, in turn, would accelerate the shrinkage of labor unions in the United States; and this would even further benefit the big campaign-contributors. (Obama and Clinton actually support this, though it reduces the labor-union base of the Democratic Party. The electorate are split between a ‘liberal’ party that wants unions to be weak, versus a conservative party that wants them to be dead.)

President Obama’s Trade Representative, his longtime personal friend Michael Froman, organized and largely wrote Obama’s proposed trade treaties: TPP, TTIP, and TISA. Froman told the AFL-CIO and U.S. Senators that when countries such as Colombia systematically murder labor-union organizers, it’s no violation of workers’ rights — nothing that’s of any concern to the U.S. regarding this country’s international trade policies or the enforcement of them. On April 22nd, Huffington Post, one of the few U.S. news media to report honestly on these treaties, bannered “AFL-CIO’s Trumka: USTR Told Us Murder Isn’t A Violation,” and reported that, “Defenders of the White House push for sweeping trade deals argue they include tough enforcement of labor standards. But a top union leader scoffed at such claims Tuesday, revealing that [Obama] administration officials have said privately that they don’t consider even the killings of labor organizers to be violations of those pacts.”

In other words: This is and will be the low level of the playing-field that U.S. workers will be competing against in TPP etc., just as it is already, in the far-smaller existing NAFTA (which Hillary had helped to pass in Congress). “Trumka said that even after the Obama administration crafted an agreement to tighten labor protections four years ago, some 105 labor organizers have been killed, and more than 1,300 have been threatened with death.” The Obama Administration is ignoring the tightened regulations that it itself managed to get nominally implemented on paper.

“Pressed for details about Trumka’s assertion that murder doesn’t count as a violation of labor rules, Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff, told HuffPost that USTR officials said in at least two meetings where she was present that killing and brutalizing organizers would not be considered interfering with labor rights under the terms of the trade measures.”

Furthermore:

“’We documented five or six murders of Guatemalan trade unionists that the government had failed to effectively investigate or prosecute,’ Lee said. ‘The USTR told us that the murders of trade unionists or violence against trade unionists was not a violation of the labor chapter.’”

That U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, is the same person Obama has negotiating with foreign governments, and with international corporations, both Obama’s TPP, and his TTIP.

Any country in TPP, TTIP, or TISA, that introduces worker-protection regulations which are beyond this abysmally low level, will then be fined by corporate panels, and those fines will become income to the companies whose ‘rights’ (such as to murder labor-organizers) have been violated, under the terms of the given treaty: TPP, TTIP, and TISA.

And that’s just one example of the type of sovereignty (in this instance overworkers’ rights) that is being, essentially, ceded to panels controlled by international corporations, under these ‘trade’ deals. They’re actually about a lot more than just tariffs etc.; they’re about sovereignty — switching sovereignty to international corporations.

As the UN’s top official on such matters has said, TTP & TTIP will produce “a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots.”

Here was Hillary Clinton’s past record on NAFTA, her own husband’s trade deal, which was almost as bad as are the ones that Obama is now trying to pass — and Obama’s will cover vastly more nations:

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, an Obama flyer that Hillary was complaining about, quoted Newsday’s characterization of Hillary’s NAFTA view in 2006: “Clinton thinks NAFTA has been a boon to the economy.” Hillary was claiming that this was a lie. Many in the press blindly supported her accusation against Obama here, because “a boon” was Newsday’s phrase, not hers. However, it was she, and not Obama, who was actually lying: Her 2003 Living History (p. 182) really did brag about her husband’s having passed NAFTA, and she said there:

“Creating a free trade zone in North America — the largest free trade zone in the world — would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our country was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization.”

This was one of, supposedly, her proudest achievements, which were (p. 231) “Bill’s successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA.” But Hillary was now demanding that Obama apologise for his flyer’s having said: “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals.”

If you want to get insight into the reality of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, just click here and examine that 8 February 2008 flyer from the Barack Obama for President campaign, during Obama’s Democratic Party Presidential primaries phase, when both candidates were deceiving Democrats, but only Hillary Clinton was provably and clearly lying to them. Here are the details:

Obama’s flyer said: “Of the two candidates in the race, only Barack Obama has been a consistent opponent of NAFTA and other bad trade deals. [Chicago Tribune, 2/29/04]” But, actually, back in 2004, Obama had hadnothing to do with NAFTA, except campaign-rhetoric against it in his campaign at that time, to become the Democratic nominee to win the open U.S. Senate seat for Illinois, and his main opponent at that time was Daniel Hynes, the son of a former Mayor Daley machine Democratic Ward Committeeman, Thomas Hynes. This was mere rhetoric from candidate Obama.

As for Hillary’s record on NAFTA, it was (unlike Obama’s) more than merely rhetorical, and both her rhetoric and her actions had actually supported NAFTA, before NAFTA became so unpopular among Democrats that she had to become merely rhetorically against it. On 20 March 2008, the day after Hillary finally released her schedule during her White House years, The Nation’s John Nichols blogged “Clinton Lie Kills Her Credibility on Trade Policy,” and he said:

“Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that [the] former First Lady was an ardent advocate for NAFTA; … now that we know she was in the thick of the maneuvering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement; … now that we know from official records of her time as First Lady that Clinton was the featured speaker at a closed-door session where 120 women opinion leaders were hectored to pressure their congressional representatives to approve NAFTA; now that we know from ABC News reporting on the session that ‘her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA’ and that ‘there was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time’; … what should we make of Clinton’s campaign claim that she was never comfortable with the militant free-trade agenda that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of union jobs?”

On 24 March 2008, ABC’s Jennifer Parker, headlined a blogpost “From the Fact Check Desk: The Clinton Campaign Misrepresents Clinton NAFTA Meeting,” and she reported:

“I have now talked to three former Clinton Administration officials whom I trust who tell me that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton opposed the idea of introducing NAFTA before health care, but expressed no reservations in public or private about the substance of NAFTA. Yet the Clinton campaign continues to propagate this myth that she fought NAFTA.”

Hillary continued this lie about herself, even after it had been repeatedly and soundly exposed to be a lie. Her behavior in this regard was reminiscent of George W. Bush’s statements on WMD in Iraq, and on many other issues.

OTHER ISSUES

Hillary Clinton favored the coup that overthrew the progressive democratically elected President of Honduras on 28 June 2009. And she favored the coup that overthrew the democratically elected (but like all of Ukraine’s Presidents) corrupt President of Ukraine in February 2014. And she favors fracking. (And see more of that here.) And she favors the Keystone XL pipeline. (And see more of that here.) (And here.) And she condemns proposals for a single-payer health-insurance system such as in Canada, and European countries, or else via universal access to Medicare, and she vigorously supports healthcare-as-a-privilege that’s based on ability-to-pay. But her rhetoric, especially after the challenge from Bernie Sanders, is opposite her actions and her long public record on those and many other key issues.

The only issues where her record has been progressive in her actions, and not merely in her words, are ones where the beneficiaries are ethnic, gender, racial, or other label-groups among the general public, whose votes are crucial in order to be able to compete at all in Democratic Party primaries — plus, of course, gun-control. However, she has done nothing to oppose the interests of her major campaign donors, no matter how contrary they are to those label-groups.  (A more recent version of that, is my “Hillary Veers Left, to Head Off Sanders.”

And a link there will bring you directly to today’s campaign-finance results.) Those support-groups can intelligently rely upon her to favor their positions on their specific issues, in practice, and not merely in words. In turn, those liberal actions by her will antagonize Republicans, so that her Presidency, if she wins, will be very much like Obama’s has been, no matter how far to the right she (like Obama himself) actually rules. The “center” will just keep moving farther to the right (no matter whether the American public keep moving toward the left). The same trends that have been clear ever since George W. Bush came into office will continue, in the same directions. Hillary’s husband started some of these trends himself, such as when he introduced NAFTA and when he ended FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act and deregulated derivatives.

CONCLUSION

For a candidate such as Hillary Clinton, a rational voter will ignore her merely-stated positions, and will instead examine, and rely solely upon, her actual record. There are a few successful politicians who are honest with the public, and not merely with donors; but, unfortunately, she isn’t one of them. Consequently, all of the pundits’ talk about such things as “Bernie moving her to the left” is only about her pretense, not at all about her reality. Her reality is what will be in the Oval Office, if she wins.

Reality is only what a politician does in office, not about mere rhetoric. Even when rhetoric is great, such as it was with Abraham Lincoln, it has relied upon honesty in order to be able to be so. Lying rhetoric tends simply to be forgotten by historians. It shouldn’t be, even if this requires us to remember some very bad rhetoric. Lies can be very important, no matter how bad the rhetoric might happen to be. History should deal with what’s important. So should voters.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. 

The US and Turkey, two of the Syrian President Bashar Assad’s key opponents, have not cheered his visit to Moscow, with the White House slamming it as a “red carpet welcome.” Russian and Syrian leaders were meeting for crisis consultations and planning.

The White House criticized the way the Syrian leader was received, saying it resembled a “red carpet welcome.” In that same statement, the US also accused Assad of using chemical weapons against his own people and questioned Russia’s interests in a political transition of power in Syria.

“We view the red carpet welcome for Assad, who has used chemical weapons against his own people, at odds with the stated goal by the Russians for a political transition in Syria,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.

Assad has stressed on multiple occasions in the past that Western claims that his government had used chemical weapons against the Syrian population are “an insult to common sense” and “nonsense.”

The State Department added that it was not shocked by Assad’s visit to Moscow considering the relationship between the two countries. “It’s not surprising that Bashar Assad would travel to Moscow, given the relationship that Syria has with Russia, and given the recent military activities by Russia in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing.

In addition, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu offered sarcastic comments on the topic, stating Assad should have“stayed in Moscow” in order to kick start the transition process.

“If only he could stay in Moscow longer, to give the people of Syria some relief; in fact he should stay there so the transition can begin,” Davutoglu told reporters. Davutoglu once again reiterated that resolving the crisis in Syria should be about Assad’s departure and not about a transition with him remaining in power. Both the US and Turkey are meeting Russia for negotiations on Friday, along with Saudi Arabia. The foreign ministers of all four countries have also agreed to meet for talks on Syria in Vienna. Despite the negative rhetoric, these are concrete steps being taken by key players to resolve the crisis in Syria, perhaps signaling a positive shift, RT’s Egor Piskunov said. “It is quite rare that these key players in the Syrian crisis come together, especially Saudi Arabia, which has been on the side of the rebels fighting against Assad all along, and now they may be talking about a transition,” Piskunov said in a news report. “If we are looking at the creation of a new diplomatic quartet here on Syria, perhaps eventually the Syrian government even may be included into a political resolution of this crisis.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad held talks in Moscow on Tuesday. “Yesterday evening Syrian President Bashar Assad arrived in Moscow for a working visit,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. “President [Putin] was informed in detail by his Syrian counterpart about the current state of affairs in Syria and the long-range plan.” Syria is a country friendly to Russia, and Moscow is ready not only to assist with fighting terrorism, but also in reaching a peaceful political settlement to the Syrian conflict in cooperation with other global and regional powers, Russian President Vladimir Putin said. “The decisive word, without any doubt, must belong solely to the Syrian people,” Putin stressed. The Russian President and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, talked about Assad’s trip following the visit. “The situation in Syria was discussed,” Peskov said. “In this context, the leader of Russia informed his Turkish counterpart about the results of Syrian President al-Assad’s visit to Moscow.”

The two leaders conducted lengthy negotiations, which then continued in the presence of Russia’s top policymakers.

Some experts have been suggesting that the West needs to reconsider its position on Assad if it wants to solve the crisis in Syria. Middle East journalist Karin Leukefeld told RT that Assad’s visit to Moscow needs to be viewed as the Syrian leader showing his willingness to negotiate.

“He wants to signal that he is ready to go outside his country to talk and to find a solution for his country and for the Syrian people. I think it is something the West should consider … The West needs to find a face-saving way to change their political line and to change their attitude towards Syria and to the Syrian president,” Leukefeld said.

On October 22, 2015, Canada commemorated the Ottawa shootings. This article was first published in November 2014

“Canada will never be intimidated. In fact, this will lead us to strengthen our resolve and redouble our efforts, and those of our national security agencies, to take all necessary steps to identify and counter threats and keep Canada safe here at home. Just as it will lead us to strengthen our resolve and redouble our efforts to work with our allies around the world and fight against the terrorist organizations who brutalize those in other countries with the hope of bringing their savagery to our shores.” -Prime Minister Stephen Harper, October 22, 2014 [1]

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On the morning of October 22, 2014, a man later identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, approached Corporal Nathan Cirillo while he was carrying out Ceremonial guard duties at Ottawa’s National War Memorial and fatally shot him in the back. Cirillo later succumbed to his injuries. [2] [3]

Zehaf-Bibeau then drove his vehicle the short distance to Parliament Hill, headed out on foot through a gate in the fence surrounding the Parliament Hill precinct, carjacked a parliamentary Minister’s vehicle and headed for the Centre Block Parliament Building. After a brief struggle with a security guard at the entrance in which the guard was shot in the foot, the gunman ran down the hall near where government and opposition members of parliament were holding caucus meetings. [4]

The attacker was eventually brought down by Kevin Vickers, a retired RCMP officer who was working on the hill as Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons. [4]

Zehaf-Bibeau, a convert to Islam, had a history of drug abuse and was considered to be mentally unstable. He was obstructed from obtaining a passport to travel to an Islamic country that shared his beliefs. He had been staying in an Ottawa Mission in the days preceding the attacks. It is unknown how he was able to attain the firearm he used. [5]

In the heightened climate of fear and insecurity that the incident provoked, the Harper government quickly defined Zehaf-Bibeau’s rampage as a terrorist attack and began promoting and expediting the passage of legislation which boosts Canadian security forces’ powers of surveillance, detention and arrest. [6]

This event, insofar as it appears to have enabled heightened police powers at home and increased military aggression abroad (combat mission against ISIL) evokes the US reaction to the 9/11 attacks.

One analyst who has remarked on this similarity is Peter Dale Scott. He is a poet, former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at Berkeley. He is the author of the soon to be released book  The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy.

He has long written about what he calls “Deep Politics” and has argued that at the root of all modern states there is a tendency toward suppressive authoritarian power that competes with democratic persuasion from the masses. Deep events such as 9/11 and the Kennedy Assassination have the impact of reinforcing those dark secret forces within the corridors of power which are now well advanced in the U.S.

In this week’s program Professor Scott takes listeners through the history and purpose of deep events, the contraction of democratic impulses that results, his view that the recent Ottawa Shooting may constitute such a deep event and the role of military and security harmonization between Canada and the United States and how that connects with what he calls the Continuity of Government.

For more on Peter Dale Scott’s writings and how to obtain a copy of his latest book, go to www.peterdalescott.net

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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.

CFRU 93.3FM in Guelph, Ontario. Tune in Wednesdays from 12am to 1am.

Notes:

1) Stephen Harper’s speech on the Ottawa shooting, full text;  National Post Wire Services | October 22, 2014; http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/10/22/stephen-harpers-speech-on-the-ottawa-shooting-full-text/

2) Josh Visser (October 23, 2014); National Post; RCMP release security footage of Michael Zehaf Bibeau during attack, say he shot soldier in back; http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/10/23/rcmp-release-security-footage-of-michael-zahef-bibeau-during-attack-say-he-shot-soldier-in-back/

3) The Toronto Star (October 22, 2014); Soldier dead after shooting at War Memorial in Ottawa, police confirm; http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/22/hamilton_soldier_dead_after_shooting_at_war_memorial_in_ottawa.html

4)Glen McGregor; David Reevely; Dean Tweed; Dennis Leung. “Terror in the Capital”. Ottawa Citizen ; https://postmediaottawacitizen2.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/1023shootingupdate-gr.jpg

5) Andrew Seymour and Greg McGregor (October 23, 2014); Ottawa Citizen; “Shooter Zehaf-Bibeau was staying at Ottawa Mission before Rampage: Witnesses”; http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/shooter-zehaf-bibeau-was-staying-at-ottawa-mission-before-rampage-witnesses

6) Bill Curry and Kathryn Blaze Carlson (October 23, 2014) Globe and Mail; Harper vows to strengthen national security laws after Ottawa shooting; http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/mps-return-to-house-in-emotional-gathering-after-ottawa-shooting/article21263777/

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine –coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.

It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.

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“Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the most realistic of all foreign policy commentators. He is a model of integrity in analysis, his book provides an honest appraisal of the extreme danger that U.S. hegemonic neoconservatism poses to life on earth.”

Putin is committed to peace, stability, respect for nation-state sovereignty. The alternative is endless wars of aggression leading to a possible global confrontation involving nuclear weapons. The unthinkable is more threatening now than at any time in the post-WW II era – far more serious than during the 1962 missiles of October crisis.

Kennedy later explained he “never had the slightest intention of” attacking or invading Cuba. He wanted all US troops out of Vietnam. He called for ending the Cold War, abolishing nuclear weapons, a “general and complete disarmament,” and Washington no longer using its might to force Pax Americana on other world nations.

His moral stand for peace and stability got him assassinated. Obama is no Jack Kennedy – waging naked aggression against multiple countries throughout his tenure. He’s furious about Assad’s “red carpet welcome” in Moscow, showing Putin’s solidarity with Syria against the scourge of terrorism, as well as directly challenging Washington’s imperial agenda.

Deputy White House press secretary Eric Schultz lied, accusing Assad of “us(ing) chemical weapons against his own people, and saying his “red carpet welcome” in Moscow is “at odds with the stated goal by the Russians for a political transition in Syria.”

Fact: US-imported terrorists alone used sarin gas and other chemical weapons against Syrian civilians multiple times.

Fact: US special forces and other Pentagon operatives trained ISIS and other terrorist elements in chemical weapons use.

Fact: Putin, Sergey Lavrov and other Russian officials many times said Syrians alone may decide who’ll lead them, never any foreign power. Interfering in the internal affairs of other countries flagrantly violates core international law.

Numerous times throughout the conflict, Assad said he’d step down if Syrians reject his leadership. In June 2014, they overwhelmingly reelected him in a process independent monitors called open, free and fair.

In an early October interview on Iran’s Khabar TV, he explained “(f)rom the beginning, it was clear to us that there were foreign hands behind terrorism in Syria.”

Washington, Israel and rogue partners want to “perpetuate the process of erosion in Syria and Iraq and later other countries of the region, so that we all remain weak for decades and maybe generations.”

They’re not fighting terrorism. They support it, using it to subjugate other nations, wanting them transformed into vassal states, their resources stolen and people exploited.

Syria’s coalition with Russia, Iran and Iraq “must succeed,” said Assad. “Otherwise, the whole region, not only one or two countries, will be destroyed.”

Russia’s goal is defeating terrorism, preventing its spread into more Middle East countries, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere, preserving Syrian sovereignty, and challenging the scourge of US imperialism – the greatest threat to world peace and stability.

Assad’s welcome in Moscow was an important show of solidarity against evil forces vital to defeat – Putin at the same time saying: “The decisive word, without any doubt, must belong to the Syrian people,” a strong statement telling Washington and rogue partners to keep hands off.

Both leaders want ongoing conflict resolved politically, Syrians alone deciding who’ll lead them. National sovereignty is inviolable, freedom impossible without it.

The New York Times-led media lying machine can’t tolerate the notion of Russia, Syria and other nations allying against Washington’s hegemonic agenda.

The latest Times Big Lie headlined “Assad Finds Chilly Embrace in Moscow Trip” – belying Putin’s warm hospitality, what the White House called Assad’s “red carpet welcome.”

The usual disreputable Times sources were cited – unnamed “officials, diplomats and (so-called) analysts,” imperial supporters, presenting one-sided views, Big Lies serving their interests, suppressing important hard truths.

Putin and Assad have a common goal – defeating terrorism, preventing its spread, preserving Syrian sovereignty, and challenging Washington’s ruthless imperial agenda

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. 

Since this migration crisis began a few weeks ago, one question has been nagging me as to why all of a sudden many Syrians (and others) are headed to Europe. Why now? Did they all just get a mass email telling them to leave? It just seemed so strange. Well, we do have an answer now and it’s something you haven’t heard anywhere in the media.

Walid Shoebat interviewed a prominent Syrian analyst named Taleb Ibrahim. He’s a Shiite Muslim and an Arab nationalist who loves his Syrian country, it’s diverse people and his president, Bashar Al-Assad. He does not share the global Islamist aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood Jihadis who are fighting in his country against Assad.

During the interview, Taleb Ibrahim explained how Erdogan is displacing the people in Syria. Erdogan is bringing thousands of Islamist Turks from other Turkish lands into Turkey, training them and then sending them into Syria to help fight Assad. He gives an example of a couple of Chinese villages that have recently cropped up inside Syria that he said both Erdogan and ISIS brought in to help fight Assad.

So basically he’s saying that Erdogan is pushing these people out of Syria and into Europe as he changes the demographics of Syria from Arabs to Islamist Turks, all for the sake of reviving the Ottoman empire!

I’ve transcribed the part of the interview that pertains to this as Taleb is sometimes hard to understand. The top portion is important background so you understand Turkey’s relationship to the other Turkish lands. He gives some very interesting information about it. The bottom part is the red meat:

Walid: What is the difference between Jaysh al-Islam and Jaysh al-Fatah? Is this the same thing?

Taleb: Jaysh al-Fatah is a military group that consists of Al-Nusra Front;  Ahrar ash-Sham, and other extremists – the army of Turkestan, which is a province in the west of China, and the army of Turkmenistan. All of those military groups are correlated to Al Qaeda.

Walid: Wait a minute here. Brother Taleb, are you telling me there are Turkmen, Turks fighting?

Taleb: Yes, yes, Turks fighting. You know the Uyghurs, which is a Muslim minority in the west of China, from Turkish origin? They are talking in the Turkish language. They are very close to Turkmen people in Turkmenistan and middle of Asia. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought thousands of those and they trained them inside Turkey, and they sent them as one of the groups that is fighting under the flag of Jaysh al-Fatah, the army of conquest .

The army of conquest, Jaysh al-Fatah includes Al-Nusra Front, the Khorasan Group….it includes the Turkestan groups, Turkmenistan groups, Ahrar ash-Sham, and other small fundamentalist and extremist groups, that are fighting in Idlib. Jaysh al-Fatah is fighting in Idlib to the north of Syria, by the Turkish border. And it is very much correlated to Turkish intelligence.

Jaysh al-Islam is linked and very much correlated to Saudi intelligence. It is a Wahhabi army, very extremist army, fighting to the edge of Damascus. And sometimes Erdogan is sending some brigades to help Al-Nusra front and to help other Al-Qaeda aligned groups in some places in Syria and in some situations they are quarreling, fighting each other for rebels.

Walid: Let’s go a little bit to history here. Jaysh al-Fatah, does this correlate to Muhammad al-Fateh or things of the Ottomans and their desire to occupy Syria?

And the second question is, if it is an issue of a revolution to oust Bashar al-Assad…why is it we have foreign fighters from Turkmenistan, as you so eloquently explained, and from the Xinjiang region in China, Islamists from there – why are these groups coming together and they are not even Syrians and are trying to occupy Syria? What is the Ottoman connection with all of this, historically speaking?

Taleb: Of course Jaysh al-Fatah is coded, the name is coded from the early stages of Islam. When Muslim armies came to Syria, to Turkey – now it wasn’t Turkey at that time. Turkey is a very young country in history. And it’s a false country. It was the Eastern Christian Empire and the capital of the Eastern Christian Empire was at Antakya. Hatay province in Turkey, which we call in Syria the Iskenderun region.

So Turkish people, especially Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he has colonialist ambitions. He is trying to put his hands on some places in Syria. If you read their newspapers, if you listen to their TV channels, they consider Aleppo as a part of Turkey and they say that Syrian Arabs has stolen this area and so and so and so.

So yes, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which is a fascist and indeed a racist who wants only Turkish people to be in his border. He is bringing Turkish people from every place to fight President Assad to CHANGE the demographic structure of Syria.

And we have reliable information…that there was a kind of demographic replacement inside Syria nearby the city of Ar-Raqqa. There are two Chinese villages. The people, the Arab citizens from those villages were killed or displaced and Erdogan and ISIS brought Chinese Uyghurs to settle in those two villages. The Syrian people told me this story and they said we call it now the two Chinese villages.

Another issue. The Syrian migrators – you know what happened in Europe in the last few weeks? Those people were displaced by some people in the North of Syria. Erdogan brought hundreds, thousands of Turkmen minorities to settle in those villages to the North of Aleppo on the border strip.

Walid: Brother Taleb, are you telling me this wave of immigration coming from Turkey, Syria, all these, is all manufactured by Erdogan, that he’s bringing those other foreign nationalities to Europe?

Taleb: Exactly! Exactly! This is the truth behind this wave of migration. It’s a great demographic change.

So now you know why so many Syrians fled the region to head for Europe. It’s a manufactured crisis by Erdogan as he attempts to control Syria and bring back the Ottoman Empire.

You should really watch the full interview as Taleb Ibrahim discusses much more about this in detail. He and Walid even discuss how the dragon from Revelation 12 issues a flood (of immigrants) against the church (Christendom)!

He also explains what Russia is really doing in Syria, bombing both ISIS and islamist groups fighting against Assad. Taleb points out that the Syrian people, like himself, love the fact that Russia is there and support it completely.

And there’s much more in this very insightful interview. You won’t hear any of this in the media.

Watch video here.

Photographer and filmmaker Arkadiusz Podniesiński, who began visiting and photographing Chernobyl in 2007, documents his 2015 visit to the radiated zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.His photographs show the far-reaching and continuing effects of the triple disaster of March 11, 2011 compounded by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Podniesiński highlights both the desperate lives of thousands who continue to live in limbo, in government emergency housing, unable to return home, but also the plight of some who have chosen to return. (The Asia-Pacific Journal)

The damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

Radiation or Evacuation

Fukushima Evacuation map showing differential radiation levels, September 2015

 Immediately after the disaster at the Fukushima power plant an area of 3 km in radius, later extended to 20 km, was designated for evacuation. Approximately 160,000 residents were forcibly evacuated and received government subsidies and temporary housing; others chose to flee without state support or housing provision. Chaos, and an inefficient system of monitoring radiation levels, resulted in many families being divided up or evacuated to places where the contamination was even greater than in the evacuation zone. In the months and years that followed, as radiation readings became more precise, the boundaries of the zone evolved. The zone was divided according to the level of contamination and the likelihood that residents would be able to return.

Four years later more than 120,000 people still cannot return to their homes, or what is left of those homes. Many of them continue to live in temporary government accommodations built for them. As with Chernobyl, some residents defied the order to evacuate and returned to their homes shortly after the disaster. Some never left.

Entry to towns and cities located in the zone with the highest levels of contamination, marked in red, is not permitted except by special permit. Due to the high level of radiation (> 50 mSv per year), no repair or decontamination work has been carried out there. According to the authorities’ forecasts the residents of those towns will not be able to return for a long time, if at all.

The orange zone is less contaminated but is also deemed uninhabitable, but with lower levels of radiation (20-50 mSv/y) clearing up and decontamination work is being conducted here. Residents are allowed to visit their homes but they are not allowed to live in them.

The lowest level of radiation (< 20 mSv/y) is found in the green zone where decontamination work has been completed. The clean-up is in its final stages, and the evacuation order is to be lifted soon.

Decontamination

Dump sites with sacks of contaminated soil are usually located on arable land. To save space the sacks are stacked in layers, one on top of the other.

When entering the zone, the first thing that one notices is the huge scale of decontamination work. Four years later, twenty thousand workers are painstakingly cleaning every piece of soil. Removing the top, most contaminated layer of soil, they put it in sacks, supposedly to be taken to one of several thousand dump sites. The sacks are everywhere. They are becoming a permanent part of the Fukushima landscape.

Decontamination work is not limited to removal of contaminated soil. Towns and villages are being cleaned as well, methodically, street by street and house by house. The walls and roofs of all buildings are sprayed and scrubbed. The scale of the undertaking and the speed of work are impressive. The workers are making every effort to clean the houses so that residents can return as soon as possible.

The roofs of all the buildings are hand-cleaned tile by tile.

Some contaminated soil has been transported out of town, however, often only to the outskirts. This expensive operation is only shifting the problem from one place to another so that residents will be able to return.

It is still not clear where the contaminated waste will end up, especially as residents protest against location of long-term dump sites near their homes. Many are unwilling to sell or lease their land for this purpose. They do not believe government assurances that 30 years from now the sacks containing radioactive waste will be gone. They fear that the radioactive waste will be there forever.

Many areas cannot be decontaminated at all because of thick forests or because they are in mountainous areas. Only houses and areas surrounding houses, as well as 10-meter strips along roads, are being decontaminated. This gives rise to the fear that any major downpour will wash radioactive isotopes out of the mountainous and forest areas and the inhabited land will become contaminated again. These fears are not without foundation; in the last year this has happened at least twice in Chernobyl.

Given continue fears of radiation and the slow pace of cleanup, many residents who distrust the authorities and fear contamination do not want to return to their homes. A survey of former residents of the red zone shows that only 10% of those polled want to return to their homes, while as many as 65% of evacuees do not intend to return. Fear of radiation is hardly the only problem. Lack of work, infrastructure, and medical care are all effective deterrents to returning, and with each year, the residents get older, like the deserted houses whose conditions deteriorate the longer they are not renovated and lived in.

There are also reasons for the unwillingness to return that residents do not like to talk about, including the compensation and the various subsidies and tax relief that evacuees receive. Compensation for the accident alone was set in 2012 at 100,000 yen (approximately 850 dollars per month) per evacuee. The government has announced that compensation will end one year after a zone is officially opened as the green and orange zones presently are. Some residents have protested and are planning legal action against the government on the ground that the area remains unsafe. Many fear that the authorities will attempt to coerce them into returning, particularly since the government in 2012 arbitrarily raised the permitted level of exposure to radiation per year from 1 to 20 mSv.¹

No-Go Zone

A separate permit is required to enter each of the towns in the red zone. Permits are issued only to those who have a legitimate, official reason to enter. No tourists are allowed. Even journalists are not welcome. The authorities, wary of journalists, enquire about the reason for visiting, the topic being covered, and the attitude of journalists towards the disaster.

Unable to visit the red zone, I entered the orange zone. There, in Tomioka, I met Matsumura Naoto, a farmer who returned illegally not long after the accident to what at the time was still the red zone. He returned to take care of the abandoned animals, unable to bear the sight of herds of cattle wandering aimlessly in the empty streets when their owners had fled the radiation. He tells of animals that were starving to death or were being killed by the authorities.

Matsumura Naoto His blog can be read here.

Learning that I visit Chernobyl regularly, Matsumura asks how the evacuation and decontamination were carried out in Chernobyl, and about the levels of radiation. It is still illegal for residents to return permanently to towns in the orange zone. They are only allowed to spend time there during the day, but even then there are few residents who do. Most do not want to return, and soon they won’t have anything to come back to. Many of the deserted houses, especially the wooden ones, are in such disrepair that soon it will be not be financially viable to renovate them, and if they are not renovated they will start to collapse.

Young residents or families with children left Fukushima long ago. In pursuit of a better life, many went to Tokyo or other large cities. Many older residents, more attached to the place they have lived for several decades, prefer to live nearby, in specially built temporary housing. Others went to relatives, but not for long, so as not to be a burden. Most soon return to their temporary housing: two tiny rooms and a kitchen.

Nozawa Yōko’s temporary housing she was moved to after evacuation	Yōko in the kitchen	Yōko’s husband, Kōchi

Namie

Although Namie, one of three towns in the no-go zone, is completely deserted, the traffic lights still work, and the street lamps come on in the evening. Now and again a police patrol drives by, stopping at every red light despite the area being completely empty. They stop our car and check our permits carefully.

Liquor store

 Here the earthquake did not seriously damage the houses, and being situated a long way from the sea there were also no threat from the tsunami. It was radioactivity that forced residents to flee.

Tajiri Yukiko showing the wreckage in the house she lived in before evacuation

In order to see the effects of the tsunami we go to the coast, where all of the buildings were destroyed. Four years have passed. The clean-up is continuing, but most damage has been cleared. One concrete building stands out. A school built using TEPCO money withstood the destructive force of the tsunami. The children fortunately escaped to the nearby hills.

The Ukedo primary school building survived just 300 meters from the ocean.

Remains of destruction in the aftermath of the tsunami, seen from the school’s observation tower.

School computers

In one classroom on the first floor, a mark below the blackboard shows the level of the tsunami. On the blackboard are words written by former residents, schoolchildren, workers and soldiers to keep up the morale of the victims: “We will be reborn,” “You can do it, Fukushima!” “Stupid TEPCO.” “We were rivals in softball, but always united in our hearts!” “We will definitely be back!” “Despite everything, now is precisely the beginning of our rebirth.” “I am proud to have graduated from the Ukedo primary school.” “Fukushima is strong.” “Don’t give up, live on!” “Ukedo primary school, you can do it!” “If only we could return to our life by the sea.” “It’s been two years now and Ukedo primary school is the same as it was on 11 March 2011.”

A fissure in the earth caused by the earthquake in Yoshizawa’s farmland.

Yoshizawa Masami,like Matsumura, returned to his ranch shortly after the disaster to take care of the abandoned animals. Now there are approximately 360 cattle on his farm.

Not long after the accident his cows started to get mysterious white spots on their skin. Yoshizawa suspects that this is from eating contaminated grass. Trying to publicize the case, he has been in contact with the media, and has protested in front of the Diet in Tokyo, even taking one of his cows. However, apart from financial support for regular testing of the cows’ blood, extensive tests have not been conducted.

Futaba

Futaba, which borders the ruined power plant, has the highest level of contamination in the no-go zone. There has been no clean up or decontamination due to high radiation. We were issued protective clothing, masks, and dosimeters.

Sign above one of the main streets of Futaba proclaims: “Nuclear power is the energy of a bright future”

Tani Kikuyo (age 71) regularly visits the house from which she and her husband Mitsuru were evacuated, but they are permitted to enter only once a month for a few hours at a time. They continue to visit even though they have long ago given up hope of returning permanently. They check to see if the roof is leaking and whether the windows have been damaged by the wind or wild animals. Their main reason for returning however is a sentimental one.

A school in Futaba. A dosimeter showing a radiation level of (2.3 uSv/h).

In the vicinity of the red zone, many abandoned vehicles are neatly organized in several rows. They are contaminated, releasing 6.7 μSv per hour.

Seven years ago I ended my first documentary on Chernobyl with these words:

“An immense experience, not comparable to anything else. Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers. Prypiat is a huge lesson for our generation.”

Have we learned anything since then:

See Arkadiusz Podniesiński’s full photographic essay on Fukushima here, and his work on Chernobyl here. See here also.

See the accompanying article by David McNeill and Androniki Christodoulou, Inside Fukushima’s Potemkin Village: Naraha

Related Articles

Asia-Pacific Journal Feature, “Eco-Model City Kitakyushu and Japan’s Disposal of Radioactive Tsunami Debris”

David McNeill and Lucy Birmingham, “Meltdown: On the Front Lines of Japan’s 3.11 Disaster”

Notes

¹ Fukushima Minpō, 1 March 2012.

Hashem Azzeh was the Israeli government’s worst nightmare.

First, he was Palestinian. Second, he was educated, a medical doctor. Third, he was a leader in his community. Which brings us to his next offense, he was a peace activist. Finally, and perhaps most aggravating for the Israeli state, he adamantly refused to be forced from his home in Hebron’s Old City – though the IDF and Israeli settlers, who lived in houses perched right above his, never tired of using intimidation and violence to try and push Hashem and his young family from their home.

IDF soldiers are a constant presence in the Old City, providing cover for the approximately 500 Israeli settlers who lord over and terrorize the tens of thousands of Palestinians who live in this part of Hebron.

Today, October 21, those soldiers killed Hashem Azzeh.

He managed a psychological support group for members of his community, encouraging them to speak about the trauma that was a part of their daily lives. Together with his wife, Nisreen, he created a social enterprise for Hebron’s young Palestinian women, helping them to learn skills and earn money to support themselves and their families.

Hashem Azzeh and his wife, Nisreen (date unknown)

When members of his community were in need of help, Hashem was there to support them. In July, we published an article about one of the people touched by Hashem’s caring character: eighty-year-old Zahirah Eweidah Dandees. Known as “Um Mohammad,” she is among the countless Palestinians in Hebron “who have been victims of the settler-state repression machine.”

Recently, Um Mohammed was forced from her home by settlers, and refused re-entry by the IDF, who barred the front door of her house. Homeless and without any close family in the city, Um Mohammed found a friend in Hashem, who arranged for her to stay in a house across the street from her own, ensuring the elderly woman had a roof over her head. Hashem also helped Um Mohammed secure legal representation to undertake the lengthy court battle to try and get her house back.

Hashem Azzeh and Um Mohammad, Hebron’s Old City, 2015 (Photo credit: Muftah)

In many ways, Hashem was Hebron’s unofficial spokesperson. Only this past Saturday, October 17, he was quoted in a piece for the Middle East Eye, describing the impunity with which settlers in the Old City have been killing young Palestinians: “The settlers feel confident that they have a free pass to kill Palestinians here,” he said. “We have asked the soldiers to help stop the settlers but they said it’s not their role and that we should leave the city.”

(Hashem Azzeh describing the violence he and his family experienced at the hands of Israeli settlers and the IDF)

Hashem would regularly give tours of the Old City to internationals, educating them about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, generally, and his city, more specifically. He was bold and would not shy away from standing a few feet from an armed IDF soldier and recounting, for tour participants, the Israeli government’s litany of violations and crimes against the Palestinians.

One of Hashem’s many friends (he was a man who made friends so easily) had this to say about his passing:

The heart is heavy tonight upon the news of Hashem Azzeh passing away little over 2 hours ago through tear gas inhalation fired upon him by the Israeli army.
He was a man who showed the world the courage and resistance of Palestine.
He stood for what he believed and that belief inspired a generation.
He rejected millions from the Israeli government to sell his land, his land was his pride and his pride was Palestine.
I remember him talking to us in his home in Hebron where his wife made us the most amazing food. He told us of his struggle, his battle to simply survive each day. Israeli settlers poisoned his trees, cut off the water supply, fired upon his home, they broke into his house and beat him and his wife, Nisreen, causing her to miscarry her baby on two separate occasions, I could go on.
But today his pain is gone forever but he left a legacy that will forever survive.
My heart bleeds for his family, I pray Allah protects them from the evil they have endured.
May you finally find your peace Hashem and may Allah grant you the highest of heavens.
Palestine will be free.

Another friend, Milla Katerina Tuominen said this:

It was just couple of months ago when I visited Hashem and his family at Tel Rumeida settlement in Hebron (al-Khalil). Today I heard that this old Palestinian man had been killed by tear gas from the Israeli army. He was a medical doctor who had founded a voluntary clinic in his neighborhood. He was famous for inviting everyone to his house regardless their religious or ethnic background and served as a perfect example of non-violent resistance despite having faced a lot of violence and hardship himself. Unfortunately his killers will never face any consequences for their actions. I want to convey my sincere condolences to his wife and four children.

Yet another friend, who asked to be identified as “Yasmin,” said this about Hashem:

This is my friend Hashem Azzeh. A husband, a father and an inspiration to all. He was killed today by the Israeli Occupation Forces in Occupied Hebron. I feel so incredibly honoured to have known someone so courageous and so determined to free the people of Palestine and resist the oppressor. I cannot even begin to put into words how special he was; there’s no doubt about it, he truly touched the heart of every individual he ever met. He’s daily life was spent informing people about the struggle to live in an apartheid city where being Arab means you are constantly subject to violence and abuse by illegal armed settlers. Today is truly a loss for Palestine, but In the words of Hashem “we will win, we will be free” ‫#‏الله‬ يرحمه‪#‎freepalestine‬

In killing Hashem Azzeh, the Israeli government has undoubtedly removed a thorn from its side. But Hashem’s work does not end with his life. There are tens of thousands of people in Palestine who will carry it forward. His legacy will remain vibrant and alive, through them, no matter how hard the Israeli government may try and eliminate the Hashem’s of the world.

For those interesting in doing more, friends of Hashem Azzeh have created a Facebook page and started a GoFundMe fundraiser to support Hashem’s wife and 4 young children.

Read more about Hashem’s life and work, here and here.

Nearly 1000 Jewish and Arab residents joined seven mayors from different municipalities to form a human chain north of Israel, calling for coexistence and condemning violence.

They lined up along the road in the Wadi Ara region to call for calm, understanding, and cooperation in creating a shared society for all citizens.

“Arabs and Jews want to live in security,” organizers wrote on Facebook. “We know that only with a just solution to the conflict will we be able to stop the killing and the hatred, to build a different reality. A reality of security.”

Givat Haviva, a non-profit group founded in 1949 by the Kibbutz Federation, organized the Friday afternoon event, and afterward, hosted dialogue and sharing circles under a big tent. You can see photos on their Facebook Page.

The Mayors signed this public declaration:

In light of the present hostilities and the tense situation in Israel, we, the mayors of neighboring Jewish and Arab local and regional authorities who are working with Givat Haviva for a shared and secure life for our populations, issue this declaration:

1. Israel’s Declaration of Independence affirms that the State of Israel is based on the principle of equality, and has been a shared home for both Jews and Arabs since its inception.

2. We call upon all the citizens of Israel, and residents in Wadi Ara and the Triangle in particular, to maintain an attitude of respect and avoid any harm to one another. We vehemently condemn any attack on body, soul, or property, as well as any expression of physical or verbal abuse.

3. We appeal to the leaders of both peoples to refrain from incitement and the ferment of emotions. Our task at this time is to inspire calm and ensure public safety. We appeal to religious leaders, intellectuals, educators and teachers to lead us in a dialogue that will help adults and children to deal with the complex situation in a way that will not lead to manifestations of racism, revenge, injury, or threats to the other.

4. We recognize the reality that the State of Israel’s near 50-year occupation of the West Bank has deeply affected us on a daily basis, causing tension, violence and danger to the existence of a democratic society in Israel. We urge the Israeli government to pursue a political solution that will enable all people in Israel to live in security and peace.

5. We recognize the great sensitivity of the Temple Mount / Al Aqsa Mosque for both Jews and Muslims. We ask the Israeli government, the government of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to manage the crisis responsibly and to return to the preservation of the status quo on the Mount.

In recent years we joined Givat Haviva’s “Partnership between Communities” program, through which we seek to live as good neighbors and establish healthy, constructive relationships which can bestow security and social and economic advancement to all the region’s residents, Jewish and Arab.
Today, with the deterioration in security and in relations between Jews and Arabs, we want to preserve the fabric of life together that we have put great effort into building. During this time of crisis, we will continue to maintain good relations and promise to remain faithful and committed to our partnership, which is based on mutual responsibility and equality between Jews and Arabs in the region and in the country.

Signatory Mayors:

• Itsik Cholevsky, Megiddo Regional Authority Head
• Hassan Atamna, Kafr Kara Local Authority Head
• Mustafa Agbaria, Maali Iron Local Authority Head
• Ilan Sade, Menashe Regional Authority Head
• Ibrahim Muassi, Acting Mayor of Baka el Garbiya
• Diab Ghanem, Zemer Regional Authority Head
• Rani Aidan, Emek Hefer Regional Authority Head

Qatar which has been a major sponsor of jihadist groups fighting in Syria for years, now is actively considering a direct military intervention in the country, according to its officials.

Israeli democracy is sliding downwards. Sliding slowly, comfortably, but unmistakably.

Sliding where? Everybody knows that: towards an ultra-nationalist, racist, religious society.

Who is leading the ride?

Why, the government, of course, that group of noisy nobodies which came to power at the last elections, led by Binyamin Netanyahu.

Not really. Take all these big-mouthed little demagogues, the ministers of this or that (I can’t quite remember who is supposed to be minister for what) and shut them up somewhere, and nothing will change. In 10 years from now, nobody will remember the name of any of them.

If the government does not lead, who does? Perhaps the right-wing mob? Those people we see on TV, with faces contorted by hatred, shouting “Death to the Arabs!” at soccer matches until they are hoarse, or demonstrating after each violent incident in the mixed Jewish-Arab towns “All Arabs are Terrorists! Kill them all!”

This mob can hold the same demonstrations tomorrow against somebody else: gays, judges, feminists, whoever. It is not consistent. It cannot build a new system.

No, there is only one group in the country that is strong enough, cohesive enough, determined enough to take over the state: the settlers.

“The periphery becomes the center”: examples from history

In the middle of last century, a towering historian, Arnold Toynbee, wrote a monumental work. His central thesis was that civilisations are like human beings: they are born, grow up, mature, age and die. This was not really new – the German historian Oswald Spengler said something similar before him (The Decline of the West). But Toynbee, being British, was much less metaphysical than his German predecessor, and tried to draw practical conclusions.

Among Toynbee’s many insights, there was one that should interest us now. It concerns the process by which border districts attain power and take over the state.

Take, for example, German history. German civilization grew and matured in the south, next to France and Austria. A rich and cultured upper class spread across the country. In the towns, the patrician bourgeoisie patronized writers and composers. Germans saw themselves as a “people of poets and thinkers”.

But, in the course of centuries, the young and the energetic from the rich areas, especially second sons who did not inherit anything, longed to carve out for themselves new domains. They went to the eastern border, conquered new lands from the Slavic inhabitants and carved out new estates for themselves.

The eastern land was called Mark Brandenburg. “Mark” means marches, borderland. Under a line of able princes, they enlarged their state until Brandenburg became a leading power. Not satisfied with that, one of the princes married a woman who brought as her dowry a little eastern kingdom called Prussia. So, the prince became a king, Brandenburg was joined to Prussia and enlarged itself by war and diplomacy until Prussia ruled half of Germany.

The Prussian state, located in the middle of Europe, surrounded by strong neighbours, had no natural borders – neither wide seas, nor high mountains, nor broad rivers. It was just flat land. So, the Prussian kings created an artificial border: a mighty army. Count Mirabeau, the French statesman, famously said: “Other states have armies. In Prussia, the army has a state.” The Prussians themselves coined the phrase: “The soldier is the first man in the state”.

Unlike most other countries, in Prussia the word “state” assumed an almost sacred status. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism and a great admirer of Prussia, adopted this ideal, calling his future creation Der Judenstaat – The Jew-State.

Toynbee, not being given to mysticism, found the earthly reason for this phenomenon of civilized states being taken over by less civilized but hardier border people.

The Prussians had to fight. Conquer the land and annihilate part of its inhabitants, create villages and towns, withstand counterattacks by resentful neighbors – Swedes, Poles and Russians. They just had to be hardy.

At the same time, the people at the center led a much easier life. The burghers of Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich and Nuremberg could take it easy, make money, read their great poets, listen to their great composers. They could treat the primitive Prussians with contempt. Until 1871 when they found themselves in a new German Reich dominated by the Prussians, with a Prussian kaiser.

This kind of process has happened in many countries throughout history. The periphery becomes the center.

In ancient times, the Greek empire was not founded by the civilized citizens of a Greek town like Athens, but by a leader from the Macedonian borderland, Alexander the Great. Later, the Mediterranean empire was not set up by a civilised Greek city, but by a peripheral Italian town called Rome.

A small German borderland in the southeast became the huge multinational empire called Austria (Österreich, “Eastern Empire” in German) until it was occupied by the Nazis and renamed Ostmark – Eastern Border area.

Examples abound.

Jewish history, both real and imagined, has its own examples.

When a stone-throwing boy from the southern periphery by the name of David became king of Israel, he moved his capital from the old town of Hebron to a new site, which he had just conquered – Jerusalem. There he was far from all the cities in which a new aristocracy had established itself and prospered.

Much later, in Roman times, the hardy borderland fighters from Galilee came down to Jerusalem, by now a civilized patrician city, and imposed on the peaceful citizens a crazy war against the infinitely superior Romans. In vain did the Jewish king Agrippa, descendant of Herod the Great, try to stop them with an impressive speech recorded by Flavius Josephus. The border people prevailed, Judea revolted, the (“second”) temple was destroyed, and the consequences could be felt this week on the Temple Mount (“Haram al-Sharif”, the Holy Shrine in Arabic), where Arab boys, imitators of David, threw stones at the Jewish imitators of Goliath.

Israel’s settler periphery

In today’s Israel, there is a clear distinction – and antagonism – between the affluent big cities, like Tel Aviv, and the much poorer “periphery”, whose inhabitants are mostly the descendants of immigrants from poor and backward Oriental countries.

This was not always so. Before the founding of the state of Israel, the Jewish community in Palestine (called the Yishuv) was ruled by the Labor Party, which was dominated by the Kibbutzim, the communal villages, many of which were located along the borders (one could say that they actually constituted the “borders” of the Yishuv.) There a new race of hardy fighters was born, while pampered city dwellers were despised.

In the new state, the Kibbutzim have become a mere shadow of themselves, and the central cities have become the centers of civilization, envied and even hated by the periphery. That was the situation until recently. It is now changing rapidly.

On the morrow of the 1967 Six-Day War, a new Israeli phenomenon raised its head: the settlements in the newly occupied Palestinian territories. Their founders were “national-religious” youth.

During the days of the Yishuv, the religious Zionists were rather despised. They were a small minority. On the one hand, they were devoid of the revolutionary élan of the secular, socialist Kibbutzim. On the other hand, real orthodox Jews were not Zionists at all and condemned the whole Zionist enterprise as a sin against God. (Was it not God who had condemned the Jews to live in exile, dispersed among the nations, because of their sins?)

But after the conquests of 1967, the “national-religious” group suddenly became a moving force. The conquest of the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem and all the other biblical sites filled them with religious fervor. From being a marginal minority, they became a powerful driving force.

They created the settlers’ movement and set up many dozens of new towns and villages throughout the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. With the energetic help of all successive Israeli governments, both left and right, they grew and prospered. While the leftist “peace camp” degenerated and withered, they spread their wings.

The “national-religious” party, once one of the most moderate forces in Israeli politics, turned into the ultra-nationalist, almost fascist “Jewish Home” party. The settlers also became a dominant force in the Likud party. They now control the government. Avigdor Lieberman, a settler, leads an even more rightist party, in nominal opposition. The star of the “centre”, Yair Lapid, founded his party in the Ariel settlement and now talks like an extreme rightist. Yitzhak Herzog, the leader of the Labour Party, tries feebly to emulate them.

All of them now use settler-speak. They no longer talk of the West Bank, but use the settler language: “Judea and Samaria”.

Following Toynbee, I explain this phenomenon by the challenge posed by life on the border.

Even when the situation is less tense than it is now, settlers face dangers. They are surrounded by Arab villages and towns (or, rather, they interposed themselves in their middle). They are exposed to stones and sporadic attacks on the highways and live under constant army protection, while people in Israeli towns live a comfortable life.

Of course, not all settlers are fanatics. Many of them went to live in a settlement because the government gave them, almost for nothing, a villa and garden they could not even dream of in Israel proper. Many of them are government employees with good salaries. Many just like the view – all these picturesque Muslim minarets.

Many factories have left Israel proper, sold their land there for exorbitant sums and received huge government subsidies for relocating to the West Bank. They employ, of course, cheap Palestinian workers from the neighbouring villages, free from legal minimum wages or any labour laws. The Palestinians toil for them because no other work is available.

But even these “comfort” settlers become extremists, in order to survive and defend their homes, while people in Tel Aviv enjoy their cafes and theatres. Many of these old-timers already hold a second passport, just in case. No wonder the settlers are taking over the state.

The process is already well advanced. The new police chief is a kippah-wearing former settler. So is the chief of the secret service. More and more of the army and police officers are settlers. In the government and in the Knesset, the settlers wield a huge influence.

Some 18 years ago, when my friends and I first declared an Israeli boycott of the products of the settlements, we saw what was coming.

This is now the real battle for Israel.

Uri Avnery is a distinguished Israeli writer, peace activist and former lawmaker. Founder of Gush Shalom peace movement, Avnery has had a ring-side view of the Middle East and the Arab-Israel conflict for the past seven decades.

A former police commander from Tajikistan was featured in an ISIS video recently where he admitted he was trained by the U.S. State Department and former military contractor Blackwater all the way up until last year.

At a Blackwater facility in North Carolina, Col. Gulmurod Khalimov received “counter-terrorism training.”

“From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program,” said US State Department spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala.

According to CNN’s fearmongering report,

“The program is intended to train candidates from participating countries in the latest counterterrorism tactics, so they can fight the very kind of militants that Khalimov has now joined.”

Americans already pay more for pharmaceutical drugs than almost any other nation, and we also take the lion’s share of them, though our overall health as a nation is relatively poor. Do we really need a Big Pharma insider as the chief of the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA)? That is just what may happen.

President Obama has nominated Dr. Robert Califf, a doctor described as “the ultimate industry insider” to this position. According to the New York Times, Dr. Califf “has deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any F.D.A. commissioner in recent memory.” He has an extensive record of close collaboration with pharmaceutical giants, and recently described regulation as a “barrier,” not a safeguard for public health.

While he donates his Big Pharma speaking and consulting fees to charity, his lucrative salary at Duke University is directly supported by companies like Merck, Novartis, and Eli Lilly. Duke University receives more than 60% of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. [1]

So why would Obama appoint the ultimate industry insider to the FDA? I’m sure you can think of a few reasons if you’ve been reading Natural Society for any length of time. Why would the leader of the nation appoint someone who is getting kickbacks and other financial support from over 20 different pharmaceutical companies – all of which Califf has admitted to.

If the senate allows Obama’s nomination, Califf will steer one of the biggest agencies in government – one that accounts for about 25 cents of every dollar American’s spend on drugs – and that amounts to billions annually.

One of the FDA’s recent allowances for Big Pharma which would likely only get worse under the ‘rule’ of an insider like Califf is S 3187,  a bill which is primarily concerned with increasing the pay-to-play administrative fees; in other words, the FDA is going to charge those who contract with them more while at the same time shortening the time it takes to get all pharmaceuticals approved.

That means more fast-tracking for more drugs that harm and impair the public at high costs. Need an example of some recent ones? Look here for a listing of over 35 that had to be pulled form shelves after FDA approval.

This savvy insider, Califf, also helped the medical industry find and pay faculty for ‘regulatory consulting.’ According to the Intercept:

“Ethics forms and business incorporation documents show that from 2006 through this year, Califf served as a board member and consultant to Faculty Connection LLC. The company boasts that its team of “practicing university-based physicians and researchers” provides “regulatory consulting,” including expertise in FDA briefing reviews and other regulatory submissions to the agency.”

AIDS healthcare Foundation (AHF), which has criticized FDA Commissioner nominee Dr. Robert Califf as ‘too close for comfort’ to the drug industry, has called on President Barack Obama to immediately withdraw Dr. Califf’s name from consideration for the post as head of the FDA after news broke that Califf previously ran an academic headhunting company that had deep ties to the drug industry and whose primary mission appears to be have been to avoid or lessen government regulation of the industry.

There is now a petition for US citizens to ask Obama to remove the nomination as well.

Notes:

[1] Reuters

US News Health (Featured image source)

“The security and popular forces have held captive an Israeli colonel,” a commander of Iraq’s popular mobilization forces said on Thursday.

“The Zionist officer is ranked colonel and had participated in the Takfiri ISIL group’s terrorist operations,” he added.

Noting that he was arrested along with a number of ISIL terrorists, the commander said, “The Israeli colonel’s name is Yusi Oulen Shahak and is ranked colonel in Golani Brigade of the Zionist regime’s army with the security and military code of Re34356578765az231434.”

He said that the relevant bodies are now interrogating the Israeli colonel to understand the reasons behind his fighting alongside the ISIL forces and the presence of other Zionist officers among ISIL terrorists.

The Iraqi security forces said the captured colonel has already made shocking confessions.

Several ISIL militants arrested in the last one year had already confessed that Israeli agents from Mossad and other Israeli espionage and intelligence bodies were present in the first wave of ISIL attacks on Iraq and capture of Mosul in Summer 2014, but no ranking Israeli agent had been arrested.

Political and military experts told FNA that the capture of the Israeli colonel will leave a grave impact on Iraq’s war strategy, including partnership with Israeli allies.

In a relevant development in July, Iraqi volunteer forces announced that they had shot down a drone that was spying on the Arab country’s security forces in the city of Fallujah, Western Iraq.

Iraq’s popular forces reported that they had brought down a hostile surveillance aircraft over the Southeastern Fallujah in Anbar Province.

They said that the wreckage of the ISIL’s spy drone carried ‘Israel-Made’ labels.

This was not the first Israeli-made drone downed in Iraq.

In August an Israeli Hermes drone was shot down in the vicinity of Baghdad Airport.

He appeared on the same rostrum with Netanyahu, smiling, shaking hands, showing solidarity with his war on Palestine, murdering defenseless victims daily, terrorizing an entire population.

Ban showed support, instead of forthrightly denouncing his ruthlessness. He and Netanyahu met behind closed doors – plotting Israel’s next moves, pretending he cares about Palestinian lives and welfare.

His visit was an exercise in photo op deception, doing nothing to alleviate Palestinian suffering, save lives, and support their liberating struggle.

In nearly nine years as UN Secretary-General (since January 1, 2007), Ban never once did anything to help them, largely  silent while Israel continues to brutalize them, collectively punishing them for not being Jewish, especially Gazans blockaded and isolated under lawless siege.

He disgraces the office he holds – complicit in high crimes against peace. Speaking alongside Israeli President Reuven Rivlin ahead of meeting with Netanyahu, he lied saying:

My visit reflects the sense of global alarm at the dangerous escalation in violence between Israelis and Palestinians. I am here to encourage and support all efforts to lower tensions and prevent the situation from spinning out of control.

It’s been out-of-control for decades. Millions of Palestinians suffer horrifically. Nothing in prospect suggests relief – because world leaders able to make a difference and Ban don’t give damn about their rights and welfare, only their own self-interest.

Ban is an imperial stooge, a mouthpiece for wealth and power, installed by Washington, serving its interests, supporting its wars of aggression, mindless of how many millions die and suffer grievously.

He thanked Netanyahu “for the warm welcome,” instead of demanding his arrest for high crimes against peace. His vacuous and insulting remarks including saying:

These are difficult times for Israelis and Palestinians. I…hope that we can work together to end the violence…

I want to offer, first of all, my sympathy for the loss and injury of innocent (Israeli, not Palestinian) victims. Allow me to express my condolences to you and the people of Israel for the killing of your citizens.

…I plan to meet with some of the families of the victims… I understand the fear and the anger felt by many Israelis in the current environment, as well as the duty that weighs on you, Mr. Prime Minister, to ensure that your citizens can enjoy safety and security.

The rest of his comments were all one-sided – ignoring Netanyahu’s well-planned, premeditated state-sponsored terrorism, outrageously praising Israel as “a democratic state,” a shocking disregard for reality, ignoring nearly 70 years of ruthlessly persecuting and brutalizing an entire population, then deplorably arguing against the right to resist, guaranteed under international law.

Palestinians are being murdered, wounded, tear-gassed, beaten, kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured daily by a brutal occupier Ban and Western leaders support.

Most alleged attacks on Jews are fabricated – the phony pretext Israel uses to terrorize an entire population with world community support.

Life in Israel for Jews is normal. In Palestine it’s nightmarish, families afraid to leave home, fearful they’ll be harassed, assaulted, arrested, tear-gassed, shot, maybe killed – by Israeli soldiers, police and/or settlers.

On Wednesday, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) said Israeli forces killed five Palestinians in less than 12 hours, including two children.

It blasted the international community’s “policy of silence over grave crimes and violations committed by Israeli forces…against” defenseless Palestinian civilians.

Ban’s silence and disgraceful visit encourages Israel to continue terrorizing them freely. Nothing is done to challenge its killing machine responsibly.

Young children murdered in cold blood arouse no sympathy. Jewish lives alone matter. Last Friday, Israel’s deputy UN envoy David Roet addressed an emergency Security Council session, saying:

Israel is facing an onslaught of terrorism. Men, women and children are being stabbed to death on the streets on a daily basis.

The world community accepts this rubbish and all other vicious Israeli Big Lies. Palestinian suffering goes unnoticed.

A Final Comment

Addressing the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu tried reinventing history, outrageously claiming former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini convinced Hitler to exterminate European Jews, saying:

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time. He wanted to expel (them). And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: “If you expel them, they’ll all come here” to Palestine.

Netanyahu then claimed Hitler asked: “So what should I do with them? Saying Husseini replied: “Burn them.” He accused the Mufti of inciting violence against Jews in the 1920s.

International Institute for Holocaust Research Professor Dina Porat debunked Netanyahu’s claims. Husseini met Hitler after he declared war on Jews, not before.

Netanyahu denigrated Palestinian suffering at a time Israeli security forces are terrorizing, brutalizing and murdering innocent people – his longstanding blame the victim policy in plain sight for everyone to see.

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 1PMCentral time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance and Iraq’s shia militias have been continuing military operations in Aleppo province, specially in its Southwest, concurrent with the army’s new operations in Hama and Lattakia provinces.

The Syrian forces captured the strategic Senobarat hilltops located to the Northwest of Al-Vazihi village. Senobarat hilltops overlook movements in areas under terrorists’ control, including Qarasi town. Earlier, the SAA backed by Russian fighter jets managed purged Tal Qabli hilltops and al-Jaberia village of terrorists.

The SAA, Hezbollah and Iraq’s shia militias have also been making continued gains in the Eastern countryside of Aleppo since Sunday midnight and managed to seize Tal Naqmous hilltops and Tal Sab’een village as well as the town of al-Moflesa. The Syrian forces are currently fortifying their positions in the newly-purged areas.

Kafi Fahd and Abu Libia from the so-called “Asifet al-Hazm Battalion” and the leader of “Sayyed al-Shuhadaa Hamzeh Battalion”, nicknamed as Abu Hamza, were killed during clashes in the Northern countryside of Lattakia.

Earlier reports said the Russian air raids on the terrorist positions across the coastal province of Lattakia left at least 40 militants dead, including Basel Zimmo a senior commander known as the King of US TOW antitank missiles. US-trained Zimmo targeted many army tanks in Syria by TOW missiles and trained many militants to work with the TOW missiles.

The goal of these operations is to purge these regions of terrorists and continue advances towards the Lattakia province. Thus, the route connecting the terrorist groups in Aleppo to the Lattakia and Idlib provinces will be cut off. Moreover, this plan should lead to establishing a security on the main route linking Central Syria, or the Damascus province, to the Northern parts of the country, or Aleppo, and accordingly dispatch of equipment and troops will be expedited, while terrorists in Eastern and Western Syria will be fully disconnected.

Another goal of the operation is Kuweires airbase. Arab sources report that the Syrian forces supported by the Russian warplanes, are pushing back ISIS terrorists from areas adjacent to the military airport. Separately, the Syrian army’s helicopters supply foodstuff and other needs to the Syrian troops defending the airport. Nonetheless, it’s too early to say that the siege will be lifted in the nearest hours.

On October 14th, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the U.S. government had turned down the proposal from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for the U.S. and Russia to cooperate together to eliminate ISIS and other jihadists in Syria and in Iraq. Lavrov said:

“We’ve made Americans the proposal announced by President Vladimir Putin yesterday. We suggested that they send a [US] military delegation to Moscow to coordinate a number of joint steps, and after that we could have sent to Washington a top-level delegation led by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, [but] … It is sad that our American colleagues in this case in fact do not side with those who fight against terrorism.

Then, on Tuesday October 20th, as CBS News online reported the following day,

“The U.S. has told Iraq’s leaders they must choose between ongoing American support in the battle against militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and asking the Russians to intervene instead. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that the Iraqis had promised they would not request any Russian airstrikes or support for the fight against ISIS.”

However, Iraq already had done precisely that — and had even said that Russia seemed more committed to defeating ISIS than America is. As I summed up on October 10th:

Wednesday, October 7th, Reuters headlined,

“Iraq Leans Toward Russia in War on Islamic State,” and reported, from Baghdad, that, “Iraq … wants Moscow to have a bigger role than the United States in the war against the militant group, the head of parliament’s defense and security committee said on Wednesday.”

Earlier, in an interview in English, with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, telecast on October 2nd, France24 TV asked him how he would view an extension of Russia’s anti-ISIS bombing campaign into Iraq, and he said (7:54), “I would welcome it.” 

So, at some time between October 7th and October 20th, the U.S. convinced Iraq’s leaders to, in essence, dis-invite the Russians, instead of to ally with them against ISIS in Iraq.

Two alternative explanations are possible. Either the U.S. had promised the Iraqis that the U.S. will now really get serious about defeating ISIS in Iraq, or else the U.S. had promised the Iraqis that Iraq would be punished — at the IMF or elsewhere — if Iraq followed through on their announced intention to replace the U.S. with Russia. (Or, of course, the U.S. could have done both — the carrot, and the stick.)

In either case (or both), the U.S. has made clear, to the Iraqis, that America will do anything to defeat Russia — even abandon the fight against ISIS in Iraq, if need be — and that the U.S. will absolutely not ally with Russia against ISIS, under any circumstances.

This makes abundantly clear, to the whole world, that the current American government considers its main enemy to be not jihadists, but Russians.

However, already, U.S. President Barack Obama had made this clear when, in his National Security Strategy 2015, he named Russia on 17 of the 18 occasions in which he charged “aggression.” The 18th instance was not Saudi Arabia, the main funder of jihadists, but instead North Korea, which poses little real threat to any U.S. ally except South Korea, and none at all to the United States. (And, of course, the U.S. President didn’t cite the U.S., which in a 2013 WIN/Gallup International poll was overwhelmingly named the most throughout the world as “the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today.”)

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

The CIA have issued legal threats against the film producers of ‘9/11 Press for Truth’ who found explosive evidence of a cover-up regarding the intelligence the agency had. 

Producers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy were contacted by the CIA on September 8th, 2015, regarding their extensive research, interviews and findings that led them to discover the identities of two key CIA analysts who were instrumental in covering-up the events of 9/11.

The film’s producers initially only referred to the CIA analysts by their first names, but expressed their intention to later reveal their full identities in a forthcoming “investigative podcast”, which seemingly prompted the agency to step in.

“While producing our investigative podcast “Who Is Rich Blee?,” intended to be released on Sunday, our team managed to deduce the likely identities of two CIA employees at the heart of a notorious failure in the run up to the September 11th tragedy.” a statement reads on the producer’s website, which was offline for most of yesterday.

“On Thursday, we submitted our script to CIA along with a request to interview the two employees,” the statement continues. “We wanted to be fair in giving them a chance to tell their sides of the story. Instead, the Agency sent us a message threatening that if we went forward with the names included in the piece that it would be a potential violation of federal criminal law.”

Duffy and Nowosielski also interviewed former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who told them on the record that he has intelligence that three former top CIA officials — George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee — knowingly withheld key information on the alleged hijackers from the White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments.

Sean Adl-Tabatabai is the Editor-in-chief at Your News Wire

In a Wednesday Sputnik News interview, I said Putin and Assad can discuss anything any time by phone or other ways of communicating – daily if necessary.

Assad’s invitation to Moscow, making Western media headlines, shows solidarity between both leaders – committed to eliminate terrorism, defeat US regional imperial policy, as well as Putin’s respect for Syrian sovereignty and the right of its people alone to decide who’ll lead them, not America or any other foreign power.

Assad and Putin partnered against the scourge of US sponsored and imported terrorism in Syria. It’s virulent in Iraq. Washington wants it spread to Russia, Central Asia, China and elsewhere, part of its dirty scheme to advance its imperium.

On Tuesday, both leaders discussed ongoing joint operations in Syria. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said:

Yesterday evening, Syrian President Bashar Assad arrived in Moscow for a working visit. (Putin) was informed in detail by his Syrian counterpart about the current state of affairs in Syria and the long-range plan.

Putin thanked Assad for coming at his request, saying the following:

We took the decision upon your request to provide effective aid to the Syrian people in fighting the international terrorists who have unleashed a genuine war against Syria.

The Syrian people has been practically alone in putting up resistance and fighting these international terrorists for several years now, and has suffered great losses. Lately though, there have been some major positive results in this fight.

The attempts by international terrorists to bring whole swathes of territory in the Middle East under their control and destabilise the situation in the region raise legitimate concerns in many countries around the world.

This is a matter of concern for Russia too, given that sadly, people from the former Soviet Union, around 4,000 people at least, have taken up arms and are fighting on Syrian territory against the government forces.

Of course, we cannot let these people gain combat experience and go through ideological indoctrination and then return to Russia.

Putin explained what he stressed before, wanting ongoing conflict resolved politically, Syrians alone deciding who’ll lead them – not America or any other foreign power.

Interfering in the internal affairs of other countries flagrantly violates international law – longstanding US policy, raping one country after another, Syria one of its many targets.

Obama bears full responsibility for ongoing conflict, using death squads imported from scores of other countries, the Salvador option used in El Salvador in the 1980s – then Iraq, Libya, Syria with lots more targets Washington has in mind.

There’s nothing civil about Syria’s conflict, one of the many myths Western officials and media scoundrels perpetuate.

Assad thanked Putin for inviting him – expressing “tremendous gratitude” for helping Syrians in their time of need, operating entirely “within the framework of international law.”

“(W)e all know that any military action must be followed by political steps,” he stressed. “(O)ur common goal is to bring about the vision the Syrian people have of their own country’s future” free from foreign domination.

“(M)ilitary strikes against the terrorists are essential, above all because we must fight terrorism” – humanity’s shared goal to defeat it.

Russian military expert Mikhail Buzhinsky called Russia’s Syria campaign an impressive demonstration of its capability, using precision weapons for the first time in combat, achieving significant results.

Commander US Army Europe General Ben Hodges expressed astonishment about Russia’s ability to deploy a powerful strike force to Syria quickly and achieve impressive results. Its strength and skill to execute effectively took him by surprise.

He stopped short of admitting Russia is a formidable force to be reckoned with.

Putin’s intervention shows he drew a red line he won’t allow to be crossed.  He won’t tolerate Washington’s intention to infest Russia and Central Asia with ISIS and other terrorist elements like in Syria and Iraq.

He intervened forcefully and effectively to prevent it. He’ll continue until accomplishing his righteous mission – at the same time challenging Washington’s imperial agenda, its evil dark side.

It’s about time someone did it – an incentive for other nations to follow.

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 1PMCentral time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Peter Oborne: “No one who is loathed by the bankers, the BBC and Tony Blair all at once can be that bad.

Corbyn is the first genuinely original party leader to emerge in Britain since a certain Margaret Hilda Thatcher made her first speech to Conservative conference in 1975. Remember: the establishment hated her, too”.

A Moseley reader sent this link to an article by Oborne, who – like Simon Jenkins and Peter Hitchens – writes with clarity and power. 

He opened by stating that every rich and powerful person in Britain hoped that Jeremy Corbyn would fall flat on his face at the Labour Party conference in Brighton:

• The bankers wanted him to fail,
• as did the businessmen who finance the modern Labour Party.
• The mass media are enemies.
• The BBC has abandoned its traditional neutrality over what it calls ‘Left-wing Jeremy Corbyn’ (why doesn’t it refer to ‘Right-wing David Cameron’?)
• Having failed to prevent his meteoric rise, Tony Blair, his supporters and their apologists in the London media establishment are now plotting his downfall.
• Britain’s morally bankrupt security establishment — the very same that duped the Blair government into an insane war against Iraq — despises Corbyn.

Oborne says he will be wholeheartedly cheering on Corbyn, despite disagreeing with several policies, because he (Oborne) is “a passionate, lifelong believer in our superlative parliamentary democracy”. He continues:

“In dictatorships such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, the penalty for challenging the political consensus is torture and death. In the United States, politics has become the plaything of billionaires. In Britain we have a very different tradition: red-blooded confrontation. Yet in recent decades we have turned our back on that superb inheritance”.

In the 1990s the political process was captured by the ‘modernisers’

“This happened first with Blairites in Labour, and later in David Cameron’s Conservatives — with both men competing for the centre ground, and both loudly proclaiming their modernising credentials at the expense of their traditional supporters. The result was that the main parties looked and sounded identical. Between them they abolished real political debate. Anyone who disagreed with conventional opinion, for example over Europe or mass immigration, was labelled an ‘extremist’.

“All three mainstream parties despised the views of ordinary voters. They produced identical leaders, in their mid-40s with no experience of the world. They viewed politics as being about technique rather than ideas. They viewed political argument as akin to advertising margarine or soap powder. . . 

“Blairite contempt for Labour’s working-class supporters led directly to the rise of the Scottish National Party

“The triumph of the spin and focus group-obsessed modernisers led to the collapse in trust in politics, especially among the young.

That is why we should celebrate Jeremy Corbyn, the first authentic leader of a mainstream political party since Margaret Thatcher. It stands to reason that he should be hated and plotted against by the political establishment. Just like Maggie Thatcher 40 years ago, he despises everything they stand for. They despise him back.

“There is, furthermore, one substantive policy issue where I believe Jeremy Corbyn has many interesting things to say. This is foreign policy . . .

“Since the rise of the modernisers, there has been a very troubling consensus on foreign affairs. Tory and Labour have agreed that, come what may, Britain would never defy the will of the United States . . .

“Let’s imagine, by contrast, that Jeremy Corbyn had been directing British foreign policy over the past 15 years. British troops would never have got involved in the Iraq debacle, and never have been dispatched on their doomed mission to Helmand province. British intelligence agents would not be facing allegations that they were complicit in torture.

“Hundreds of British troops who died in these Blairite adventures (which were endorsed by Cameron) would still be alive. Furthermore, the world would now be a safer place. Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq and David Cameron’s attack on Libya have created huge ungoverned zones of anarchy across the Middle East and North Africa, in which terrorist groups fester and from which migrants flee.

“That is why Conservative claims that Jeremy Corbyn would jeopardise our national security are so wrong-headed. His foreign policy advice has often been wiser by far than the foreign policy establishment”.

In fact many think it probable that British and global security would be greatly enhanced should Corbyn become prime minister.

Spokesman of Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah (Hezbollah Battalions) Jafar al-Hosseini underlined that his forces are planning to win back the city of Ramadi after expelling the American forces from Anbar province.

“Our forces have two operations underway; first seizing Ramadi from ISIL and second keeping away the American forces from Anbar province,” al-Hosseini told FNA on Wednesday.

He underlined that preventing the US forces from getting close to Anbar province will expedite operations for winning back the province, specially after the military operations in Salahuddin province that led to the liberation of the city of Beiji.

The Ramadi city is now the scene of massive military operations of Iraq’s joint forces against the ISIL militants.

Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, was attacked by the jihadists in 2014 before being captured in February, 2015. Government forces succeeded in liberating the city in March, but withdrew two months later.

Iraq’s Western provinces have become a battlefield between Iraqi government forces and the ISIL fighters.

The Iraqi troops captured the refinery city of Beiji in the Western Salahuddin province on the second day of a fresh massive operation on Monday. Iraq’s Armed Forces Command Center made an official announcement on the groundbreaking victory on Tuesday.

In July, Iraqi armed forces launched a large-scale operation to roll back ISIL insurgency in Anbar province, however, its capital is still controlled by the Takfiris.

The messages sent by the US and Russia to Iraq indicate that the Baghdad government is under pressure resulting from the rivalries between the US and Russia over increasing their regional presence.

Such pressures will continue until Baghdad takes a final and resolute stance on US or Russian support in fighting the ISIL in the Arab country.

Meantime, the present information indicates that the Iraqi government is more inclined to take up a bigger role in the quadrilateral coalition with Russia, Iran and Syria.

Washington has not replied to Baghdad’s call for serious fight against the ISIL in action, while Moscow, Tehran and Damascus are still the most important supporters of Iraq in the fight against the ISIL; unlike Washington that is trying to weaken the Iraqi volunteer forces in their fight against the ISIL, the Russia, Iran and Syria reiterate strengthening the volunteer forces.

The US government in a message to Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi voiced Obama’s dissatisfaction with Baghdad’s inclination towards Tehran, Moscow and Damascus.

In the meantime, the Iraqi groups, specially the volunteer forces, believe he quadrilateral coalition has provided actual aid and backup to Iraq, while the US coalition did not, and this has resulted in Iraq’s inclination towards Iran, Russia and Syria.

Iraq’s Former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie underlined the necessity for replacing Washington with Moscow for joint war on terrorist groups.

“The parliament fractions are calling on the Iraqi government to request Russian airstrikes and use it to attack the ISIL military bases and oil centers,” Rubaie, who is now a senior legislator at the Iraqi parliament, told FNA on Tuesday.

“The US air force doesn’t cooperate with Iraq’s federal government and security and armed forces and refrains from providing any intelligence on ISIL’s concentration and field camps,” he added.

Rubaie complained that in every 10 flight missions conducted by the US-led coalition planes, ISIL positions come under attack in only two missions, while nothing special happens in the remaining 8 missions.

In relevant remarks on Monday, Iraqi security expert Hesham al-Hashemi said the Baghdad government would ask for Russia’s direct military assistance in the fight against the ISIL in the coming days, adding that further military advances by Iraq’s joint forces would be a great achievement for the quadrilateral coalition.

“If the Iraqi security forces achieve considerable advances in their fight against the ISIL in the Northern parts of Salahudin province, Iraq will surely ask for Russia’s military aid to help them in the fight agaist the ISIL,” Al-Hashemi told FNA.

The Iraqi security expert reiterated that the Iraqi air force desperately needed the Russian air force’s help in the fight against the ISIL.

He pointed to a security agreement signed between Iraq and the US, and said, “The Baghdad-Washington agreement will not prevent Iraq from asking for further military aid in the ongoing fight against terrorism from any third country.”

On Saturday, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov told reporters after the 6th Xiangshan Security Forum in Beijing that Moscow had not received a request for military assistance in fight against the outlawed ISIL terrorist group, and it is ready to consider it.

“What I can say now is that as of today we do not have a request from Iraq like the one we have from (Syria’s President) Bashar Assad,” he said.

“In case we receive a request, we shall consider it accordingly.”

“As there are very many insinuations about Syria, I would like to stress we have a written request from Bashar Assad for a military and military-technical assistance in fighting IS(IL),” he said.

“We stress we are acting on a legal base and in compliance with the international law.”

The Russian-led military coalition is badly beating Washington’s proxies in Syria which is why John Kerry is calling for a “Time Out”.

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for an emergency summit later in the week so that leaders from Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan could discuss ways to avoid the “total destruction” of Syria. According to Kerry, “Everybody, including the Russians and the Iranians, have said there is no military solution, so we need to make an effort to find a political solution. This is a human catastrophe that now threatens the integrity of a whole group of countries around the region,” Kerry added.

Of course, it was never a “catastrophe” when the terrorists were destroying cities and villages across the country, uprooting half the population and transforming the once-unified and secure nation into an anarchic failed state. It only became a catastrophe when Vladimir Putin synchronized the Russian bombing campaign with allied forces on the ground who started wiping out hundreds of US-backed militants and recapturing critical cities across Western corridor. Now that the Russian airforce is pounding the living daylights out of jihadi ammo dumps, weapons depots and rebel strongholds, and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is tightening their grip on Aleppo, and Hezbollah is inflicting heavy casualties on Jabhat al Nusra militants and other Al Qaida-linked vermin; Kerry’s decided it’s a catastrophe. Now that the momentum of the war has shifted in favor of Syrian president Bashar al Assad, Kerry wants a “Time out”.

Keep in mind, that Putin worked tirelessly throughout the summer months to try to bring the warring parties together (including Assad’s political opposition) to see if deal could be worked out to stabilize Syria and fight ISIS. But Washington wanted no part of any Russian-led coalition. Having exhausted all the possibilities for resolving the conflict through a broader consensus, Putin decided to get directly involved by committing the Russian airforce to lead the fight against the Sunni extremists and other anti-government forces that have been tearing the country apart and paving the way for Al Qaida-linked forces to take control of the Capital. Putin’s intervention stopped the emergence of a terrorist Caliphate in Damascus. He turned the tide in the four year-long war, and delivered a body-blow to Washington’s malign strategy Now he’s going to finish the job.

Putin is not gullible enough to fall for Kerry’s stalling tactic. He’s going to kill or capture as many of the terrorists as possible and he’s not going to let Uncle Sam get in the way.

These terrorists–over 2,000 of who are from Chechnya–pose an existential threat to Russia, as does the US plan to use Islamic extremists to advance their foreign policy objectives. Putin takes the threat seriously. He knows that if Washington’s strategy succeeds in Syria, it will be used in Iran and then again in Russia. That’s why he’s decided to dump tons of money and resources into the project. That’s why his Generals have worked out all the details and come up with a rock-solid strategy for annihilating this clatter of juvenile delinquents and for restoring Syria’s sovereign borders. And that’s why he’s not going to be waved-away by the likes of mealy-mouth John Kerry. Putin is going to see this thing through to the bitter end. He’s not going to stop for anyone or anything. Winning in Syria is a matter of national security, Russia’s national security.

Here’s Kerry again: “If Russia is there to help Assad find a way to a political solution as well as to fight Daesh (ISIS) and extremism, then there is the possibility of a very different path.”

Putin has offered solutions from the very onset, it was Washington that rejected those remedies. Putin supported the so called Geneva communique dating back to 2012. In fact, it was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who threw a wrench in the proceedings by demanding that Assad not be part of any transitional governing body. (Note: Now Obama has caved on this demand.) Russia saw her demand as tantamount to regime change, which it was since Assad is the internationally-recognized head of state and fully entitled to be a part of any transitional government. US rejectionism sabotaged efforts for internationally-monitored “free and fair multi-party elections” and ended any chance for a speedy end to the war. Washington was more determined to get its own way (“Assad must go”) then to save the lives of tens of thousands of civilians who have died since Clinton walked away from Geneva.

And now Kerry is extending the olive branch? Now Washington pretends to care about the “total destruction” of Syria?

I’m not buying it. What Kerry cares about is his hoodlum “head-chopper” buddies that are being turned into shredded wheat by Russian Daisy Cutters. That’s what he cares about. Take a look at this from RT:

Syrian President Bashar Assad “does not have to leave tomorrow or the next day,” the US State Department (spokesman Mark Toner) has stated. Washington allows that Assad may take part in transitional process, but can’t be part of Syria’s next government…

… this isn’t the US dictating this. This is the feeling of many governments around the world, and frankly, the majority of the Syrian people,” Toner said.

When asked to clarify “how long” the State Department thinks the transition process could take, Toner failed to give an exact time period.

I can’t put a timeframe on it. I can’t say two weeks, two months, six months,” he said, adding that the US is looking for “a political resolution to the conflict.”…

Toner then admitted that the US is still in the “process to start the process,” stressing that this was “an urgent issue” that “has gone on too long.” (‘Assad doesn’t have to leave tomorrow, can be part of transitional process’ – US State Department”, RT)

“A process to start the process”?? Hello?

Toner is backpeddling so fast he’s not even sure what he’s saying. Clearly, the administration is so flustered by developments on the ground in Syria, and so eager to stop the killing of US-backed jihadis, that they sent poor Toner out to talk to the media before he’d even gotten his talking points figured out. What a joke. The administration has gone from refusing to meet with a high-level Russian delegation just last week (to talk about coordinating airstrikes in Syria), to completely capitulating on their ridiculous “Assad must go” position today. That’s quite a reversal, don’t you think? I’m surprised they didn’t just run a big white Flag up over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. while the Marine Band played Taps.

But don’t think that this latest humiliation will derail Washington’s plan for destroying Syria as a functioning, sovereign state and carving it into a million powerless statelets that pose no threat to Big Oil’s pipeline corridors, or US military bases, or Israel’s sprawling Zionist Valhalla. Because it won’t. That plan is still right on track despite Putin’s efforts to crush the militants and defend the borders. The latest iteration of the Syria dissolution strategy was articulated by Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass who said:

….the United States and others should pursue a two-track policy. One track would channel steps to improve the balance of power on the ground in Syria. This means doing more to help the Kurds and select Sunni tribes, as well as continuing to attack the Islamic State from the air.

Relatively safe enclaves should emerge from this effort. A Syria of enclaves or cantons may be the best possible outcome for now and the foreseeable future. Neither the US nor anyone else has a vital national interest in restoring a Syrian government that controls all of the country’s territory; what is essential is to roll back the Islamic State and similar groups.

The second track is a political process in which the US and other governments remain open to Russian (and even Iranian) participation. The goal would be to ease Assad out of power and establish a successor government that, at a minimum, enjoyed the support of his Alawite base and, ideally, some Sunnis.” (Testing Putin in Syria, Richard Haass, Project Syndicate)

Topple Assad and partition the country. Destroy Syria once and for all. That is Washington’s operating strategy. It’s a plan that was first proposed by Brooking’s analyst Michael O’Hanlon who recently said:

…a future Syria could be a confederation of several sectors: one largely Alawite (Assad’s own sect), spread along the Mediterranean coast; another Kurdish, along the north and northeast corridors near the Turkish border; a third primarily Druse, in the southwest; a fourth largely made up of Sunni Muslims; and then a central zone of intermixed groups in the country’s main population belt from Damascus to Aleppo…

Under such an arrangement, Assad would ultimately have to step down from power in Damascus… A weak central government would replace him. But most of the power, as well as most of the armed forces. would reside within the individual autonomous sectors — and belong to the various regional governments…

American and other foreign trainers would need to deploy inside Syria, where the would-be recruits actually live — and must stay, if they are to protect their families. (Syria’s one hope may be as dim as Bosnia’s once was, Michael O’ Hanlon, Reuters)

Once again, the same theme repeated: Topple Assad and partition the country. Of course, the US will have to train “would-be recruits” to police the natives and prevent the buildup of any coalition or militia that might threaten US imperial ambitions in the region. But that goes without saying. (By the way, Hillary Clinton has already thrown her support behind the O’Hanlon plan emphasizing the importance of “safe zones” that could be used to harbor Sunni militants and other enemies of the state.)

John “Wacko” McCain has been the most strident proponent of the plan to break up Syria. Here’s part of what he said on the topic:

We must act now to defend civilian populations and our opposition partners in Syria….we must establish enclaves in Syria where civilians and the moderate opposition to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and ISIS can find greater security. These enclaves must be protected with greater American and coalition airpower and likely foreign troops on the ground. We should not rule out that U.S. forces could play a limited role in this ground contingent…

We must back up our policy in ways that check Putin’s ambitions and shape his behavior. If Russia attacks our opposition partners, we must impose greater costs on Russia’s interests — for example, by striking significant Syrian leadership or military targets. But we should not confine our response to Syria. We must increase pressure on Russia elsewhere. We should provide defensive weapons and related assistance to Ukrainian forces so they can take a greater toll on Russian forces. (The Reckless Guns of October, Daniel Lazare, Consortium News)

Sure, let’s Kick-off World War 3. Why not?

The man should be in a straitjacket not fulminating on the floor of the Congress.

The entire US political establishment supports the removal of Assad and the breaking up of Syria. Kerry’s sudden appeal for dialogue does not represent a fundamental change in the strategy. It’s merely an attempt to buy some time for US-backed mercenaries who are feeling the full-brunt of the Russia’s bombing campaign. Putin would be well-advised to ignore Kerry’s braying and continue to prosecute his war on terror until the job is done.

(Note: As this article was going to press, the Turkish Daily Zaman reported that:

“….the US and several European and Gulf states…have agreed to a plan under which Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad will remain in power for the next six months during a transition period….Turkey has abandoned its determination [to get rid of Assad] and has agreed on an interim period with Assad in place,” former Foreign Minister Yaşar Yakış told Today’s Zaman on Tuesday….If the Syrian people decide to continue with Assad, then there is not much Turkey can object to.” (Report: Turkey agrees to Syria political transition involving Assad, Today’s Zaman)

This story has not yet appeared in any western media. Obama’s Syrian policy has completely collapsed.

The Dodd-Frank regulations are so lethal to community banks that some say the intent was to force them to sell out to the megabanks. Community banks are rapidly disappearing — except in North Dakota, where they are thriving. 

At over 2,300 pages, the Dodd Frank Act is the longest and most complicated bill ever passed by the US legislature. It was supposed to end “too big to fail” and “bailouts,” and to “promote financial stability.” But Dodd-Frank’s “orderly liquidation authority” has replaced bailouts with bail-ins, meaning that in the event of insolvency, big banks are to recapitalize themselves with the savings of their creditors and depositors. The banks deemed too big are more than 30% bigger than before the Act was passed in 2010, and 80% bigger than before the banking crisis of 2008. The six largest US financial institutions now have assets of some $10 trillion, amounting to almost 60% of GDP; and they control nearly 50% of all bank deposits.

Meanwhile, their smaller competitors are struggling to survive. Community banks and credit unions are disappearing at the rate of one a day. Access to local banking services is disappearing along with them. Small and medium-size businesses – the ones that hire two-thirds of new employees – are having trouble getting loans; students are struggling with sky-high interest rates; homeowners have been replaced by hedge funds acting as absentee landlords; and bank fees are up, increasing the rolls of the unbanked and underbanked, and driving them into the predatory arms of payday lenders.

Even some well-heeled clients are being rejected. In an October 19, 2015 article titled  “Big Banks to America’s Firms: We Don’t Want Your Cash,” the Wall Street Journal reported that some Wall Street banks are now telling big depositors to take their money elsewhere or be charged a deposit fee.

Municipal governments are also being rejected as customers. Bank of America just announced that it no longer wants the business of some smaller cities, which have been given 90 days to find somewhere else to put their money. Hundreds of local BofA branches are also disappearing.

Hardest hit, however, are the community banks. Today there are 1,524 fewer banks with assets under $1 billion than there were in June 2010, before the Dodd-Frank regulations were signed into law.

Collateral Damage or Intended Result?

The rapid demise of community banking is blamed largely on Dodd-Frank’s massively complex rules and onerous capitalization requirements. Just doing the paperwork requires an army of compliance officers, and increased capital and loan requirements are eliminating the smaller banks’ profit margins. They have little recourse but to sell to the larger banks, which have large staffs capable of dealing with the regulations, and which skirt the capital requirements by parking assets in off-balance-sheet vehicles. (See “How Wall Street Captured Washington’s Effort to Rein in Banks” in Reuters in April 2015.)

According to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, the disappearance of community banks was not an unintended consequence of Dodd-Frank. He said in a speech in July:

The Dodd-Frank architecture, first of all, has made us less financially stable. Since the passage of Dodd-Frank, the big banks are bigger and the small banks are fewer. But because Washington can control a handful of big established firms much easier than many small and zealous competitors, this is likely an intended consequence of the Act. Dodd-Frank concentrates greater assets in fewer institutions. It codifies into law ‘Too Big to Fail’ . . . . [Emphasis added.]

In an article titled “The FDIC’s New Capital Rules and Their Expected Impact on Community Banks,” Richard Morris and Monica Reyes Grajales concur. They note that “a full discussion of the rules would resemble an advanced course in calculus,” and that the regulators have ignored protests that the rules would have a devastating impact on community banks. Why? The authors suggest that the rules reflect “the new vision of bank regulation – that there should be bigger and fewer banks in the industry.”

The Failure of Regulation

Obviously, making the big banks bigger also serves the interests of the megabanks,whose lobbyists are well known to have their fingerprints all over the legislation. How they have been able to manipulate the rules was seen last December, when legislation drafted by Citigroup and slipped into the Omnibus Spending Bill loosened the Dodd-Frank regulations on derivatives. As noted in a Mother Jones article before the legislation was passed:

The Citi-drafted legislation will benefit five of the largest banks in the country—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. These financial institutions control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. If this measure becomes law, these banks will be able to use FDIC-insured money to bet on nearly anything they want. And if there’s another economic downturn, they can count on a taxpayer bailout of their derivatives trading business.

Regulation is clearly inadequate to keep these banks honest and ensure that they serve the public interest. The world’s largest private banks have been caught in criminal acts that former bank fraud investigator Prof. William K. Black calls the greatest frauds in history. The litany of frauds involves more than a dozen felonies, including bid-rigging on municipal bond debt; colluding to rig interest rates on hundreds of trillions of dollars in mortgages, derivatives and other contracts; exposing investors to excessive risk; and engaging in multiple forms of mortgage fraud. According to US Attorney General Eric Holder, the guilty have gone unpunished because they are “too big to prosecute.” If they are too big to prosecute, they are too big to regulate.

But that doesn’t mean Congress won’t try. Dodd-Frank gives the Federal Reserve “heightened prudential supervision” over “systemically important” banks, essentially putting them under government control. According to Hensarling, writing in the Wall Street Journal in July, Dodd-Frank is turning America’s largest financial institutions into “functional utilities” and is delivering the power to allocate capital to political actors in Washington.

Thomas Hoenig, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, gave a speech in 2011 in which he also described banking as a “public utility.” (What he actually said was, “You’re a public utility, for crying out loud.”) Six months later, Hoenig was appointed vice chairman of the FDIC.

If the megabanks are going to be true public utilities, they probably need to be publicly-owned entities, which capture profits and direct credit in a way that actually serves the people. If Dodd-Frank’s several thousand pages of regulations cannot create a stable and sustainable banking system, the regulatory approach has failed. The whole system needs to be revamped.

Restoring Community Banking: The Model of North Dakota         

Even if the megabanks were to become true public utilities, we would still need a thriving community banking sector. Community banks service local markets in a way that the megabanks with their standardized lending models are neither interested in nor capable of.

How can the community banks be preserved and nurtured? For some ideas, we can look to a state where they are still thriving – North Dakota. In a September 2015 article titled “How One State Escaped Wall Street’s Rule and Created a Banking System That’s 83% Locally Owned,” Stacy Mitchell writes that North Dakota’s banking sector bears little resemblance to that of the rest of the country:

North Dakotans do not depend on Wall Street banks to decide the fate of their livelihoods and the future of their communities, and rely instead on locally owned banks and credit unions. With 89 small and mid-sized community banks and 38 credit unions, North Dakota has six times as many locally owned financial institutions per person as the rest of the nation. And these local banks and credit unions control a resounding 83 percent of deposits in the state — more than twice the 30 percent market share that small and mid-sized financial institutions have nationally.

Their secret is the century-old Bank of North Dakota, the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, which partners with and supports the state’s local banks. In an April 2015 article titled “Is Dodd-Frank Killing Community Banks? The More Important Question is How to Save Them”, Matt Stannard writes:

Public banks offer unique benefits to community banks, including collateralization of deposits, protection from poaching of customers by big banks, the creation of more successful deals, and . . . regulatory compliance. The Bank of North Dakota, the nation’s only public bank, directly supports community banks and enables them to meet regulatory requirements such as asset to loan ratios and deposit to loan ratios. . . . [I]t keeps community banks solvent in other ways, lessening the impact of regulatory compliance on banks’ bottom lines.

We know from FDIC data in 2009 that North Dakota had almost 16 banks per 100,000 people, the most in the country. A more important figure, however, is community banks’ loan averages per capita, which was $12,000 in North Dakota, compared to only $3,000 nationally. . . . During the last decade, banks in North Dakota with less than $1 billion in assets have averaged a stunning 434 percent more small business lending than the national average.

The BND has also been very profitable for the state and its citizens. Over the last 21 years, the BND has generated almost $1 billion in profit and returned nearly $400 million to the state’s general fund, where it is available to support education and other public services while reducing the tax burden on residents and businesses.

The partnership of a state-owned bank with local community banks is a proven alternative for maintaining the viability of local credit and banking services. Other states would do well to follow North Dakota’s lead, not only to protect their local communities and local banks, but to bolster their revenues, escape Washington’s noose, and provide a bail-in-proof depository for their public funds.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com. Listen to “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown” on PRN.FM.

Since October 10, Russia’s air force in Syria continued to hit terrorists’ targets conducting from 33 to 88 sorties per day.

Russian air strikes were performed in the provinces of Raqqah, Hama, Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia, Idlib, Homs, Deir ez-Zor. Since the start of the operation, Russian air raids have destroyed more than 380 sites of ISIS.

The last days have shown that ISIS militants have serious air defense assets. On October 15, Russian warplanes destroyed the air defense system “Osa” at the village of Eastern Guta around Damascus.

In northern Syria, the pro-government forces consist of 60 000-strong grouping officially strengthened by Russian military equipment and weapons.

SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence has information that units of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) have been bolstered by Russian military advisers, down to squad level in some artillery and special units.

In Aleppo province, the SAA and its allies are seeking to lift the siege from the Kuweires Military Airport. On October 10 the SAA “Tiger forces” took control of the town of Jabboul. On October 15, the pro-government units captured the village of Tal Naam. On October 16, the villages of Qala’at yAl-Najam, Abtayn were controlled by the SAA. At the moment the Syrian forces are clashing with militants in approximately 6.2km from the airport.

At least, 235 Jabhat al Nusra militants have been killed since the start of the Syrian advance in Hama province. The strategic towns of Al-Mansoura and al-Lihaya came under control of the Syrian government. Also, the SAA captured the towns of Tal Sekik and Foru.

It became known that Hezbollah commander, Hassan Hossein Al-Hadj, has died during the clashes for the city of Mansura in the Idlib province. The SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence sources report, Hezbollah units fighting against terrorists in Syria has received reinforcements and additional supplies of arms and equipment. This is a result of the growing role of Hezbollah and Iran-backed militia groups at the Syrian battlespace. As result of the heavhy clashes against Jabhat al Nusra, the Syrian forces captured the southtern part of the city of Kafr Nabudah.

The pro-government forces’ advance is aimed on the strategic town of Khan Shaykhun olcated at the highway linking Damascus and Aleppo.

In Latakia province, Syrian forces supported by Russian warplanes pushed al Nusra militant s from Kafr Dalba and took control of the sector. Then, SAA and allies captured the villages of Salma and Jeb al-Ahmar. The ISIS militants were located in these areas. At the moment, Russian warplanes and the Syrian army units are moping up the area from the separate militant units.

In Homs province, the Syrian forces are conducting military actions against Jabhat Al Nusra and ISIS. The center of clashes is the Al-Rastan area. Russian and Syrian warplanes work against terrorist there actively. Also, heavy clashes were observed at Rasm al `Abd and Habra al-Garbia. The Jabhat Al Nusra militants are using anti-tank missile systems “TOW” supplied by Saudi Arabia.

Jabhat al Nusra militants are massively fleeing from the province Daraa to Jordan. The Syrian forces are advancing in the sector of the town of Mahaja. Jabhat al Nusra has lost dozens of militants in the clashes there.

Separately, Iraqi forces started a full-scale offensive against ISIS in the province of Anbar. It borders with Syria. According to the SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence sources this fact is directly related to the cooperation among Russia, Iran, Syria and Iraq launched trough the joint information center in Baghdad.

On October 11, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was reportedly injured as result of the airstrike in the Anbar province of Iraq. On October 14, Irainian media reported that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was under treatment in Turkey. The US Central Intelligence Service and Turkish special services assisted him in this.

Russia has been continuing to supply weapons and equipment to the Syrian forces. According to reports, the Russian heavy flamethrower systems TOS-1A “Solntsepek” are in Syria. They will be used in the Syrian forces’ offensive actions over the country.

The security of the Russian naval facility in Tartus was strengthened. The guard units received additional military equipment and number of reinforcements. A marine infantry battalion of the Russian Black Sea fleet is a main force there. Russia is exercising preparatory works to increase logistical capabilites of the naval facility. 10 additional container ships and tankers will be reportedly used to expand supplies to Tartus.

The main result of the recent success of the Syrian forces have raised the pro-government forces’ morale. The future developments will strongly depend on the Syrian force’s capacity to hold gained momentum and to coordinate its actions with the Russian air efforts. In any case, the active phase of the offensive will end in next 1-2 weeks. Then Syrian forces will need to strengthen captured position, get additional supplies and rest.

News reportage of mass shooting events over the past several years has changed markedly from coverage of such incidents just a few decades ago. Some media critics and researchers have pointed to mass shootings, including those transpiring on January 8, 2011 in Tucson Arizona, July 20, 2012 in Aurora Colorado, December 14, 2012 in Newtown Connecticut, and the recent October 1, 2015 event at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, to suggest that these incidents may have been influenced or even partly contrived with involvement of federal authorities. They reinforce their arguments with an impressive array of conflicting media reports and unrealistic “official” narratives concerning these events as potential evidence of government deception.

Whether or not such claims are true, there can be no doubt that each referenced event has been inordinately sensationalized by corporate news media and national political leaders to advocate for stricter gun control, mental health, and police state measures, even though criminologists maintain that the number of mass shootings has not increased since the 1990s.[1]

Like the curious 1995 mass shootings in Dunblane Scotland and Port Arthur Australia—events capitalized on by political leaders in those countries to pass harsh gun control measures and expressly invoked by President Obama just hours after the Roseburg shooting—researchers and independent news media point to a potential agenda behind the intense publicization of mass shootings throughout the United States.

As this author has argued, although it may seem an extravagant assertion, one must ponder whether there is sufficient reason to consider whether certain US government agencies are involved “creating” or embellishing some of these mass shooting incidents. One need look no further than the history of Operation Gladio, or FBI involvement in what one investigative journalist terms the “manufacture” of terror events, documented respectively by scholar Daniele Ganser and journalist Trevor Aaronson, to conclude that a lavishly-funded military-intelligence-media complex has for at least forty years demonstrated a sheer contempt toward the Western body politic that has in some instances resulted in mass murder.[2]

A hypothesis may be at least partly demonstrated that a similar dynamic holds true for mass shootings through careful analysis of news coverage on mass shootings transpiring prior to the heavy federal involvement in local and regional law enforcement and specific shooting incidents that have only intensified in the 14-year purported “war on terror.”

The following preliminary examination suggests how the news consuming public was afforded much more lucid and enduring depictions of mass shootings by journalists in past decades. In other words, many years before internet technology became essential to assembling stories, journalists reported accurate and demonstrable facts to their readerships on mass shooting crime scenes and their dynamics in very short order, giving the reader abundant and consistent information to understand what really happened in such tragic events.

Reportage on mass shootings in the 1990s and prior is at significant variance with how such incidents are presented today. For example, in corporate news coverage of the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre integral facets of the story changed in the immediate wake of the event. Conflicting information surrounded how the shooter gained entrance to the school’s interior, what weapons the shooter employed in his attack, the types of wounds the victims sustained, even the identity of the assailant and nature of the emergency response, all of which are fundamental features of a criminal investigation that in many past instances was quickly and unambiguously relayed to the public.

Similar features have plagued coverage of many other mass shootings in the US in recent years. At the Aurora Colorado theatre shooting in 2012 some eyewitnesses came forward to contend there were two or more culprits involved—a claim contradicting the official narrative that one James Holmes was the sole assailant. Further, Aurora police chief Dan Oates stated to reporters immediately following the event that officers responded to the incident and apprehended Holmes in 90 seconds—a remarkably short time given the event’s almost certain chaos. Oates then states that his personnel eschewed ambulance service for injured parties, transporting the wounded to local hospitals in police cars—a startling and implausible admission by a leading law enforcement official with clear implications for probable negligence and civil liability.

Further, despite the movie theater being equipped with an extensive network of state-of-the-art video surveillance, to date no video footage has been released to the public that James Holmes was inside or for that matter anywhere near the premises in the period leading to the shooting. Along these lines, one eyewitness, Corbin Dates, asserted in several interviews with major media that there was more than one individual involved in the shooting—none of whom resembled Holmes.

Coverage of, and emergency response to, the October 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting was similarly bizarre. “Early media reports stated that a 20-year-old male had fatally shot at least 13 people,” 21st Century Wire’s Shawn Helton writes, “but that was later downgraded to 10 fatalities including the gunman, with another seven injured before being changed again to 10 killed and nine wounded at the UCC campus. Eventually, the suspected gunman turned out to be 26-year old Chris Harper Mercer, who we were told repeatedly had been ‘neutralized’ (shot) by police during a gun battle on campus. However, 48-72 hours later, it was revealed that the ‘lone gunman’ Harper Mercer had committed suicide, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.”

The above inconsistencies and implausible features in official narratives of US mass shootings resound in those listed below. Nevertheless they are repeated almost without question by corporate news media.

Isla Vista Killings May 23, 2014
Florida State U Shooting November 20, 2014
Seattle Pacific Shooting June 5, 2014
Las Vegas Shooting June 8, 2014
Spring Texas Shooting July 9, 2014
Charlotte Church Shooting June 17, 2015
Chattanooga Shooting July 16, 2015
Lafayette Shooting July 23, 2015
WDBJ Journalists Shooting August 26, 2015

The question remains, have such anomalies and informational lacunae characterized official pronouncements of major mass shooting incidents before federal law enforcement agencies became so heavily involved in processing crime scenes and advising local police and emergency response services?Journalistic coverage of three significant mass shootings where federal involvement is absent is presented below to argue that more recent mass shooting events possessing curious and seemingly inexplicable features in fact require far closer scrutiny from capable intellects and the broader public than they have thus far received.

University of Texas Shooting – 1966

The most well-known mass shooting in US history took place at midday on August 1, 1966 when 25-year-old Charles J. Whitman terrorized the University of Texas at Austin’s campus from the observation ledge of the 27-story UT Tower, utilizing an array of rifles to shoot 45 pedestrians, 12 fatally. On August 2 the New York Times ran two comprehensive reports of the event, detailing the horror though police and eyewitness testimony. “Students, professors and visitors ran for cover,” United Press International reporters on the scene wrote.

In the story’s initial paragraphs the reader is apprised of the event’s resolution: “An off-duty policeman, Romero Martinez, who had responded to a call on his radio, inched his way around a wall at the top of the tower and fired six bullets into the sniper with his service revolver after the sniper shot at him.”

The shooting is rendered more vivid through testimony from an array of traumatized witnesses relating their experiences.

”Denver Dolman, who operated a bookstore at the edge of the campus, said a young Negro student was riding his bicycle toward the Texas Union Building … The bicycle wavered and the boy appeared to fall onto the sidewalk.”

“John Scott Allen, 18, a freshman, was watching. A bullet smashed through a window and struck him in the right forearm.”

“Leland Ammons, a law student, was standing beside Billy Speed, a policeman, when Mr. Speed was shot.”

“Ruth Kiykendall, who works on the 18th floor of the tower, called to a friend in a building nearby. ’Somebody’s up here shooting in the tower,’ she gasped. ’There is blood all over the place.”

Austin Police Chief R. A. Miles explained that Whitman murdered his wife and mother in the lead-up to the mass shooting. “Hours later, Chief Miles said, Whitman took a trunkful of guns, food, and water to the top of the university landmark,” the story reads.

Several photographs augment the prose, including those of policeman Speed being carried away, and another presenting and describing in detail the “weapons found on” the “observation platform of the university tower … a 6 mm rifle with telescopic sight, a Remington .35-caliber rifle, a 12-guage sawed off shotgun, a carbine, a 9 mm Luger and a .357 Magnum pistol.”[3]

On August 3 the New York Times carried followup stories that included excerpts from candid interviews with Whitman’s immediate family, a reproduction of notes from Whitman’s psychiatrist, and a detailed consideration of remarks from expert physicians on the potential role played by a pecan-sized brain tumor found during Whitman’s postmortem examination. All such content was unambiguously presented to the public in less than 48 hours via the nation’s “paper of record,” and remains as evidence of how such horrific events were chronicled in recent US history.[4]

University of Iowa Shooting – 1991

Indeed, the initial historical record established by journalists on the scene suggests that specific and unequivocal information on other US mass shootings has been speedily related to the people. For instance, in the late afternoon of Friday, November 1, 1991 Gang Lu, a doctoral candidate studying physics at the University of Iowa, shot and killed four colleagues and wounded a college administrator and her assistant, the former dying of her injuries the following day. On November 2 the New York Times ran a story including eyewitness accounts and statements from university and area law enforcement officials describing how the event played out and suggesting Lu’s possible motivations.

“A university spokeswoman , Ann Rhodes, said the student, Gang Lu … methodically searched out his victims. He had been disgruntled over his failure to receive an academic award for his doctoral dissertation, she said.”

The story continues to succinctly lay out the event’s chronology and resolution—each of which, if we are to conclude that the Times reporter was working on a deadline for the paper’s August 2 late edition, were ascertained and related to the press within hours.

A dreary, snowy school day had just begun to wind down when the shootings began at about 3:40 P.M. University officials and the police said the gunman came upon a group of students and professors in Van Allen Hall, the physics department’s building, and killed the four men [three professors and a graduate student colleague] without saying a word.”

The professors had each been involved in Mr. Gang’s doctoral work, and the researcher had been a rival for the honor he sought, Ms. Rhodes said.

Mr. Gang then stalked out of the building and ran two blocks to Jessup Hall, the main administration building, which faces the campus common. There he injured the women in the office of academic affairs, where he had recently filed a complaint.

The video below provides an overview of area police response to the shooting.

“The shootings lasted 10 to 15 minutes, said Iowa City’s Police Chief R. J. Winkelhake. Campus police officers responding to the shots found Mr. Gang about 10 minutes later, sprawled on an office floor beside a .38-caliber revolver. ‘He was alive at the time but with serious head wounds,’ Chief Winkelhake said.”[5]

As in coverage of the UT Austin shooting, less than 48 hours later the Times elaborated on the investigation in a subsequent report, drawing on the observations of university and local police; no federal agencies or officials appear present.

The discovery of five of Mr. Lu’s letters after the shootings has convinced investigators here that he had detailed plans to inflict deadly violence on a number of university employees,” Johnson County District Attorney J. Patrick White explained at a November 3 press conference.

Joined by the University of Iowa’s president, Hunter R. Rawling 3d, and other university officials, Mr. White today painted a portrait of a darkly disturbed man who drove himself to success and to destruction.

Despite the perception of Mr. Lu among those who knew him as an outstanding scholar in theoretical space physics, Mr. White indicated that there was a sinister edge to Mr. Lu’s character well before the shootings.

In the letters … Mr. Lu reportedly named his victims, said William Fuhrmeister, the university’s public safety director. None of the letters were ever mailed, the authorities said. Mr. Fuhrmeister, the university’s public safety director, said Mr. Lu had left instructions with acquaintances to mail the letters. The letters were apparently turned over to the authorities after the shootings.

In the letters, other targets besides the six shooting victims were also named Mr. White said, but he and other officials refused to disclose their identities.

Other credible sources are on the record, further describing how the event was experienced. “Dr. Van Allen,” for example, “a professor emeritus of physics, was in the building when the shooting began at 3:42 P.M. ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ he said. “I was up on the seventh floor doing some work. At about 3:45 P.M. a young colleague of mine dashed into the office and said, ‘I recommend you don’t open the door until I hear it’s O.K.’”[6]

Unlike the hastily organized memorials following recent college shootings that curiously take place on the same day, Iowa’s university-wide service at the campus’ basketball arena was not held until November 7–almost a week after the shooting.[7]

Stockton Elementary School Shooting – 1989

Details of other school shootings from years preceding the war on terror era are likewise swiftly and accurately provided in conventional news coverage, typically relying on eyewitness testimony and remarks from law enforcement and emergency response officials concerning the investigation and event.

On January 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy, a 24-year-old incorrigible with a substantial criminal record, brandished an AK-47 rifle to attack 400 to 500 Southeast Asian refugee children playing outside the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton California. A total of 30 sustained injuries and five of the children perished in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide following the assault. “‘He was just standing there with a gun, making wide sweeps,’” according to teacher Lori Mackey. “She said she ran to her classroom window when she heard what she thought were firecrackers, and saw a man standing in the schoolyard, spraying gunfire … ‘There was mass chaos. There were kids running in every direction,’” Mackey said.

“There were a dozen students lying on the ground,” an 11-year-old mother of a Cleveland Elementary student told reporters. “‘It was very frightening.” “Ramon Billed 3d, a student, described seeing a schoolmate shot. ‘I just saw him fall down,’ Ramon said. ‘His head hit the ground. the teacher grabbed him and dragged him inside the other classroom’ … Another pupil, Roberto Costa said the shooting started during his reading class. ‘The bullets were hitting the walls,’ he said. ‘Everybody got scared.’” A passerby “heard gunfire and ran to the scene. ‘I tried to get a pulse, couldn’t get a pulse,’ he said, referring to a pupil. ‘I was hoping an ambulance would show up. It seemed to take forever.’”

Again, in less than 24 hours reporters recorded the event, the background of the shooter and his every essential movement on the scene, even the number of bullets fired and the property damage caused via information from those assembling the criminal investigation and the recollections bystanders. “He opened fire on the westside of a group of portable classrooms,” AP writers noted,

then moved to the east side and continued firing across the blacktop where children were playing toward the main building about 250 yards away, [Deputy Police] Chief [Lucian] Neely said. He was no closer than that when he shot himself in the head. About 60 rounds were fired; in some cases the bullets went completely through the main school’s building and came out the other side to fall spent on the L-shaped school’s front lawn, Chief Neely said.[8]

In followup coverage the crime scene is described via on-site accounts. “Overnight, workmen patched the 60 or so bullet holes in the south wall of the brown stucco building and scrubbed out bloodstains. But only about a quarter of the 970 pupils showed up.”

The assailant’s approximate movements in the prelude to the shooting are also recorded.

On Tuesday, just before noon, [Purdy] arrived at the Cleveland School in his 1977 Chevrolet station wagon, burned the car with a molotov cocktail in a Budweiser bottle and walked onto the crowded school grounds. There he opened fire. He shot at least 106 rounds. “He was not aiming as much as spraying,” said Captain [Dennis] Perry of the Stockton Police Department. Children began to crumple. The shooting lasted about two minutes. Then Mr. Purdy put the pistol to his right temple and fell dead against a school wall.[9]

Concluding Observations

Journalists covering mass shootings twenty or more years ago usually relied predominantly on local police officials and eyewitness accounts to chronicle such events. Information related in such reportage was consistent and accurate in nature, and was quickly related to the reading public. Such reports were produced at a time when news organizations often had only telephone and facsimile to gather content. In light of the above, and in particular the fact that we now live in an internet-fueled “information age,” how can one account for the the almost uniformly poor and sometimes cartoonish reportage of today’s mass shootings?

The overall coverage of shootings since at least 2011 has become unreliable and slipshod, with the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre the foremost example of ambiguous, confusing and ultimately irresponsible reportage largely based on state and federal law enforcement officials commenting under the cover of anonymity. Federal agency involvement in homicide and similar crime investigations no doubt tends toward the potential politicization of such events. This is particularly the case as the leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, and similar entities is appointed by the given presidential administration. Such bureaucrats understandably recognize their allegiance to this political power and are readily appease its given agendas.

Clear examples of federal interference in local and regional criminal investigations and attendant press censorship may be found in the major political assassinations of the 1960s, in particular the murders of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where significant public confusion still abounds. More recently, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City suggests a juncture where federal intervention became increasingly commonplace, ultimately transforming the narrative of that event and how it is called up in popular memory; from a demonstrable government “false flag” attack to a strike against America’s heartland by the enemy within–an unstable, anti-government drifter, comprising the template for the so-called “lone wolf,” a now commonplace term in US police state parlance.

Hungry for information to develop stories under deadlines and editorial pressure, journalists are effectively incapable of questioning the pronouncement of official sources. Fearful of alienating powerful relayers of information, they place in abeyance their commonsense discernment of what may or may not be plausible to a situation where their understanding and expertise is limited. This is all the more reason for the concerned citizen to take heed. The plethora of recent mass shootings and array of disorienting news accounts accompanying each should be carefully considered, particularly in light of the more trustworthy and consistent journalism of such tragic events from the 1990s and prior, a journalism far less subject to disinformation and unclouded by prevailing political agendas and goals.

Notes

[1] William J. Krouse and Daniel J. Richardson, Mass Murder with Firearms: Incidents and Victims, 1999-2013, Congressional Research Service, July 30, 2015.

[2] Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, New York: Routledge, 2005; Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, New York: Ig Publishing, 2013.

[3] “Sniper in Texas U. Tower Kills 12, Hits 33; Wife, Mother Also Slain; Police Kill Him.” New York Times, August 2, 1966; “27-Story Tower Haven For Sniper,” New York Times, August 2, 1966, A1.

[4] Martin Waldron, “Whitman Told Doctor He Sometimes Thought of ‘Shooting People,’” New York Times, August 3, 1966, A1; Walter Sullivan, “Effects of a Tumor on the Brain Can Cause Antisocial Behavior,” New York Times, August 3, 1965, A20; “Text of Psychiatrist’s Notes on Sniper,” New York Times, August 3, 1966, A20.

[5] Steven Lee Myers, “Student Opens Fire at U. of Iowa, Killing 4 Before Shooting Himself,” New York Times, November 2, 1991, A8.

[6] Michel Marriott, “Gunman in Iowa Wrote of Plans In Five Letters,” New York Times, November 3, 1991, A26.

[7] “A Day of Mourning at University of Iowa: Funeral, Memorial Services for Shooting Victims Replace Classes,” Washington Post, November 5, 1991.

[8] “Five Children Killed As Gunman Attacks a California School,” New York Times, January 18, 1989, A1.

[9] Robert Reinhold, “After Shooting, Horror but Few Answers,” New York Times, January 19, 1989, B6.

[The] lack of upward mobility … has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain — that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead. (from Obama’s May appearance on David Letterman)

One of the most firmly entrenched myths of The American Ideology is that the U.S. is a “middle class society,” a “land of opportunity” where anyone who works hard has the opportunity to achieve the standard of living which has made America “the envy of the world.” A common, and spot on, rejoinder has been to remind us that America has always had a sizable class of permanently poor people and that it is just factually false that those ready, willing and able to work are on the path to middle class status.

But does this reply concede too much? Has there ever been a substantial middle class in America? Or has a poor working class been able to mask its condition by accessing an institution that has disguised a large portion of a poor working class as a middle class? The best place to start is with the history of the modern American middle class.

The First Working-Class Middle Class: The Roaring Twenties

Of course not everyone can get rich, for the same reason that not everyone can be very tall. But most of us are supposed to be able to enjoy the comforts that many Americans enjoyed after the Second World War and earlier, in economically pubescent form, during the Roaring Twenties. That decade was the first in history when any population enjoyed the comforts of a “consumer society.” The remarkable growth rates of that decade were driven entirely by Americans’ purchases of automobiles, ranges, radios, phonographs, toasters, refrigerators, electric fans and more. The whole world saw the miracle of the first genuine non-professional middle class. These new luxuries were not restricted to the very rich and doctors and lawyers; wage workers were the majority consumers of these “consumer durables.”

But the Great Depression led many radical Leftists to argue that the short-lived prosperity (for white people) of the 1920s was a fluke, a temporary aberration from capitalism’s default condition in which the working class was flat-out poor. Sure, the war ended the Depression, but if that was so, once the war ended wouldn’t the economy revert to normal, with high unemployment and widespread poverty once again the order of the day. This was a major concern in the mid-forties of a great many economists of every political stripe.

The Mature Middle Class: The Long Postwar Boom

But after the historically unheard of postwar expansion (1949-1973), with no major economic contractions, the Depression came to be dismissed as the outcome of silly mistakes, e.g. the high interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve (the Friedman-Bernanke story), and the shameless shenanigans of profligate financiers. The postwar glory days (again for white people) came to be regarded as the new normal, the resumption and expansion of the middle-class society of the 1920s.

The record was truly spectacular: on the income of one (male) breadwinner, very many families were able to afford a house, at least one automobile, a plethora of durable goods, higher education for the kids, medical expenses and sufficient savings for mom’s and dad’s retirement. Hard work paid off in a wage supporting a standard of living hitherto unknown to any working class anywhere. Only in America. (Never mind that this story backgrounds women’s enforced role as wives and mothers, enabled in large part by Mother’s Little Helper.)

During a May appearance on Letterman Fauxbama stated the catechismal account of the myth of the middle class, referring to “middle-class America’s basic bargain — that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.” Those impressive benefits once available to the Golden Age single-breadwinner household are typically held to demonstrate that the “middle class bargain” was once a reality for the majority of American workers. To be sure, we’re in a bit of a wee depression right now, but once that’s fixed the middle class dream will again be within the grasp of those willing to “work hard.” That was the message of the Obamination’s Letterman stint.

An Accurate But Limited Response to the Myth of the Middle Class

A rational and historically informed response to the legend of the middle class is that this alleged stratum of the 1920s and the Golden Age (1945-1973) existed for a mere 34 years of American history. Before the 1920s just about all working-class peole were poor. Since 1974 we have had 42 years of burgeoning inequality, un- and underemployment, growing poverty and steadily declining wages with no end in sight. The middle class was a departure from the historic norm of a materially insecure working class, the default position of industrial capitalism.That response, accurate as it is, harbors a deeper myth that disguises a virtually unremarked and scandalous feature of the history of the U.S. working class, namely that it has always been poor. There never was a middle class, not in the sense in which that concept is meant to pack the punch intended by capitalist apologetics. If that’s so, the U.S. has never been a “rich country.”

The matter hinges on what is meant by ‘middle class’. This is no “merely” semantic question. The term is at the core of the justification of modern capitalism, and connotes not merely a statistical income level, but is meant to convey the relation between one’s willingness to earn a living, i.e. to work hard, and the possibility of achieving a desirable standard of living as a reward for one’s work. The example above, describing the benefits available to the one-breadwinner family during the Golden Age, is meant to imply that those benefits are the just deserts of hard work. That was the clear intention of Obama’s Letterman claim. The middle class gets what it deserves as a reward for its labor. But the truth is that the working class has never been able to achieve economic security on the basis of its wage.

Being dutifully productive has never been sufficient to guarantee the worker a satisfying life. If working people are to enjoy the benefits once available to the single breadwinner, they must permit a portion of that hard-earned wage to be extracted from their income by creditors. More precisely, the benefitsmight be forthcoming -remember, hard work is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of material security- but only if the worker is prepared to allow a reduction of her future income by the creditors’ extraction of interest from the paycheck to come. Reduced income purchases a higher standard of living. Sounds paradoxical, but it’s not. This is what debt is about.

Neither in the 1920s nor during the Golden Age did workers achieve security and the pleasures of capitalist consumerism as the just reward for their labor. Let’s have a closer look at the fortunes of working people in the 1920s.

The First “Middle-Class” Society: the 1920s

The most striking feature of the condition of working people in the 1920s is how closely it resembled the declining fortunes of the working class during the post-Boom Age of Austerity (1974 – ). Inequality not seen since before 1900 became conspicuous during the Roaring Twenties. 1928 was the year of peak twentieth-century inequality up to that time. 1929 delivered an historic financial crash. 2007 was the first year thereafter to match the inequality of 1928. 2008 gave us the greatest financial crisis ever. The connection between inequality and economic crisis is hard to miss.

The consumption boom of the twenties went along with the century’s greatest inequality. In 1919, the percentage shares of total income received by the top 1 percent and the top 5% stood, respectively, at 12.2 percent and 24.3 percent; in 1923 the shares had risen to 13.1 percent and 27.1 percent and by 1929 to 18.9 and 33.5 percent. According to the prestigious Brookings Institution, in 1929 “0.1 percent of the families at the top received practically as much as 42 percent of families at the bottom of the scale.” All of the increases in real income in the 1920s went to upper-income groups and most of the rest merely held firm or lost ground.

Extreme inequality followed mathematically from the following features of the economy of the 1920s: production soared, productivity and profits skyrocketed much faster than production, while wages remained stagnant. Sound familiar? History shows this to be overripe capitalism’s default position. The postwar period up to this day exhibits the same features.

Do the twenties look like a golden age before the Golden Age? In the classic Brookings Institute study of income and poverty levels during the 1920s,America’s Capacity To Consume, we learn that “By 1929, 71 percent of American families earned incomes of under $2,500 a year, the level that the Bureau of Labor Statistics considered minimal to maintain an adequate standard of living for a family of four. 60 percent earned less than $2,000.00 per year, the amount determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics “sufficient to supply only basic necessities.” 50 percent had less than $1700.00 and more than 20 percent had less than $1,000.00.

Thus, nothing resembling a middle class existed in the 1920s. 60 percent of families earned less than what was required to provide “only basic necessities.” Half of all families made even less that that, and more than one in five earned less than half that required to provide bare necessities. Working Americans were poor. America was a poor country.

The employment picture was equally grim. During the steep recession in the first years of the decade unemployment (among nonfarm workers) hit 19.5 percent in 1921 and 11.4 percent in 1922. In 1924 it rose from 4.1 to 8.3 percent, fell to 2.9 percent in 1926 and was back up to 6.9 percent in 1928. 1922-1926 was the period of fastest growth in production and profits before overinvestment and underconsumption slowed the rate of GDP and sales growth. Yet two of those boom years saw unemployment comparable to or exceeding 2015’s official unemployment figures.

Here we have yet another entry in the list of Things You’re Not Allowed To Know: during the Roaring Twenties, the majority of Americans were poor. And even the postwar Golden-Age years, we shall see, do not evidence the existence of a middle-class society. Yet during both the 1920s and the Golden Age America did not look like a poor country. Autos were everywhere, households were swimming in consumer durables and home ownership was growing at a healthy clip.

But appearances can deceive. For real poverty can be disguised, and the principal means of obscuring material insecurity when there has appeared to exist a middle class has been the extension of credit to vast numbers of working households. During both the 1920s and the Golden Age households accumulated mounting debt in order to achieve the “middle class standard of living.”

Workers’ wages needed a substantial supplement of financial speed to goose the buying power required for middle class pleasures. That’s not part of the myth of the middle class. In order for the standard story to pack the punch it wants to pack, one of two conditions must be met. Either:

1. The wage of the breadwinner must be sufficient to enable the benefits touted in the single-breadwinner story, or

2. If the wage sometimes needs to be supplemented in order to enable middle class status, the supplement must not be chronic, it must not be addictive, and it must not invariably climax in crisis.

Neither of these conditions was met in the 1920s or the Golden Age. How then was the consumer durables boom of 1922-1929 possible when wages barely rose and workers were poor? The buying spree was sustained by credit purchases, spending more than one earned. Demand out of wage income alone was insufficient to purchase what the economy was capable of turning out. Rising standards of living could not be maintained in the face of stagnant wages without the ability of consumers to mortgage future income. The twenties were the first instance of what was to become an abiding feature of American capitalism, the need for large scale credit financing to sustain levels of consumption required to stave off macroeconomic retardation and persistent economic insecurity.

The Hoover Commission Report, a massive study of the economy of the 1920s conducted by a large team of the country’s most prominent economists, reported that:

“The most spectacular and the most novel development in the field of credit was the growth after 1920 of a variety of forms of consumers’ borrowing… the amount of such credit was tremendously expanded, both absolutely and relatively, during the past decade.”

The proportion of total retail sales financed by creditincreased from 10 percent in 1910 to 15 percent in 1927 to 50 percent in 1929. Over 85 percent of furniture, 80 percent of washing machines and 75 percent of phonographs and radios -indeed most new consumer items-  were purchased on time. A prime reason GM pulled ahead of Ford in car sales was that it enabled credit purchases through the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC).Credit was even used to buy clothes. Young single working women often went into debt to keep up with the latest styles. By 1929 sales on installment approached $7 billion. Many more people bought these goods than would have had they had to save the total price in cash before making the purchases.Credit pervaded the household economy and disguised low wages, as it would again in the postwar period.

In Middletown, the landmark study of the industrial town Muncie, Indiana, in the years 1924-1925, Robert and Helen Lynd note the pervasiveness of credit in the everyday lives of working people there:

Today Middletown lives by a credit economy that is available in some form to nearly every family in the community. The rise and spread of the dollar-down-and-not-so-much-per plan extends credit for virtually everything – homes, $200 over-stuffed living-room suites, electric washing machines, automobiles, fur coats, diamond rings – to persons of whom frequently little is known as to their intention or ability to pay. (emphasis added)

In the sense of the term required by apologists who use it, there has never been an American Middle Class. During both the1920s and the postwar period household “prosperity” and overall economic growth depended on increasing dosages of debt in order to maintain an increasing standard of living and the appearance of middle-class security. Wages, though, did not increase as rapidly as did debt growth. In fact, wages remained flat throughout the 1920s. So debt grew to the point at which it could not be paid. Borrowing and purhasing power then declined in 1926; underconsumption became conspicuous as excess inventories and capacity built up. Crisis ensued.

The Postwar Period Resurrects the Debt-Drenched Twenties

It is often claimed that the sustained growth of the postwar Golden Age was possible only because labor unions were able to keep wages rising in step with productivity gains. But this historic achievement was a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of the increase in purchasing power necessary to produce the “middle class” standard of living (for white people) of the Golden Age. It is a measure of just how high wages must be in order fully to avert mass unemployment and growing inequality thatincreasing injections of household or consumer debt were required to provide the requisite purchasing power. This was as true during the Golden Age as it was in the 1920s.

Capital again worked its magic: another underconsumption crisis was averted even as wages were kept below what was needed to avert crisis. This was accomplished by initiating a bubble in consumption, encouraging households to augment their buying power by taking on increasingburdens of debt.

In 1946 the ratio of household debt to disposable income stood at about 24 percent. By 1950 it had risen to 38 percent, by 1955 to 53 percent, by 1960 to 62 percent, and by 1965 to 72 percent. The ratio fluctuated from 1966 to 1978, but the stagnation of real wages which began in 1973 pressured households further to increase their debt burden in order to maintain existing living standards, pushing the ratio of debt to disposable income to 77 percent by 1979. And keep in mind that accumulating debt was necessary not merely to purchase more toys, but to meet rising housing, health care, education and child care costs. With prohibitive health care costs the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, debt was necessary for most workers to stay out of poverty.

By the mid-1980s, with neoliberalism in full swing and wages stagnating, the ratio began a steady ascent, from 80 percent in 1985 to 88 percent in 1990 to 95 percent in 1995 to over 100 percent in 2000 to 138 percent in 2007. (http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/20110916/z1r-1.pdf

see also Business Week, Oct. 12, 1973 The Debt Economy, 45, 94-6) As debt rose relative to workers’ income, households’ margin of security against insolvency began to erode. The ratio of personal saving to disposable income under neoliberalismbegan a steady decline, falling from 11 percent in 1983 to 2.3 percent in 1999. (Economic Report of the President, Table 30, 2000)

The debt bubble that became unmistakable in the 1990s was to be far greater than the bubble of the 1920s; the financial system by now was capable of far more fraud and treachery than was possible in the 1920s, thanks largely to deregulation and derivatives.

But what gets to the heart of captalism is the overall similarity of the 1920s and the postwar periods: during each period wages failed to be high enough to purchase the requisites of a decent, much less a rising, standard of living without an unsustainable, and therefore crisis-generating, household debt bubble. In neither period was hard work and the corresponding wage sufficient to avert sub-middle-class status.

The Golden Age, like the 1920s, was an age of a debt-junkie nation of poor workers. The much touted “vanishing middle class” is rooted in time-released conditions fully in place during the Golden Age. Poor workers were allowed to mask their economic insecurity with debt-financed widgets permitted by their social and economic masters on the condition that they agree in exchange to turn over a significant portion of their future earnings to those masters, and at a time when they could least afford it. I’d call those workers poor from the get-go.

In the absence of organized resistance, the current age of rising inequality, low wages, high un- and underemployment and inceasing economic precariousness will persist indefinitely. Mainstream economic luminaries such as Larry Summers, Paul Krugman and Robert Skidelsy tell us so in their contributions to the current rediscovery of the reality of secular stagnation. If most Americans have always been poor in the sense that counts, how shall we describe the condition of working people in the age of secular stagnation? Repressed for sure: persistent and hopeless austerity will generate social dislocation on a disturbing scale – rising crime and suicide rates, domestic violence and psychological depression. I think of these as expressions of unorganized resistance. Oppressive conditions are naturally resisted in one form or another. The form taken depends on the existence and scope of savvy agents of political resistance. In any case, the State is preparing for what it fears will be significant outbursts of mass recalcitrance. The infrastructure of a police state is in place. State repression apparently must be practiced, rehearsed in preparation for full fledged assault. The experimental “subjects” have thus far been largely black people. But that’s just the dress rehearsal. Only an organized, active Left with a mass base can avert what’s in the wings. So far, it doesn’t look good. So far.

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College. His website is:http://www.alannasser.org. His book, United States of Emergency American Capitalism and Its Crises, will be published by Pluto Press next fall. If you would like to be notified when the book is released, please send a request to [email protected] 

Among Palestinians and Israelis, the recent upsurge in violence has been variously described as the children’s, lone-wolf, Jerusalem and smartphone intifadas. Each describes a distinguishing feature of this round of clashes.

The steady erosion of Fatah and Hamas’ authority during the post-Oslo years, as the Palestinian factions proved incapable of protecting their people from the structural violence of the occupation, has driven Palestine’s politically orphaned children to the streets, armed with stones.

The growing hopelessness and sense of abandonment have led a few so-called “lone wolves” to vent their fury on Israelis with improvised weapons such as knives, screwdrivers and cars. These attacks have attracted the most publicity, becoming the equivalent of the second intifada’s suicide bomber. But they serve chiefly as a barometer of Palestinian despair.

Jerusalem is the centre of events, with the Palestinians’ only unifying symbol, al-Aqsa mosque, at its heart. For Palestinians, the incremental takeover of the compound – and the West’s indifference – is like watching the mass dispossession of 1948 play out again in slow motion.

In addition, Jerusalem is the main fault line. Israel’s illegal annexation of the city has left Palestinians there in an extreme form of isolation – indefinitely stateless and supremely vulnerable.

And finally, the smartphone camera has allowed Palestinians to document their suffering and witness unmediated their compatriots’ personal acts of resistance and self-sacrifice.

Futile knife attacks may appal outsiders, but for many Palestinians they are the moment when an individual briefly reclaims his or her agency and fights back on behalf of a collectively subjugated and humiliated people.

The need for so many different labels for these events reveals another important facet of the current Palestinian struggle: its disorganised nature.

Israel has almost completed the division and enclosure of Palestinians into disconnected enclaves. As they hear the sound of the prison doors closing, Palestinian youths are lashing out at the guards closest to hand.

Because the divisions between Palestinian populations have become so entrenched geographically, and their leaders politically, it is hard for Palestinians to find any unifying vision or organising principle. Do they fight first against their occupiers or their spent leadership?

But the lack of planning and discipline has exposed Israel’s own limitations too.

Israel has little but stopgap measures to defend against the protests. Its intelligence agencies cannot predict the lone wolf, its guns cannot deter the knife, its military might cannot subdue the craving for justice and dignity.

Strangely, in the face of all this, there are signs of a parallel breakdown of order and leadership on the Israeli side.

Mobs of Jews patrol Jerusalem and Israeli cities, calling out “Death to the Arabs!” A jittery soldier causes pandemonium by firing his rifle in a train carriage after a bogus terror alert. An innocent Eritrean asylum seeker is shot by a security guard during an attack because he looks “Arab”, then beaten to a pulp by a lynch mob that includes soldiers.

Meanwhile, politicians and police commanders stoke the fear. They call for citizens to take the law into their own hands. Palestinian workers are banned from Jewish towns. Israeli supermarkets remove knives from shelves, while 8,000 Israelis queue up for guns in the first 24 hours after permit rules are eased.

Some of this reflects a hysteria, a heightened sense of victimhood among Israelis, fuelled by the knife attack videos. But the mood dates to before the current upheavals.

It is also a sign of the gradual leaching of the settler’s lawlessness into the mainstream. A popular slogan from the past weeks is: “The army’s hands are tied.” Israeli civilians presumably believe they must take up arms instead.

After six uninterrupted years of the extreme right in power, Israelis don’t blame their government’s policy of relentless force for the backlash. They demand yet more force against the Palestinians.

Polls show Avigdor Lieberman, the former Moldovan bouncer who became the hard man of the Israeli right, is most favoured to lead the nation out of the crisis.

Solutions are being applied most savagely in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians are being locked even more tightly into neighbourhood ghettoes. Israel’s “eternal, unified capital” is being carved up by roadblocks. Palestinian residents are made to endure daily searches and insults that will sow the seeds of yet more fury and resistance.

As Israel tries to slam shut the door of one prison cell in Jerusalem, the inmates threaten to break open the door of another, in Gaza. Israel’s leadership has watched uneasily the repeated breaches of Gaza’s fence over the past days by youths enraged by their own misery and what they see happening in the other prison wings.

The current unrest may recede, but more waves of protest of ever greater intensity are surely not far behind.

Jafar Farah, a Palestinian leader in Israel, has warned of it heading slowly from a national conflict into a civil war, one defined by the kind of debased one-state solution Israel is imposing.

The chaotic violence of the past weeks looks like a warning from the future – a future Israel is hurtling towards.

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

A version of this article first appeared in the National (Abu Dhabi).

Terrorist armed groups fighting the Syrian army and its allies near Aleppo said on Monday they had received new supplies of US-made anti-tank missiles from states opposed to President Bashar al-Assad since the start of a major government offensive last week, Reuters news agency reported.

The delivery of the US-made TOW missiles to the takfiri groups in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria appears to be an initial response to the new Russian military campaign by foreign states supporting the outlawed gunmen, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

But officials from one of the Aleppo-based rebel groups said the supplies were inadequate for the scale of the assault, one of several ground offensives underway with Russian air support.

A number of takfiri groups – like the Free Syrian Army, the al-Nusra Front and ISIL (the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ – vetted by states opposed to President Assad have been supplied with weapons via Turkey, part of a program supported by the United States and which has in some cases included military training by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“We received more supplies of ammunition in greater quantities than before, including mortar bombs, rocket launchers and anti-tank (missiles),” said Issa al-Turkmani, a commander in the FSA-affiliated Sultan Murad group fighting in the Aleppo area. “We have received more new TOWs in the last few days … We are well-stocked after these deliveries.”

TOW missiles are the most potent weapon in the takfiri arsenal. FSA-affiliated groups have also been using TOWs against government forces to fend off another offensive in Hama province, southwest of Aleppo.

Since the start of the Russian air strikes, ground offensives by the Syrian army and its allies have hit areas controlled by takfiri groups other than ISIL in parts of western Syria that are crucial to Assad’s survival.

The October 12, 2015 terror bombing in Ankara, resulting in the death of 127 trade unionists, peace activists, Kurdish advocates and progressives, has been attributed either to the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan regime or to ISIS terrorists.

The Erdoğan regime’s ‘hypothesis’ is that ISIS or the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) was responsible for the terrorist attack, a position echoed by all of the NATO governments and dutifully repeated by all of the Western mass media. Their most recent claim is that a Turkish member of ISIS carried out the massacre – in a ‘copy-cat action’ after his brother, blamed by the Turkish government for an earlier bombing which left 33 young pro-Kurdish activists dead in July in Suruc, on the Syrian border.

The alternative hypothesis, voiced by the majority of the Turkish opposition, is that the Erdoğan regime was directly or indirectly involved in organizing the terrorist attack or allowing it to happen.

In testing each hypothesis it is necessary to examine which of the two best accounts for the facts leading up to the killing and who benefits from the mayhem.

Our approach is to examine those behind various acts of violence preceding, accompanying and following the massacre in Ankara. We will examine the politics of both the victims and theErdoğan regime, and their conception of political governance, especially in light of the forthcoming November 2015 national elections.

Antecedents to the Ankara Terror Bombing

Over the past several years the Erdoğan regime has been engaged in a violent crackdown of civil society activity. In 2013, massive police action broke-up a major social protest in the center of Istanbul, killing 8 demonstrators and injuring 8500 environmental and civil society activists defending Taksim Gezi Park from government-linked ‘developers’. In May 2014, over 300 Turkish coal miners in Soma were killed in an underground explosion in a mine owned by an Erdoğan supporter. Subsequent demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the state. The formerly state-owned mine had been privatized by Erdoğan in 2005 – many questioned the legality of the sale to regime cronies.

Prior to and after these violent police actions against civilian demonstrators, thousands of officials and public figures were arrested, fired and investigated by the Erdoğan regime for allegedly being supporters of a legal Islamic social organization – the so-called Gülen movement.

Hundreds of journalists, human rights activists, publishers and other media workers were arrested, fired and blacklisted at the behest of the Erdoğan regime, for criticizing high level corruption in the Erdoğan cabinet.

The Erdoğan regime escalated its domestic repression of the secular opposition in order to concentrate power in the hands of an Islamist cult-ruler. This was particularly the case after the government deepened its support of thousands of foreign jihadi extremists and mercenaries streaming into Turkey on their way to the Syrian jihad.

From the beginning of the armed uprising in Syria, Turkey became the main training ground, arms depot and entry-point for armed Islamist terrorists (AIT) entering Syria. The Erdoğan regime directed the AIT to attack, dispossess and destroy the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds whose fighters had liberated a significant section of northern Syria and Iraq and served as an ‘example of self-government’ for Turkish Kurds.

The Erdoğan regime has joined the brutal Saudi monarchy in financing and arming AIT groups and especially training them in urban terror warfare against the secular government in

Damascus and the Shiite regime in Baghdad. They specialized in bombing populated sites occupied by Erdogan’s enemies or the Saudi targets especially secular Kurds, leftists , trade unionists and Shiites allied with Iran.

The Erdogan regime’s intervention in Syria was motivated by its desire to expand Turkish influence (neo-Ottomanism) and to destroy the successful Kurdish autonomous government and movement in Northern Syria and Iraq.

To those ends, Erdoğan combined four policies:

(1) He vastly expanded Turkish support for and recruitment of Islamic terrorists from around the world, including Libya and Chechnya.

(2) He facilitated their entry into Syria, and encouraged them to attack villages and towns in the ethnic Kurdish regions.

(3) He broke off peace negotiations with the PKK and re-launched a full-scale war against the militant Kurds.

(4) He organized a covert terrorist campaign against the legal, secular, pro-Kurdish electoral party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP).

The Erdoğan regime sought to consolidate dictatorial powers to pursue and deepen its ‘Islamization’ of Turkish society and to project his version of Turkish hegemony over Syria and the Kurdish regions inside and outside Turkey. To accomplish these ambitious and far reaching goals, Erdoğan needed to purge his Administration of any rival power centers.

He started with the jailing and expulsion of secular, nationalist Kemalist military figures. He continued with a purge of his former supporters in the Gülen organization.

Failing to gain a majority in national elections because of the growth of the HDP, he proceeded with a systematic terror campaign: organizing street mobs made up of his followers in the ‘Justice and Development Party’, who burned and wrecked HDP offices and beat up activists. Erdoğan’s terror campaign culminated with the July 2015 bombing of a leftist youth meeting in Suruc whose activists were aiding Syrian Kurdish refugees and the beleaguered fighters resisting Islamist terrorists in Korbani, a large Syrian town across the border controlled by the Erdoğan-backed ISIS. Over 33 activists were murdered and 104 were wounded. Two Turkish covert intelligence officers or ‘policemen’, who knew in advance of the bombing, were captured, interrogated and executed by the PKK. This retaliation for what was widely believed to be a state-sponsored massacre provided Erdoğan with a pretext to re-launch his war on the Kurds. Erdoğan immediately declared war on both the armed and unarmed Kurdish movements.

The Erdoğan regime trotted out the claim that the Suruç terrorist attack was committed by ISIS suicide bombers, ignoring the regime’s ties to ISIS. He announced a large-scale investigation. In fact it was a perfunctory round up and release of suspects of no consequence.

If ISIS was involved in this and the Ankara massacres, it did so at the command and direction of Turkish Intelligence under orders of President Erdoğan.

The Suruç Massacre: A Dress Rehearsal for Ankara

Suruç was a ‘dress rehearsal’ for Erdoğan’s terrorist attack in Ankara, three months later.

Once again the main target was the Kurdish opposition electoral party (the HDP) as well as the major progressive trade unions , professional associations, and anti-war activists.

Once again Erdoğan blamed ISIS, without acknowledging his ties to ISIS. Certain facts point to Turkish state complicity:

1. Why were the bombs placed in the midst of the unarmed demonstrators and not next to the police and intelligence headquarters within a block of the carnage?
2. Why did Erdoğan’s police attack and prevent emergency medical assistance to the demonstrators in the immediate aftermath of the bombing?
3. Why did he block popular leaders, independent investigators and representatives from targeted groups from examining the bombing site?
4. Why did Erdoğan immediately reject a cease-fire offer from the PKK and launch a vast military operation while promoting rabidly chauvinistic street demonstrators against Kurds engaged in legal political campaigning?
5. Why did the police attack mourners at the subsequent funerals?

Who Benefited from the Terror Attacks?

The terror attacks benefited Erdoğan’s immediate and long-range strategic political goals – and no one else!

First and foremost, they killed activists from the HDP party, anti-war leftists and trade unionists.  The violent government attacks against the HDP in the aftermath of the massacre has increased Erdoğan’s chances of securing the electoral majority that he needs in order to change the Turkish constitution so he can assume dictatorial powers.

Secondly, it was aimed at (1) reducing the ties between the Turkish and Syrian Kurds; (2) breaking the ties between progressive Turkish trade unions, secular professionals ,peace activists and the Kurdish Democratic Party; (3) mobilizing the rightwing ultra-nationalist Turkish street mobs to attack and destroy the electoral offices of the HDP; (4) intimidating pro-democracy activists and progressives and silencing dissent to Erdoğan’s domestic power grab and intervention in Syria.

To the question of who is responsible for serial violent attacks on civil society organizations, opposition political parties, and purges and arrests of independent officials in the lead-up to the terror attack? The answer is Erdoğan.

Who was behind the campaign of violence and bombing in Kurdish neighborhoods in Istanbul and elsewhere leading up to the Suruç and Ankara terrorist attacks? The answer is Erdoğan.

Conclusion

We originally counter -posed two hypotheses regarding the terrorist attack in Ankara: The Erdoğan regime’s hypothesis that ISIS – as a force independent of the Turkish government -or even the PKK were responsible for brutally killing key activists in Turkish and Kurdish civil organizations; and the opposite hypothesis that the Erdoğan regime was the mastermind.

After reviewing the motives, actions, beneficiaries and interests of the two hypothetical suspects, the hypothesis, which most elegantly and thoroughly accounts for and makes sense of the facts is that the Erdoğan regime was directly responsible for the planning and organization of the massacres through its intelligence operatives.

A subsidiary hypothesis is that the execution – the placing of the bombs – may have been by an ISIS terrorist, but under the control of Erdoğan’s police apparatus. 

The last thing anyone wants when they buy a diamond to wear with pride and confidence as a symbol of love and commitment, is for it to be tarnished by association with bloodshed and violence.

According to Shmuel Mordechai, the Diamond Controller at Israel’s Ministry of Economics, the United States continued to be the primary market for Israeli re-exported diamonds at US$2.37 billion which accounting for 38% of the market whilst the  United Kingdom accounted for 3.7% at US$234 million, in 2014. Belgium accounted for 8.5% or US$532 million and Switzerland 6.47% at US$405 million.

‘The imperative for all businesses to respect human rights and ensure their business relationships are not contributing to adverse human rights impacts is a well-established tenet affirmed in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the UN Global Compact, and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. The fact that the diamond industry, which accounts for one third of Israel ’s manufacturing exports, is a very significant source of revenue for the regime in Israel means jewellers that sell diamonds processed in Israel help fund the commission of war crimes and suspected crimes against humanity.’

In evidence to the London Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine Israeli political economist, Shir Hever, stated:

‘Every time somebody buys a diamond that was exported from Israel some of that money ends up in the Israeli military. So the financial connection is quite clear.’

Notes

http://www.globalresearch.ca/israels­blood­diamonds-when­a­diamond­is­forever­on­your­conscience/5482602

The Trudeau family is back in the political seat of governance.  Justin Trudeau, Canada’s second youngest leader, will occupy a position his father so comprehensively dominated.

Stephen Harper was tossed out of office after having remade the conservative movement in Canada, putting forth a mix of vulgar incitements (the niqab debate; stripping citizenship; anti-terrorist platforms), neoliberal trade policies, and hammed up promises of Canadian glory.

The story of the 2015 election may well be remembered as one when Harper, after nearly ten years in power, finally lost his hold. But it should be remembered as one where the third force of Canadian politics failed to gain power.  The National Democratic Party, a party that should have come up with more heft, simply slid away in the last weeks of the campaign.

It did not seem that way at first.  Rachel Notley’s victory in Alberta in May suggested that the NDP could match it even in conservative ridings. And the party’s opposition to such police state bunk as C-51 had earned it status as a challenger.  Tom Mulcair, in other words, seemed to be doing something right.

At the voting booths, Mulcair was placed through the wringer. The flirting voters, having tantalised the party strategists, were leaving in droves.  The party that should have provided a genuine alternative to the Liberal centrist model of elitist capture was soundly crushed.

At the dissolution of parliament, the NDP had 95 seats.  At the end of Monday night, it had 40, by any stretch a catastrophic collapse of its base.  Its solid Quebec support disintegrated.  Mulcair himself barely beat off a challenge in his own riding from the Liberal contender.

An NDP strategist suggested he had not been “angry” enough.[1]  He was certainly not charming enough, not like his predecessor, Jack Layton, who managed to win support in Quebec in 2011 in dramatic fashion.  The passion was lacking; the businesslike manner was underwhelming. Harper’s legacy in Canadian politics has been so profound in the way it has trundled angry politics onto centre stage.

Instead, the brow beaten Mulcair had to suggest before a hundred supporters or so at the Palais des congrès de Montréal that “this election had to do with change, and today Canadians have turned the page on the last 10 years and have rejected fear and divisiveness.”

The Liberal triumph, in contrast, stole a march on perceived NDP softness, even if Mulcair did seem firm on such points as deficit spending.  (Like the Conservatives, the line here was the unimpeachable glory of the balanced budget.) On points such as the niqab ban, Mulcair found himself trapped between Harper’s purported majoritarian sentiment and Quebec sovereigntist Gilles Duceppe, who heartily agreed with such measures.

Commentators have hit upon strained similarities – that the country’s 15^th decade seemed much like its 10^th – 1957-1967.  Robert Wright surmised that Canadian “distemper” was not picked up by the managerial types in the form of John Diefenbaker and Lester B. Pearson.  Grey Canada had had enough by 1968, ushering in an age of Trudeaumania.  Nothing like that is in the wings on this occasion.

There is the usual chatter about reforms the Liberals might initiate.  There are mutterings about overhauling the antiquated first past the post electoral system that disenfranchises more than enfranchises – and a range of other measures that are simply unlikely to happen.

Will Trudeau wind back the militarised establishment, and Harper’s trashing of “soft power” options?  The latter made Canada a suitably aggressive deputy of US foreign policy. Or will the newly elected leader puncture the security, surveillance state, which the Liberals backed?

The Anti-terrorism Act, 2015, had Trudeau’s support, which effectively pitted the legislature against the spirit of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression have argued that parts of the C-51 legislation violate that sacred document “in a manner that is not justified in a free an democratic society.”[2]

It should be remembered that it was the Liberals who created C-11, Canada’s own variant of the Stop Piracy Online Act, a statutory creation it subsequently help pass with the Tories.  (Fittingly, much of this spirit can be found in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement’s Intellectual Property chapter.)

While Trudeau promises much, the element of posturing is fundamental. In debates, he may well have been aggressive against Harperism, but in votes, he did something else.  He skipped the final vote on C-24, otherwise known as the “Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act”, the same act he so roundly condemned as creating a second-tier of citizens.   He backed, along with 29 other Liberals, Bill C-7, given the rather colourful title “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”.

The centrist, in short, is cursed by calculated compromises that reactionaries do not need to consider.  The only ideology of relevance there is one of worn appearances that may, given a moment, vanish.  The NDP tended to be less burdened by that legacy.  When it came to the polling both, that qualifying feature did not prove enough.

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

Notes

[1] http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/mulcair-failing-to-maintain-the-momentum

[2] http://www.canadianprogressiveworld.com/2015/10/19/a-canadian-progressives-case-against-justin-trudeau-becoming-canadas-next-prime-minister/

A funny thing happened in 2012 after Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial writer at the New York Times, wrote his spectacularly false narrative telling readers that the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act had nothing to do with the crash because problem firms like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG didn’t own insured commercial banks — which would have been prohibited under the Glass Steagall Act, had it not been repealed in 1999. In fact, all three of the firms did, indeed, own banks insured by the FDIC at the time of the crash.

We figured that Sorkin had just made an error, or, well, three monster errors, so we wrote to his editor. We heard nothing. We wrote to the New York Times public editor who is supposed to uphold the integrity of the paper. Nothing. We wrote to the publisher. Nothing. To this very day, the errors remain in the Sorkin article. When the so-called paper of record allows three outrageously wrong errors to persist as fact, it doesn’t look like sloppy journalism, it looks like a conspiracy to deny the public an honest narrative.

Sorkin’s lie has since been regurgitated by two other writers at the New York Times: Paul Krugman and William Cohan. The lie has also spread to President Obama and Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, as a cover for why they won’t buck Wall Street and work to reinstate this critically needed legislation as Senators Elizabeth Warren, John McCain, Bernie Sanders and dozens of others in Congress are demanding. Marcy Kaptur’s legislation in the House of Representatives to restore the Glass-Steagall Act has 67 cosponsors.

The New York Times seems disingenuous at best and conspiratorial at worst: admitting in an editorial that it blew it big time in advocating for the repeal of Glass-Steagall while hiding in the wings as its writers are allowed to push a false narrative that the New York Times refuses to correct.

The editorial page editors wrote on July 26, 2012:

While we are on this subject, add The New York Times editorial page to the list of the converted. We forcefully advocated the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. ‘Few economic historians now find the logic behind Glass-Steagall persuasive,’  one editorial said in 1988. Another, in 1990, said that the notion that ‘banks and stocks were a dangerous mixture’ ‘makes little sense now.

“That year, we also said that the Glass-Steagall Act was one of two laws that ‘stifle commercial banks.’  The other was the McFadden-Douglas Act, which prevented banks from opening branches across the nation.

 Wall Street On Parade Read complete article 

Many around the world believe that Tony Blair did not only support the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, but did so in contravention of international law. New damning evidence in this regard suggests the net is finally closing in on him.

The unearthing of two classified US government memos, published in the UK tabloid, the Mail on Sunday, leaves no doubt that the former British prime minister committed Britain to following the US into Iraq a full year before the bombs started dropping on Baghdad in March 2003.

The first of the memos concerned was sent to US president George W Bush by his secretary of state, Colin Powell, in early April of 2002. In it Powell writes: “On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary. He is convinced on two points: the threat is real; and success against Saddam will yield more regional success.”

At the same time, as the former British PM was alleged to have committed UK forces to war alongside the US, Blair was assuring the British public that he and the American president were seeking a diplomatic solution to the question of Iraq and Saddam’s role in the region.

Powell also discusses trade issues in the first memo, specifically the controversial decision by the Bush administration to impose a tariff on EU steel imports in March 2002: “We do not expect Blair to dwell on the steel decision, although it was a bitter blow for him, as he indicated in his recent letter to you. It is clear that Britain will not fight our fight within the EU on this.”

© Chris Helgren / Reuters

This is a shocking revelation, exposing the extent to which Blair was willing to suborn UK’s trade and economic interests, along with the untold number of British jobs dependent on them, to his priority of currying favor with Washington.

Moving on to the second classified memo, prepared by the US Embassy in London for Colin Powell, we are given an insight into the determination of Blair and his allies to overcome political obstacles and opposition within his own parliamentary Labour Party over Britain’s potential participation in a US military coalition vis-à-vis Iraq.

Most shocking here is the suggestion that the US Embassy had confidential sources among Labour MPs, providing it with inside information, with their names in the document redacted to conceal their identities.

The memos have come to light in the wake of the scandal surrounding the location of classified emails on the private server of Hillary Clinton from her own time as secretary of state in the Obama administration. Currently campaigning for the Democratic Party nomination for next year’s presidential elections, Clinton was recently forced by a federal judge to release the emails, which number around 30,000.

It is thought she may have requested the memos to and from her Republican predecessor, Colin Powell, in order to review the procedures that were followed by the US State Department prior to the start of the US-UK invasion in March 2003.

Whatever her motivation for possessing them, their revelations place further pressure on Sir John Chilcot and his inquiry into Iraq, set up in 2009 and which has yet to publish its findings six years after the last witness was questioned in 2010. When Blair appeared in front of the inquiry he denied the allegation that he committed Britain to military action in Iraq along with the United States, during the aforementioned Crawford, Texas summit with George W Bush.

Tony Blair holds up Iraq inquiry report over tough criticism? (Op-Edge by John @JohnWight1) http://t.co/CsrbpLQRHI pic.twitter.com/TQKJAzrww2

— RT (@RT_com) August 18, 2015

Growing public and political disquiet over the inordinate delay in publishing the findings of the inquiry has been focused on the possibility that it is being held up by Blair, unhappy with the criticisms that have been made of his conduct and actions in the run-up to the war in Chilcot’s report, which Blair along with the other witnesses who have come in for criticism have seen in advance in order to allow them to respond. No matter, the publication of these classified US memos merely add to the growing clamor for the former British prime minister and key personnel within his government and inner circle to be investigated for war crimes and face trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

© Chris Helgren / Reuters

The fact that Blair has gone on to amass a fortune since leaving office in 2007 – through his role as adviser to various governments around the world, some with egregious human rights records; his role as a consultant to an international bank, a Saudi oil company, and as a speaker at various corporate and international business gatherings – many find especially repugnant. What these memos prove is that Tony Blair was blinded by the power of Washington, desperate to bask in its favors and prestige, determined in the process to become a political player on the international stage. Instead he has become a laughing stock, particularly in the UK, where public revulsion of him is widely felt, indeed it is now a toss-up between him and Margaret Thatcher over which is the most loathed British prime minister in the country’s recent history. What should never be lost when discussing Blair and his role when it comes to Iraq are the catastrophic consequences suffered by the Iraqi people. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were killed as a direct result of the war in 2003, with many more maimed, millions displaced, and an entire nation traumatized beyond measure. In 2015, rather than the flowering democracy promised by Blair, Bush, and their apologists, Iraq is a country mired in chaos, rife with sectarian violence, social dislocation, with Third World level poverty the norm for a people who at one time could boast of First World level education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Tony Blair’s role in destroying Iraq will follow him to his grave. However, if there is any justice in the world, it should also follow him into the dock at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

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Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.

The few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite of the world, dominate nation-states through international trade agreements and transnational state organizations such as the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the International Monetary Fund.

The TCC communicates their policy requirements through global networks such as the G-7 and G-20, and various nongovernmental policy organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberger Group. The TCC represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top 1 percent of the world’s wealth hierarchy.

The TCC are keenly aware of both their elite status and their increasing vulnerabilities to democracy movements and to unrest from below. The military empire dominated by the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) serves to protect TCC investments around the world. Wars, regime changes, and occupations performed in service of empire support investors’ access to natural resources and their speculative advantages in the market place.

When the empire is slow to perform or faced with political resistance, private security firms and private military companies (PMC) increasingly fulfill the TCC’s demands for the protections of their assets. These protection services include personal security for TCC executives and their families, protection of safe residential and work zones, tactical military advisory and training of national police and armed forces, intelligence gathering on democracy movements and opposition groups, weapons acquisitions and weapon systems management, and strike forces for military actions and assassinations.

The expanding crisis of desperate masses/refugees, alienated work forces, and environmental exhaustion means an unlimited opportunity for PMCs to engage in protections services for the global elite.

Estimates are that over $200 billion a year is spent on private security employing some fifteen million people worldwide. G4S is the largest PMC in the world with 625,000 employees spanning five continents in more than 120 countries. Nine of the largest money management firms in the world have holdings in G4S. Some of its more important contractors are the governments of the UK, the US, Israel, and Australia.  In the private sector G4S has worked with corporations such as Chrysler, Apple, and Bank of America. In Nigeria, Chevron contracts with G4S for counterinsurgency operations including fast-response mercenaries. G4S undertakes similar operations in South Sudan, and has provided surveillance equipment for checkpoints and prisons in Israel and security for Jewish settlements in Palestine.

Another private military contractor Constellis Holdings—formally Blackwater and Triple Canopy—is a leading provider of security, support, and military advisory services to the US government, foreign governments, multinational corporations, and international organizations. Constellis is managed by an all male board of directors including billionaire Red McCombs; John Ashcroft, the former attorney general; retired admiral Bobby Inman; and Jack Quinn, a leading Democratic advisor who served as chief of staff to vice president Al Gore and as counsel to President Clinton.

Hundreds of private military contractors now play an important role in TCC security in the evolving 21^st century neo-fascist corporate world. Capital will be free to travel instantly and internationally to anywhere that profits are possible, while nation-states will become little more than population containment zones with increasingly repressive labor controls. For these reasons, PMCs must be understood as a component of neoliberal imperialism that now supplements nation-states’ police powers and could eventually substitute for them.

The trend toward privatization of war is a serious threat to human rights, due process, and democratic transparency and accountability. The US/NATO military empire sets the moral standards for denial of human rights by using pilotless drones to kill civilians without regard for international law in various regions of resistance to empire. Labeling dead civilians as insurgents and terrorists, the complete lack of due process and human rights belies any standard of governmental moral legitimacy. This lack of moral legitimacy in turn sets standards for private military companies to operate with much the same malice in the shadow of the empire.

The globalization of PMC operations alongside transnational capital investment, international trade agreements, and an increasing concentration of wealth in the TCC means that the repressive practices of private security and war will inevitably come home to roost in the US, the European Union, and other first-world nations.

The 99 percent of us without wealth and private police power face the looming threat of overt repression and complete loss of human rights and legal protections. We see signs of this daily with police killings (now close to a hundred per month in the US), warrantless electronic spying, mass incarceration, random traffic checkpoints, airport security/no-fly lists, and Homeland Security compilations of databases on suspected resisters.

Each time we look past the crimes of the empire we lose a portion of our integrity of self.  Ignoring repression becomes part of continuing compromise in our daily lives leading to a moral malaise and increased feelings of helplessness. We must stand up and demand democratic transparency and the international enforcement of human rights. Unless we collectively challenge the empire, we face a world that is evolving into a new dark age of neo-feudal totalitarianism unlike any previously known.

Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and president of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored. For a longer footnoted version of this report see:

Read the full study, as featured in Censored 2016: Media Freedom on the Line here.

http://www.projectcensored.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/C16_Ch08_Phillips_21stCenturyFascism.pdf

In a recent poll by ATIS, and before the release of the “smoking gun memo”, an astonishing 96% of people agreed that Tony Blair should stand trial for war crimes. The poll sample was taken from over 4700 votes spread over several websites, so even allowing for a very large margin of error, I think we can safely conclude that the majority of people believe Tony Blair is a war criminal and should stand trial for war crimes.

The bombshell “smoking gun” memo, straight from the Whitehouse, reveals the deal done in blood by Blair and Bush in 2002 more than a year before the Iraq war. Blair gave bush his unqualified support for the illegal war in Iraq whilst telling the British Public he was not proposing military action, as revealed in the secret email uncovered by the FBI investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private mail server when Secretary of Defence.

It is estimated by some observers, that more than 1,000,000 people died and a further 4.000,000 were displaced or injured and their homes destroyed, the majority of them civilians. Tony Blair sickeningly calls these atrocities committed in the Iraq war against mostly women and children “collateral damage”. The effects of this atrocious war is still reverberating around the Middle East which is now in complete chaos and also in Europe, where we now see a flood of millions of refugees trying to escape the turmoil and chaos of Blair actions. Blair could also be tried under his own anti terrorism laws in a British court, because, it could be argued, his actions aided and abetted the terrorists.

There is one other important point that should not be overlooked, Blair by his collusion with George Bush and the USA’s thirst for war and regime change, deliberately and knowingly sent many of our young people to their certain deaths and left many others horribly maimed for life. This makes Tony Blair complicit in the conspiracy to murder British citizens by any legal definition you care to use. When 96% of the people agree on anything, it sends a very powerful message, it’s time for Chilcot to publish his report, and its time Tony Blair faced his accusers from the dock in the Hague.

There will be no more taxpayer bailouts for the Big Wall Street banks. That much has been established by the lobbied to death Dodd-Frank banking reform (yeah, right) bill.

A recent study indicates that more than two-thirds of people who have been prescribed antidepressants are likely not suffering from depression at all. Sixty-nine percent of those taking SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) do not display the classic symptoms of major depressive disorder, which is commonly known as clinical depression, according to a report published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

SSRIs are also prescribed for other mental disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and panic disorder, but the researchers found that 38 percent of those taking the drugs did not meet the criteria for these conditions either.

Commonly considered to have fewer side effects than other antidepressants, SSRIs are the most prescribed class of drugs for treating depression and other psychiatric disorders.

The authors of the study wrote:

Many individuals who are prescribed and use antidepressant medications may not have met criteria for mental disorders. Our data indicate that antidepressants are commonly used in the absence of clear evidence-based indications.

Between 1988 and 2008, the use of antidepressants increased almost 400 percent, with 11 percent of Americans now taking these drugs regularly.

Why are these drugs being over-prescribed?

The answer might be that temporary periods of mental stress are being misdiagnosed as clinical depression. Dr. Howard Forman, medical director of the Addiction Consultation Service at Montefiore Medical Center, is one of those who subscribe to this theory.

According to Dr. Forman:

We all experience periods of stress, periods of sadness, and periods of self-doubt. These don’t make us mentally ill, they define us as human.

He also points out that although psychotherapy might be a better way of treating these conditions, there are “roadblocks” involved, including cost, scarcity of qualified therapists, and the time demands those experts face.

The official U.S. guidelines for diagnosing clinical depression are when a “person has five or more depressive symptoms over a two week period, most of the day, nearly every day.”

Symptoms of clinical depression range from a depressed mood to thoughts of suicide. They might also include a lack of interest in normal activities, changes in weight or appetite, insomnia or too much sleep, restlessness, fatigue, guilty feelings and problems with concentration or decision-making.

Although SSRIs are considered to be safer than other antidepressants, they are not without potentially serious side effects. Studies have shown that the use of antidepressants involves an “increased risk of suicidal behaviour and thoughts in children and adolescents, particularly in the early stages of treatment.” The use of Prozac and Seroxat actually doubles the risk of suicidal behavior among young people.

Studies have also indicated an increased risk of children being born with autism when their mothers take SSRIs during pregnancy.

Considering the risks, these drugs should never be casually prescribed. However, in this climate of increased reliance on pills to solve every problem, over-prescription of medications is rampant, particularly in the U.S.

Big Pharma rakes in more than half a trillion dollars in revenues each year and spends billions advertising its products. This is most likely the real reason that antidepressants are being over-prescribed.

Drug manufacturers apply pressure and provide incentives to doctors to prescribe more pharmaceuticals than necessary. One study revealed that “drug companies have a tremendous incentive to find new conditions to treat with existing drugs, and when they can’t, they invent them.”

That’s right: the drug makers invent disorders out of thin air just so they can sell more of their products, according to an article posted by the Drug and Alcohol Testing Compliance Services (DATCS) website:

For example, the drug Sarafem is really Prozac with a different name and a different color capsule. It’s patented, approved, and promoted for the treatment of “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder” which is defined as the sadness, irritability, tension, and moodiness that might occur prior to menstruation. Even though this drug isn’t any more effective at treating these symptoms than generic Prozac, it’s up to three times as expensive.

Another tactic is to “change the definition of existing diseases,” says the DATCS:

For example, changes to blood pressure and cholesterol level guidelines could qualify millions of new people for prescription medication literally overnight. When this happens, it’s not uncommon for the supporters of such changes to have financial ties to the drug companies that would benefit most.

These profit-motivated tactics should be recognized as what they really are: criminal behavior by a cabal of greedy predators. Enough is enough. It’s time to acknowledge and put a stop to these practices.

Notes:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk
http://www.medicaldaily.com
http://www.psychiatrist.com
http://datcs.com

The Russian-led military coalition is badly beating Washington’s proxies in Syria which is why John Kerry is calling for a “Time Out”.

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for an emergency summit later in the week so that leaders from Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan could discuss ways to avoid the “total destruction” of Syria. According to Kerry, “Everybody, including the Russians and the Iranians, have said there is no military solution, so we need to make an effort to find a political solution. This is a human catastrophe that now threatens the integrity of a whole group of countries around the region,” Kerry added.

Of course, it was never a “catastrophe” when the terrorists were destroying cities and villages across the country, uprooting half the population and transforming the once-unified and secure nation into an anarchic failed state. It only became a catastrophe when Vladimir Putin synchronized the Russian bombing campaign with allied forces on the ground who started wiping out hundreds of US-backed militants and recapturing critical cities across Western corridor. Now that the Russian airforce is pounding the living daylights out of jihadi ammo dumps, weapons depots and rebel strongholds, and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is tightening their grip on Aleppo, and Hezbollah is inflicting heavy casualties on Jabhat al Nusra militants and other Al Qaida-linked vermin; Kerry’s decided it’s a catastrophe. Now that the momentum of the war has shifted in favor of Syrian president Bashar al Assad, Kerry wants a “Time out”.

Keep in mind, that Putin worked tirelessly throughout the summer months to try to bring the warring parties together (including Assad’s political opposition) to see if deal could be worked out to stabilize Syria and fight ISIS. But Washington wanted no part of any Russian-led coalition. Having exhausted all the possibilities for resolving the conflict through a broader consensus, Putin decided to get directly involved by committing the Russian airforce to lead the fight against the Sunni extremists and other anti-government forces that have been tearing the country apart and paving the way for Al Qaida-linked forces to take control of the Capital. Putin’s intervention stopped the emergence of a terrorist Caliphate in Damascus. He turned the tide in the four year-long war, and delivered a body-blow to Washington’s malign strategy Now he’s going to finish the job.

Putin is not gullible enough to fall for Kerry’s stalling tactic. He’s going to kill or capture as many of the terrorists as possible and he’s not going to let Uncle Sam get in the way.

These terrorists–over 2,000 of who are from Chechnya–pose an existential threat to Russia, as does the US plan to use Islamic extremists to advance their foreign policy objectives. Putin takes the threat seriously. He knows that if Washington’s strategy succeeds in Syria, it will be used in Iran and then again in Russia. That’s why he’s decided to dump tons of money and resources into the project. That’s why his Generals have worked out all the details and come up with a rock-solid strategy for annihilating this clatter of juvenile delinquents and for restoring Syria’s sovereign borders. And that’s why he’s not going to be waved-away by the likes of mealy-mouth John Kerry. Putin is going to see this thing through to the bitter end. He’s not going to stop for anyone or anything. Winning in Syria is a matter of national security, Russia’s national security.

Here’s Kerry again: “If Russia is there to help Assad find a way to a political solution as well as to fight Daesh (ISIS) and extremism, then there is the possibility of a very different path.”

Putin has offered solutions from the very onset, it was Washington that rejected those remedies. Putin supported the so called Geneva communique dating back to 2012. In fact, it was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who threw a wrench in the proceedings by demanding that Assad not be part of any transitional governing body. (Note: Now Obama has caved on this demand.) Russia saw her demand as tantamount to regime change, which it was since Assad is the internationally-recognized head of state and fully entitled to be a part of any transitional government. US rejectionism sabotaged efforts for internationally-monitored “free and fair multi-party elections” and ended any chance for a speedy end to the war. Washington was more determined to get its own way (“Assad must go”) then to save the lives of tens of thousands of civilians who have died since Clinton walked away from Geneva.

And now Kerry is extending the olive branch? Now Washington pretends to care about the “total destruction” of Syria?

I’m not buying it. What Kerry cares about is his hoodlum “head-chopper” buddies that are being turned into shredded wheat by Russian Daisy Cutters. That’s what he cares about. Take a look at this from RT:

“Syrian President Bashar Assad “does not have to leave tomorrow or the next day,” the US State Department (spokesman Mark Toner) has stated. Washington allows that Assad may take part in transitional process, but can’t be part of Syria’s next government…

“… this isn’t the US dictating this. This is the feeling of many governments around the world, and frankly, the majority of the Syrian people,” Toner said.

When asked to clarify “how long” the State Department thinks the transition process could take, Toner failed to give an exact time period.

“I can’t put a timeframe on it. I can’t say two weeks, two months, six months,” he said, adding that the US is looking for “a political resolution to the conflict.”…

Toner then admitted that the US is still in the “process to start the process,” stressing that this was “an urgent issue” that “has gone on too long.” (‘Assad doesn’t have to leave tomorrow, can be part of transitional process’ – US State Department”, RT)

“A process to start the process”?? Hello?

Toner is backpeddling so fast he’s not even sure what he’s saying. Clearly, the administration is so flustered by developments on the ground in Syria, and so eager to stop the killing of US-backed jihadis, that they sent poor Toner out to talk to the media before he’d even gotten his talking points figured out. What a joke. The administration has gone from refusing to meet with a high-level Russian delegation just last week (to talk about coordinating airstrikes in Syria), to completely capitulating on their ridiculous “Assad must go” position today. That’s quite a reversal, don’t you think? I’m surprised they didn’t just run a big white Flag up over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. while the Marine Band played Taps.

But don’t think that this latest humiliation will derail Washington’s plan for destroying Syria as a functioning, sovereign state and carving it into a million powerless statelets that pose no threat to Big Oil’s pipeline corridors, or US military bases, or Israel’s sprawling Zionist Valhalla. Because it won’t. That plan is still right on track despite Putin’s efforts to crush the militants and defend the borders. The latest iteration of the Syria dissolution strategy was articulated by Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass who said:

“….the United States and others should pursue a two-track policy. One track would channel steps to improve the balance of power on the ground in Syria. This means doing more to help the Kurds and select Sunni tribes, as well as continuing to attack the Islamic State from the air.

Relatively safe enclaves should emerge from this effort. A Syria of enclaves or cantons may be the best possible outcome for now and the foreseeable future. Neither the US nor anyone else has a vital national interest in restoring a Syrian government that controls all of the country’s territory; what is essential is to roll back the Islamic State and similar groups.

The second track is a political process in which the US and other governments remain open to Russian (and even Iranian) participation. The goal would be to ease Assad out of power and establish a successor government that, at a minimum, enjoyed the support of his Alawite base and, ideally, some Sunnis.” (Testing Putin in Syria, Richard Haass, Project Syndicate)

Topple Assad and partition the country. Destroy Syria once and for all. That is Washington’s operating strategy. It’s a plan that was first proposed by Brooking’s analyst Michael O’Hanlon who recently said:

“…a future Syria could be a confederation of several sectors: one largely Alawite (Assad’s own sect), spread along the Mediterranean coast; another Kurdish, along the north and northeast corridors near the Turkish border; a third primarily Druse, in the southwest; a fourth largely made up of Sunni Muslims; and then a central zone of intermixed groups in the country’s main population belt from Damascus to Aleppo…

Under such an arrangement, Assad would ultimately have to step down from power in Damascus… A weak central government would replace him. But most of the power, as well as most of the armed forces. would reside within the individual autonomous sectors — and belong to the various regional governments…

American and other foreign trainers would need to deploy inside Syria, where the would-be recruits actually live — and must stay, if they are to protect their families. (Syria’s one hope may be as dim as Bosnia’s once was, Michael O’ Hanlon, Reuters)

Once again, the same theme repeated: Topple Assad and partition the country. Of course, the US will have to train “would-be recruits” to police the natives and prevent the buildup of any coalition or militia that might threaten US imperial ambitions in the region. But that goes without saying. (By the way, Hillary Clinton has already thrown her support behind the O’Hanlon plan emphasizing the importance of “safe zones” that could be used to harbor Sunni militants and other enemies of the state.)

John “Wacko” McCain has been the most strident proponent of the plan to break up Syria. Here’s part of what he said on the topic:

“We must act now to defend civilian populations and our opposition partners in Syria….we must establish enclaves in Syria where civilians and the moderate opposition to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and ISIS can find greater security. These enclaves must be protected with greater American and coalition airpower and likely foreign troops on the ground. We should not rule out that U.S. forces could play a limited role in this ground contingent…

“We must back up our policy in ways that check Putin’s ambitions and shape his behavior. If Russia attacks our opposition partners, we must impose greater costs on Russia’s interests — for example, by striking significant Syrian leadership or military targets. But we should not confine our response to Syria. We must increase pressure on Russia elsewhere. We should provide defensive weapons and related assistance to Ukrainian forces so they can take a greater toll on Russian forces.” (The Reckless Guns of October, Daniel Lazare, Consortium News)

Sure, let’s Kick-off World War 3. Why not?

The man should be in a straitjacket not fulminating on the floor of the Congress.

The entire US political establishment supports the removal of Assad and the breaking up of Syria. Kerry’s sudden appeal for dialogue does not represent a fundamental change in the strategy. It’s merely an attempt to buy some time for US-backed mercenaries who are feeling the full-brunt of the Russia’s bombing campaign. Putin would be well-advised to ignore Kerry’s braying and continue to prosecute his war on terror until the job is done.

(Note: As this article was going to press, the Turkish Daily Zaman reported that:

“….the US and several European and Gulf states…have agreed to a plan under which Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad will remain in power for the next six months during a transition period….Turkey has abandoned its determination [to get rid of Assad] and has agreed on an interim period with Assad in place,” former Foreign Minister Yaşar Yakış told Today’s Zaman on Tuesday….If the Syrian people decide to continue with Assad, then there is not much Turkey can object to.” (Report: Turkey agrees to Syria political transition involving Assad, Today’s Zaman)

This story has not yet appeared in any western media. Obama’s Syrian policy has completely collapsed.

Almost daily, The Times finds new ways to disgrace itself. Instead of full and accurate reporting, it fronts for imperial lawlessness – making it complicit with high crimes of war and against humanity. 

Its administration and Pentagon press release “journalism” is misinformation and distortion.

Its latest willful deception headlines “Hospital Attack Fueled by Units New to Kunduz,” saying:

“The American airstrike against a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan…was approved by American Special Operations Forces normally assigned to other parts of Asia.”

“The Afghan commandos who requested the strike had been rushed from another part of the country to help quell the Taliban attack. And the AC-130 gunship that unleashed the fire had not worked with either group before.”

“Military investigators have not yet reached any final conclusions about how the Oct. 3 attack in Kunduz occurred, but an emerging focus of investigators is how the lack of familiarity of American and Afghan forces with the area and their lack of experience in working together may have directly contributed to the series of mistaken decisions that led to the attack, American officials said.”

“They attributed those problems, in part, to the withdrawal of American forces from northern Afghanistan that has been part of the gradual drawdown of United States forces in the country.

No legitimate editor would publish this type of rubbish – willful distortion of facts, ignoring clear evidence of a premeditated war crime, horrific by any standard, authorized at the highest levels.

Fact: US warplanes knowingly and deliberately bombed what they knew was a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital – treating sick and wounded Afghans, not involved in fighting.

Fact: High-ranking US and Afghan officials in Washington and Kabul had precise coordinates of the facility – identified as a hospital, not a military outpost or refuge.

Fact: Multiple US attacks continued for over an hour – ignoring MSF’s frantic plea to stop, moments after the first strike, telling Pentagon and Afghan authorities a hospital was being hit, medical personnel and patients alone inside.

Fact: Attacking the facility was a well-planned, premeditated, willful act of mass murder – 24 victims, medical staff and patients only, some burned alive in their beds, 37 others injured.

The only medical facility available for thousands of Afghans was destroyed. They have nowhere to go for treatment, assuring many will die and suffer grievously because of Washington’s act of savagery.

The Times report mocks them, ignoring 14 years of US Afghan war crimes. Post-9/11, millions of Afghans died from war-related violence, untreated diseases, starvation, exposure to freezing cold in winter and overall deprivation – deliberate premeditated genocide, the highest of all high crimes.

An unnamed MSF nurse called what happened “absolutely terrifying.” People were screaming for help while the hospital was being destroyed, turned to rubble and set ablaze by US airstrikes.

“We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings,” said the nurse. “I cannot describe what was inside. There are no words for how terrible it was. In the Intensive Care Unit, six patients were burning in their beds.”

“We looked for some staff that were supposed to be in the operating theater. It was awful. A patient there on the operating table, dead, in the middle of the destruction. We couldn’t find our staff.”

Wounded patients were “crying out, everywhere.” Surviving doctors had to operate on their colleagues, trying to save them. Many died.

“Some of my colleagues were in too much shock, crying and crying.” The horror was too much to bear. Doctors, nurses and other medical staff worked tirelessly for months, at times non-stop, treating patients urgently needing care.

They hadn’t been home for months. Many are now dead – murdered by US imperialism, humanity’s greatest scourge, ISIS and other takfiri terrorists pale in comparison.

“I cannot find words for this,” said the nurse. He survived. Many of his colleagues died. MSF demands a full independent investigation, conducted by the Geneva-based International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) – the only permanent body established to investigate international humanitarian law violations.

It rejects Washington, NATO and Afghan authorities investigating themselves – assuring whitewash, not truth and full disclosure of what happened.

It called on Obama and Afghan officials to permit it, a requirement for it to proceed, so far not gotten. Last week, MSF reported a US armored vehicle forced its way through the closed wrecked hospital’s gate unannounced – destroying and/or damaging evidence of the malicious attack.

MSF press officer Tim Shenk explained it, saying “(t)heir unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear for the team.”

Photographs show charred human remains, damaged or destroyed medical equipment, and a facility largely in ruins.

With or without an independent investigation, the whole world knows what happened. Washington knowingly and willfully committed a grievous war crime, mass murdering noncombatant civilians, the way all US wars are waged – without mercy, violating fundamental international law, civilian men, women and children suffering most.

The Times is complicit with Washington’s coverup – publishing Pentagon propaganda, suppressing vital truths.

A Final Comment

On July 3, 2015, MSF reported the following:

“On Wednesday 1 July at 14:07, heavily armed men from Afghan Special Forces entered the MSF hospital compound, cordoned off the facility and began shooting in the air.”

“The armed men physically assaulted three MSF staff members and entered the hospital with weapons. They then proceeded to arrest three patients.”

“Hospital staff tried their best to ensure continued medical care for the three patients, and in the process, one MSF staff member was threatened at gunpoint by two armed men.”

“After approximately one hour, the armed men released the three patients and left the hospital compound.”

“We are shocked by this incident,” MSF director of operations Dr. Bart Janssens said at the time. “Since it opened in 2011, Kunduz Trauma Centre has been a place where all patients can receive free medical and surgical care safely. This serious event puts at risk the lives of thousands of people who rely on the centre for urgent care.”

MSF called what happened “an unacceptable (serious) breach of international humanitarian law, which protects medical services from attacks” – this one carried out with full knowledge and likely authorization of US officials, running everything in Afghanistan, its puppet regime subservient to US rule.

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. 

The first thing any thinking person learns about the Internet is not to trust everything you see there. While you can find much well-researched and reliable material, you’ll also encounter disinformation, spoofs, doctored photographs and crazy conspiracy theories. That would seem to be a basic rule of the Web – caveat emptor and be careful what you do with the information – unless you’re following a preferred neocon narrative. Then, nothing to worry about.

A devil-may-care approach to Internet-sourced material has been particularly striking when it comes to the case of the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. It has now become de rigueur on the part of the West’s mainstream news outlets to tout the dubious work of a British Internet outlet called Bellingcat, which bases its research on photographs and other stuff pulled off the Internet.

Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins also has made journalistic errors that would have ended the careers of many true professionals, yet he continues to be cited and hailed by the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have historically turned up their noses about Internet-based journalism.

The secret to Higgins’s success seems to be that he reinforces what the U.S. government’s propagandists want people to believe but lack the credibility to sell. It’s a great business model, marketing yourself as a hip “citizen journalist” who just happens to advance Official Washington’s “group thinks.”

We saw similar opportunism among many wannabe media stars in 2002-03 when U.S. commentators across the political spectrum expressed certitude about Iraq’s hidden stockpiles of WMD. Even the catastrophic consequences of that falsehood did little to dent the career advancements of the Iraq-WMD promoters. There was almost no accountability, proving that there truly is safety in numbers. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Through the US Media Lens Darkly.”]

New Recruits

But there’s always room for new recruits. Blogger Higgins made his first splash by purporting to prove the accuracy of U.S. government claims about the Syrian government firing rockets carrying sarin gas that killed hundreds of civilians on Aug. 21, 2013, outside Damascus, an incident that came close to precipitating a major U.S. bombing campaign against the Syrian military.

Those of us who noted the startling lack of evidence in the Syria-sarin case – much as we had questioned the Iraq-WMD claims in 2002-03 – were brushed aside by Big Media which rushed to embrace Higgins who claimed to have proved the U.S. government’s charges. Even The New York Times clambered onboard the Higgins bandwagon.

Higgins and others mocked legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh when he cited intelligence sources indicating that the attack appeared to be a provocation staged by Sunni extremists to draw the U.S. military into the war, not an attack by the Syrian military.

Despite Hersh’s long record for breaking major stories – including the My Lai massacre from the Vietnam War, the “Family Jewels” secrets of the CIA in the 1970s, and the Abu Ghraib torture during the Iraq War – The New Yorker and The Washington Post refused to run his articles, forcing Hersh to publish in the London Review of Books.

Hersh was then treated like the crazy uncle in the attic, while Higgins – an unemployed British bureaucrat operating from his home in Leicester, England – was the new golden boy. While Higgins was applauded, Hersh was shunned.

But Hersh’s work was buttressed by the findings of top aeronautical scientists who studied the one rocket that carried sarin into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta and concluded that it could have traveled only about two kilometers, far less distance than was assumed by Official Washington’s “group think,” which had traced the firing position to about nine kilometers away at a Syrian military base near the presidential palace of Bashar al-Assad.

“It’s clear and unambiguous this munition could not have come from Syrian government-controlled areas as the White House claimed,” Theodore Postol, a professor in the Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MintPress News.

Postol published “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21st, 2013” in January 2014 along with Richard Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories who was a United Nations weapons inspector and has to his credit two books, 40 patents and more than 75 academic papers on weapons technology.

Postol added in the MintPress interview that Higgins “has done a very nice job collecting information on a website. As far as his analysis, it’s so lacking any analytical foundation it’s clear he has no idea what he’s talking about.”

In the wake of the Postol-Lloyd report, The New York Times ran what amounted to a grudging retraction of its earlier claims. Yet, to this day, the Obama administration has failed to withdraw  its rush-to-judgment charges against the Syrian government or present any verifiable evidence to support them.

This unwillingness of the Obama administration to fess up has served Higgins well, in that there is still uncertainty regarding the facts of the case. After all, once a good propaganda club is forged for bludgeoning an adversary, it’s not something Official Washington lays down easily. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.“]

The MH-17 Mystery

So, Higgins and Bellingcat moved on to the mystery surrounding MH-17, where again the Obama administration rushed to a judgment, pinning the blame on the Russians and ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who were fighting the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.

Though again hard evidence was lacking – at least publicly – Official Washington and its many minions around the world formed a new “group think” – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was responsible for the 298 deaths.

On July 20, 2014, just three days after the MH-17 shoot-down in an article with the definitive title “U.S. official: Russia gave systems,” The Washington Post reported that an anonymous U.S. official said the U.S. government had “confirmed that Russia supplied sophisticated missile launchers to separatists in eastern Ukraine and that attempts were made to move them back across the Russian border.”

This official told the Post that there wasn’t just one Buk battery, but three. The supposed existence of these Buk systems in the rebels’ hands was central to the case blaming Putin, who indeed would have been highly irresponsible if he had delivered such powerful weapons – capable of hitting a commercial airliner flying at 33,000 feet as MH-17 was – to a ragtag rebel force of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

But there were problems with this version, including the fact that – as reflected in a “government assessment” from the Director of National Intelligence released on July 22, 2014, (or five days after the crash) – U.S. intelligence listed other weapons allegedly provided by the Russians to the ethnic Russian rebels but not a Buk anti-aircraft missile system.

In other words, two days after the Post cited a U.S. official claiming that the Russians had given the rebels the Buks, the DNI’s “government assessment” made no reference to a delivery of one, let alone three powerful Buk batteries.

And that absence of evidence came in the context of the DNI larding the report with every possible innuendo to implicate the Russians, including references to “social media” entries. But there was no mention of a Buk delivery.

The significance of this missing link is hard to overstate. At the time eastern Ukraine was the focus of extraordinary U.S. intelligence collection because of the potential for the crisis to spin out of control and start World War III. Plus, a Buk missile battery is large and difficult to conceal. The missiles themselves are 16-feet-long and are usually pulled around by truck.

U.S. spy satellites, which supposedly can let you read a license plate in Moscow, surely would have picked up these images. And, if – for some inexplicable reason – a Buk battery was missed before July 17, 2014, it would surely have been spotted on an after-action review of the satellite imagery. But the U.S. government has released nothing of the kind – not three, not two, not one.

Different Account

Instead, in the days after the MH-17 crash, I was told by a source that U.S. intelligence had spotted Buk systems in the area but they appeared to be under Ukrainian government control. The source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts said the likely missile battery that launched the fateful missile was manned by troops dressed in what looked like Ukrainian uniforms.

At that point in time, the source said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that the troops were actually eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but the initial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers. There also was the suggestion that the soldiers involved were undisciplined and possibly drunk, since the imagery showed what looked like beer bottles scattered around the site, the source said. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine?”]

Subsequently, the source said, these analysts reviewed other intelligence data, including recorded phone intercepts, and concluded that the shoot-down was carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian government, working with a rabidly anti-Russian oligarch, but that senior Ukrainian leaders, such as President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, were not implicated. However, I have not been able to determine if this assessment was a dissident opinion or a consensus within U.S. intelligence circles.

Another intelligence source told me that CIA analysts did brief Dutch authorities during the preparation of the Dutch Safety Board’s report but that the U.S. information remained classified and unavailable for public release. In the Dutch report, there is no reference to U.S.-supplied information although the report reflects sensitive details about Russian-made weapons systems, secrets declassified by Moscow for the investigation.

Into this propaganda-laced controversy stepped Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat with their “citizen journalism” and Internet-based investigation. The core of their project was to scour the Internet for images purportedly of a Buk missile system rumbling through the eastern Ukrainian countryside in the days before the MH-17 crash. After finding several such images, Bellingcat insistently linked the Buk missiles to the Russians and the rebels.

Supposedly, this investigative approach is better than what we traditional journalists do in such cases, which is to find sources with vetted intelligence information and get them to share it with us, while also testing it out against verifiable facts and the views of outside experts. Our approach is far from perfect – and often requires some gutsy whistle-blowing by honest officials – but it is how many important secrets have been revealed.

A central flaw in the Internet-based approach is that it is very easy for a skilled propagandist in a government dirty-tricks office or just some clever jerk with Photoshop software to manufacture realistic-looking images or documents and palm them off either directly to gullible people or through propaganda fronts that appear as non-governmental entities but are really bought-and-paid-for conduits of disinformation.

This idea of filtering propaganda through supposedly disinterested – and thus more credible – outlets has been part of the intelligence community’s playbook for many years. I was once told by Gen. Edward Lansdale, one of the pioneers of CIA psychological operations, that his preference always was to plant propaganda in news agencies that were perceived as objective, that way people were more believing.

Lost Credibility

After the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals of the 1970s, when the American people were suspicious of whatever they heard from the U.S. government, the Reagan administration in the 1980s organized inter-agency task forces to apply CIA-style techniques to manage the perceptions of the U.S. public about foreign events. The architect was the CIA’s top propaganda specialist, Walter Raymond Jr., who was transferred to the National Security Council staff to skirt legal prohibitions against the CIA manipulating Americans.

Raymond, who counseled his subordinates in the art of gluing black hats on U.S. adversaries and white hats on U.S. friends, recommended that U.S. propaganda be funneled through organizations that had “credibility in the political center.” Among his favorite outlets were Freedom House, a non-governmental “human rights” group that was discreetly funded by the U.S. government, and the Atlantic Council, a think tank led by former senior U.S. government officials and promoting strong NATO ties. [For more background, see “How Reagan’s Propaganda Succeeded.”]

The same process continues to this day with some of the same trusted outlets, such as Freedom House and Atlantic Council, but requiring some new fronts that have yet to be identified as propaganda conduits. Many receive discreet or backdoor funding from the U.S. government through the National Endowment for Democracy or other U.S. entities.

For instance, the U.S. Agency for International Development (along with billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute) funds the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which targets governments that have fallen into U.S. disfavor and which are then undermined by reporting that hypes alleged ties to organized crime and corruption. The USAID/Soros-funded OCCRP alsocollaborates with Bellingcat.

Higgins has become a favorite, too, of the Atlantic Council, which has partnered with him for a report about Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict, and he wins praise from the Soros-financed Human Rights Watch, which has lobbied for U.S. military intervention against the Assad government in Syria. (Like Higgins, Human Rights Watch pushed discredited theories about where Syrian sarin-gas attack originated.)

Yet, because Higgins’s claims dovetail so neatly with U.S. government propaganda and neoconservative narratives, he is treated like an oracle by credulous journalists, the Oracle of Leicester. For instance, Australia’s “60 Minutes” dispatched a crew to Higgins’s house to get the supposed coordinates for where the so-called “Buk getaway video” was filmed – another curious scene that appeared mysteriously on the Internet.

When “60 Minutes” got to the spot near Luhansk in eastern Ukraine where Higgins sent them, the location did not match up with the video. Although there were some billboards in the video and at the site in Luhansk, they were different shapes and all the other landmarks were off, too. Still, the Australian news crew pretended that it was at the right place, using some video sleight-of-hand to snooker the viewers.

However, when I published screen grabs of the getaway video and the Luhansk location, it was clear to anyone that the scenes didn’t match up.

A screen shot of the roadway where the suspected BUK missile battery supposedly passed after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Image from Australian “60 Minutes” program)

Correspondent Michael Unsher of Australia’s “60 Minutes” claims to have found the billboard visible in a video of a BUK missile launcher after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Screen shot from Australia’s “60 Minutes”)

Yet, instead of simply admitting that they were in error, the “60 Minutes” host did a follow-up insulting me, asserting that he had gone to the place identified by Higgins and claiming that there was a utility pole in the video that looked something like a utility pole in Luhansk.

A screen shot from the so-called “getaway” video supposedly taken shortly after MH-17 was shot down showing the road that the suspected BUK anti-aircraft missile battery was taking.

A screen shot from Australia’s “60 Minutes” update supposedly showing a utility pole in the “getaway” video and matching it up with a poll in an intersection of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. However, note that the inset obscures the spot where a house appeared on the original video.

At this point, the Australian program went from committing an embarrassing error to engaging in journalistic fraud. Beyond the fact that utility poles tend to look alike, nothing else matched up and, indeed, the landmarks around the utility poles were markedly different, too. A house next to the pole in the video didn’t appear in the scene filmed by the Australian crew. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “A Reckless Stand-upper on MH-17.”]

An Enduring Aura

But Higgins’s aura was such that objective reality and logic no longer seemed to matter. That two utility poles looked somewhat alike when nothing else in a video matched up at all somehow proved you were at the right location simply because the Oracle of Leicester had sent you there.

I’ve known many excellent journalists who saw their careers ended because they were accused of minor slip-ups on difficult stories when they were clearly correct on the big picture. Think, for instance, of the harsh treatment meted out to Gary Webb on Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking and Mary Mapes on George W. Bush’s shirking his National Guard duty. But different rules clearly apply if you make serious errors in line with U.S. propaganda. For example, think of virtually the entire mainstream news media buying into the false Iraq-WMD claims and facing almost no accountability at all.

The second set of rules apparently applies to Higgins and Bellingcat, who have the mainstream U.S. media on bended knee despite a record of journalistic misfeasance or malfeasance. In editorials about the Dutch Safety Board report last week , both The New York Times and The Washington Post hailed Bellingcat – as if they were recognizing that the old mainstream media had to rub shoulders with supposedly “new media” to have any credibility. It was a moment that would have made the CIA’s Lansdale and Raymond smile.

The Post’s neocon editorial writers, who have backed “regime change” in Iraq, Syria and other targeted countries, viewed the Dutch Safety Board report as vindicating the initial rush to judgment blaming the Russians and praised the work of Bellingcat – although the Dutch report pointedly did not say who was responsible or even where the fatal missile was launched.

“More forensic investigation will be necessary to identify precisely where the missile came from, but the safety board identified a 123-square-mile area mostly held by the separatists,” the Post wrote, although a different way of saying the same thing would be to note that the launch area identified by the report could suggest the firing by either Ukrainian forces or the rebels.

The Post did observe what has been one of my repeated complaints — that the Obama administration is withholding the U.S. intelligence evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry claimed three days after the shoot-down had identified the precise location of the launch.

Yet, the subsequent U.S. silence on that point has been the dog not barking. Why would the U.S. government, which has been trying to pin the shoot-down on the Russians, hide such crucial evidence – unless perhaps it doesn’t corroborate the desired anti-Putin propaganda theme?

Yet, the Post sought to turn this otherwise inexplicable U.S. silence into further condemnation of Putin, writing:

“A Dutch criminal investigation is underway that may identify the individuals who ordered and carried out the shootdown. We hope the prosecutors will have access to precise data scooped up by U.S. technical means at the time of the shootdown, which made clear the responsibility of Russian-backed forces.”

So, the Post sees nothing suspicious about the U.S. government’s sudden reticence after its initial loud rush-to-judgment. Note also the Post’s lack of skepticism about what these “technical means” had scooped up. Though the U.S. government has refused to release this evidence – in effect, giving those responsible for the shoot-down a 15-month head start to get away and cover their tracks – the Post simply takes the official word that the Russians are responsible.

Then comes the praise for Bellingcat:

“Already, outside investigations based on open sources and social media, such as by the citizen journalist group Bellingcat, have shown the Buk launcher was probably wheeled into Ukraine in June from the Russian 53rd Air Defense Brigade, based outside Kursk. The criminal probe should aim to determine whether Russian servicemen were operating the unit when it was fired or helping the separatists fire it.”

No Skepticism

Again, the Post shows little skepticism about this version of events, leaving only the question of whether Russian soldiers fired the missile themselves or helped the rebels fire it. But there are obvious problems with this narrative. If, indeed, the one, two or three Russian Buk batteries were rumbling around eastern Ukraine the month before the shoot-down, why did neither U.S. intelligence nor Ukrainian intelligence notice this?

And, we know from the Dutch report that the Ukrainians were insisting up until the shoot-down that the rebels had no surface-to-air missiles that could threaten commercial airliners at 33,000 feet. However, the Ukrainians did have Buk systems that they were positioning toward the east, presumably to defend against possible Russian air incursions.

On July 16, 2014, one day before MH-17 was hit, a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter-jet was shot down by what Ukrainian authorities said was an air-to-air missile, according to the Dutch report. Presumably the missile was fired by a Russian fighter patrolling the nearby border.

So, if the Ukrainians already believed that Russian warplanes were attacking along the border, it would make sense that Ukrainian air defense units would be on a hair-trigger about shooting down Russian jets entering or leaving Ukrainian airspace.

Even if you don’t want to believe what I was told about U.S. intelligence analysts suspecting that a rogue Ukrainian military operation targeted MH-17, doesn’t it make sense that an undisciplined Ukrainian anti-aircraft battery might have mistakenly identified MH-17 as a Russian military aircraft leaving Ukrainian airspace? The Ukrainians had the means and the opportunity and possibly a motive – after the shoot-down of the SU-25 just one day earlier.

The Dutch Safety Board report is silent, too, on the question raised by Russian officials as to why the Ukrainians had turned on their radar used to guide Buk missiles in the days before MH-17 was shot down. That allegation is neither confirmed nor denied.

Regarding Bellingcat’s reliance on Internet-based photos to support its theories, there is the additional problem of Der Spiegel’s report last October revealing that the German intelligence agency, the BND, challenged some of the images provided by the Ukrainian government as “manipulated.” According to Der Spiegel, the BND blamed the rebels for firing the fateful Buk but said the missile battery came not from the Russians but from Ukrainian government stockpiles. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.”]

However, a European source told me that the BND’s information was not as categorical as Der Spiegel reported. And, according to the Dutch report, the Ukrainian government reported that a Buk system that the rebels captured from a Ukrainian air base was not operational, a point where the rebels are in agreement. They also say they had no working Buks.

Yet, even without the BND’s warning, great caution should be shown when using evidence deposited often anonymously on the Internet. The idea of “crowd-sourcing” these investigations also raises the possibility that a skillful disinformationist could phony up a photograph and then direct an unwitting or collaborating reporter to the image.

Though I am no expert in the art of doctoring photographs, my journalism training has taught me to approach every possible flaw in the evidence skeptically. That’s especially true when some anonymous blogger directs you to an image or article whose bona fides cannot be established.

One of the strengths of old-fashioned journalism was that you could generally count on the professional integrity of the news agencies distributing photographs. Even then, however, there have been infamous cases of misrepresentations and hoaxes. Those possibilities multiply when images of dubious provenance pop up on the Internet.

In the case of MH-17, some photo analysts have raised specific questions about the authenticity of images used by Bellingcat and others among the “Russia-did-it” true-believers. We have already seen in the case of the “Buk-getaway video” how Higgins sent a reporting team from Australia’s “60 Minutes” halfway around the world to end up at the wrong spot (but then to use video fakery to deceive the viewers).

So, the chances of getting duped must be taken into account when dealing with unverifiable sources of information, a risk that rises exponentially when there’s also the possibility of clever intelligence operatives salting the Internet with disinformation. For the likes of psy-ops innovator Lansdale and propaganda specialist Raymond, the Internet would have been a devil’s playground.

Which is one more reason why President Barack Obama should release as much of the intelligence evidence as he can that pinpoints where the fateful MH-17 missile was fired and who fired it. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Plays Games with MH-17 Tragedy.”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Group seeks to ‘reclaim Jewish identity,’ raise a global Jewish voice to ‘challenge Israel’s destructive policies.’

A new international network of Jewish groups and individuals committed to justice in Palestine released a statement over the weekend calling for an end to the killing and an end the occupation. The network, which first met over the summer and has yet to come up with a name, currently spans 16 countries — from Brazil, to Australia, to Switzerland and South Africa — and represents 15 organizations.

An action by the American anti-occupation group If Not Now for Tisha B’Av in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where participants read the names of Israelis and Palestinians who died in last summer’s Gaza war. (Photo by Gili Getz)

According to the preface to their statement, the group seeks to “reclaim Jewish identity not as a nationalist identity but as one that celebrates our diverse roots, traditions & communities wherever we are around the world. We believe that it is essential for there to be a global Jewish voice to challenge Israel’s destructive policies, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. This international Jewish network aims to become that voice.”

Forty Palestinians and eight Israelis have been killed since the beginning of the month. There have been over two dozen stabbing attacks against Israelis across Israel and the West Bank, with around 100 Israelis and well over 1,000 Palestinians wounded, many of them by live fire.

In times of heightened violence, specifically against Israelis, Jewish organizations and individuals around the world tend to either show support for Israel or stay silent. It is taboo to criticize Israel when there are terror attacks against Israeli citizens, as was clear during the Second Intifada. But that is precisely when it is most necessary. To both identify as Jewish and show a deep concern for what is going on in Israel while criticizing its policies is rare, making this letter is so important.

Here are some excerpts:

According to Jordy Silverstein, a historian and writer from Melbourne who signed onto the statement, the point is to “increase the dissent in our communities.” The network, she says, “seeks to show that a Zionism based on militarism, exclusion, violence, division, murder, and lies isn’t the only way of living on that land, or of expressing ones Jewishness.”

Experts claim that Canada’s newly-elected Liberal Party government will take a softer line on issues such as the conflict in Ukraine and the fight against ISIL while making significant cuts to the defense budget.

As Saudi Arabia, backed and coordinated by the United States, continues a war of aggression against Yemen, the US has decided to sell Saudi dictator Salman bin Abdulaziz four more warships as well as munitions and other equipment valued at $11.25 billion.

Saudi Arabia is currently using US ships to block food, fuel, and medical supplies from entering Yemen, with US-manned ships “patrolling alongside”. Doctors Without Borders has reported that the blockade is “killing as many people in Yemen as the bombing”, and the Red Cross and other groups have said it is causing a humanitarian crisis, as Yemen imports almost one hundred percent of its food.

While nationalist news outlet Reuters asserts that deals like the current weapons shipment to Saudi Arabia are “carefully vetted”, independent investigative journalist Gareth Porter asked the Obama regime about the clear “illegality of resupplying further munitions to the Saudis”, and was told only that the US has asked King Abdulaziz to investigate himself regarding his war crimes.

US government sources told Reuters that “Saudi Arabia’s concerns about Iran” hastened the new weapons deal.  Sources failed to mention that among these “concerns” is that Iran’s influence might bring democratic reform to the Saudi kingdom.

Reuters quotes another anonymous US government source who says that by using the Saudis as a proxy to destabilize, starve, and spread Saudi-style despotism to Yemen through war of aggression, the US is “promoting peace and stability”.  Since the US/Saudi campaign against Yemen began, al Qaeda and ISIS have both made major gains in that country.

Obama has a history of large arms sales to the Saudis.  The “world’s largest” arms trafficker and peace prize winner secured the biggest arms sale in US history in 2010, stocking the Saudi dictator with $60 billion in lethal weaponry and equipment, and later hundreds of millions of dollars in banned cluster bombs, which the dictator has since used against Yemenis.

Robert Barsocchini focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry.  Updates on Twitter.

More than 35,000 troops are participating in NATO’s month-long Trident Juncture war games, along with some 140 warplanes and 60 warships. The militaries of 30 different capitalist governments aligned with the NATO alliance are involved.

Massive NATO drills are taking place in Italy, Spain and Portugal. The drills are designed to prepare the NATO powers for large-scale strategic warfare outside the boundaries of the NATO countries, according to NATO officials.

The main focus of the NATO drills is to prepare for comprehensive strategic warfare spanning broad stretches of the Eurasian landmass, comments from NATO officers have made clear.

“Trident Juncture 2015 will demonstrate NATO’s new increased level of ambition in joint modern warfare and will showcase a capable, forward-leading Alliance,” NATO’s command center said in a statement Tuesday.

According to NATO officials, the military drills involve an unprecedented mobilization of NATO forces, modeled on the “Federated Mission Network” system of military “interoperability” developed during the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan.

The exercises are emphasizing large-scale maneuver warfare to a degree not seen since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but will also include training in hybrid warfare.

The drills aim to mobilize NATO’s leading combat elements, including the NATO Response Force (NRF) and the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), for a “changed security environment” and “challenges from the South and the East,” according to NATO statements. The Western powers are preparing their militaries for a further destabilization of Europe’s political order and for new wars and interventions along Russia’s eastern frontier and in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

During remarks opening the drills, NATO Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow vowed that the drills would “demonstrate NATO’s ability to move quickly and decisively beyond our borders.”

At a news conference, Vershbow denied that the fictitious aggressor in the Trident Juncture scenario was Russia. But then, effectively confirming this proposition, he added, “That is not to say that some of the challenges we are addressing and testing our forces for are not analogous to the challenges we would face were we to have a conflict with Russia.”

He cited both the large Russian naval base at Kaliningrad, an enclave of Russian territory wedged in between Lithuania and Poland, and the recent deployment of Russian warplanes to Syria, on the southern flank of NATO member Turkey, as developments that NATO planners had to take into account.

During the news conference, an antiwar protester unfurled a banner demanding an explanation of the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, a war crime committed by US military forces with the backing of their NATO partners in that country. There were other antiwar protests in Trapani, Sicily, where the Trident Juncture headquarters was established.

Trident Juncture “sends a very clear message to any potential aggressor,” NATO’s commander, American General Philip Breedlove, said. “Any attempt to violate the sovereignty of one NATO nation will result in the decisive military engagement of all NATO nations.”

Breedlove was echoing the pledge made by President Obama during his last trip to the region: the full power of the 30-nation alliance, including its nuclear armaments, would be mobilized for the defense of any member nation, including the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which have perpetual tensions with Russia because of the large Russian-speaking minority in each country, which is either persecuted or openly disenfranchised.

The Trident drills are part of the general military escalation against Russia carried out by the US and NATO powers since the toppling of the pro-Russian regime of President Viktor Yanukovych by the February 2014 US-backed and fascist-led coup d’etat. The intervening period has seen the steady expansion of the NATO Response Force and the pre-positioning of NATO forces on high alert to deploy to the Russian border within a matter of hours.

At a military conference in Brussels in early October, NATO defense officials seized on accusations of airspace violations by a pair of Russian jets to carry out a further military escalation against Moscow, agreeing to expand the NATO Response Force to 40,000 troops and to deploy new teams of NATO military specialists to Central and Eastern Europe. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg proclaimed during the conference that the alliance is “implementing the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War.”

On Sunday, US General Dennis Via said that the Pentagon is preparing to ship another round of pre-positioned weapons packages known as “activity sets” to Europe.

The Trident drills are also serving to prepare NATO forces for operations along the southern flank of Europe. Faced with the surging tide of refugees crossing the Mediterranean in flight from the catastrophes produced by the US-NATO wars in Libya and Afghanistan, the US occupation of Iraq, and the US-backed Islamist campaign against the government of Syria, which have killed hundreds of thousands and left entire societies in ruins, the NATO powers are mobilizing their military might to beat back the tidal wave of human beings produced by their own criminal war policies.

The intensity of the NATO war games is an expression of the fact that a general war in Europe is now viewed as possible, even likely, by leading factions of the Western militaries. Comments from a French military officer featured in a NATO promotional video for Trident Juncture illustrated the militarist mentality that prevails within the imperialist officer corps.

Comparing the historic war preparations to sports practice, the NATO officer said: “Let me take the analogy of a football team. They’re all super, they have strikers, they have goal keepers, but they have to form a team.” He added, “Now when they come together, they need training to win next Sunday’s match.”

The war fever of the imperialists must be taken as a grave warning to the international working class. Unthinkable scenarios are being discussed in ruling circles, which involve the unleashing of full-scale war between the two major nuclear-armed forces on the planet, NATO and Russia.

The truth about the September 11, 2001 terror attacks would not only destabilize the American political system but it would also take down the US as a global empire, an American scholar says.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks during an interview with Press TV on Tuesday, while commenting on the ongoing feud between Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Jeb Bush over the 9/11 attacks.

On Friday, Trump blamed George W. Bush for the September 11, 2001 attacks. On Sunday, Trump said that if he had been president in 2001, his immigration policy would have kept al-Qaeda terrorists from attacking the US.

In response, Bush said his brother, former President George W. Bush, is not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. “Look, my brother responded to a crisis, and he did it as you would hope a president would do.”

“He united the country,” Bush told CNN. “He organized our country, and he kept us safe. And there’s no denying that. The great majority of Americans believe that.”

Dr. Barrett said everyone in the United States believes that George W. Bush deserves blame for the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“Ever since 9/11, many Americans, between one-third in some polls who say that the US government under Bush perpetrated the 9/11 attacks or intentionally let them happen in order to trigger war in the Middle East, and up to 90 percent of Americans in other polls, who say that they don’t really believe or fully believe the official story of 9/11, this issue has been a smoldering barrel of political dynamite,”

he said. “And now it’s smoldering a little bit harder, and it might just go off.”

“According to Jeb Bush, the brother of George Bush, Jeb being the apparent favorite candidate to win the Republican nomination for president, at least until Trump emerged, Jeb is now on the defensive, arguing that his brother George W. Bush was not responsible and there’s no blame for the 9/11 attacks,”

he added.

“Of course, this is an issue that Jeb cannot possibly be a win on, because no matter how you analyze the 9/11 attacks, whether you’ve done the full investigation using alternative sources, such as the magisterial work of Dr. David Ray Griffin, to learn that in fact the 9/11 attacks were not a surprise attack by a foreign enemy, they were in fact an inside job, a spectacular public relations stunt designed to create a neoconservative policy coup d’etat and launch a series of wars that would primarily benefit Israel. But whether you’ve done the search and figure that out or not, you have to admit that Bush was clearly responsible for 9/11 even if he was not actively complicit in this coup d’etat,”

Dr. Barrett noted.

“And even if you refuse to admit that it was a coup d’etat, it’s obvious that Bush should be blamed for what happened,” he stated.

The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.

They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.

 “In August of 2001, George W. Bush received the president’s daily briefing from the CIA, and it was headlined, ‘Bin Laden determined to attack the United States’. Bush whipped his neck around and angrily screamed, ‘Well, you’ve covered your ass now,’”

Dr. Barrett said.

“Of course, the ungenerous interpretation of this is that Bush knew full well that plans were proceeding apace for the big public relations event in September, and he did not appreciate the CIA briefer covering his posterior while passing the buck up to the president,”

he added.

 “The other interpretation would be that Bush is just such a complete fool and idiot that his outburst had no real meaning, and he should be blamed for 9/11 not as a complicit perpetrator, or someone who intentionally knew it was coming and let it happen, but rather someone whose incompetence was so overwhelming that somehow he caused the entire military defense system of the United States to have an unprecedented collapse,”

he continued.

The American scholar went on to say that “the bottom line here is that it’s obvious to everyone in the United States that George W. Bush deserves blame for 9/11.

“The only question is whether because he was insanely incompetent and somehow magically projected his grotesque incompetence on the rest of the government and then saw everyone who was incompetent get promoted or was it something much, much worse. But the reality is it was much, much worse,”

he emphasized.

“And if this political dynamite bomb goes off, it’s not just going to take out the Bush family, which has been the most corrupt organized crime family in America running the drug dealings at the CIA, among other things, but it’s going to take down the whole political system as we know it today, and possibly going to take down the US as a global empire,”

he observed.

“That’s one reason everybody in the US here is afraid to open up this can of worms, but that actually would be a very good thing; nothing better could possibly happen to the planet than for this can of worms to get opened, and for the US empire to be taken down, and for something more in line with the ideals of America’s founding fathers to rise up out of the ashes,”

Dr. Barrett concluded.

Times articles, commentaries and editorials feature all propaganda all the time, managed news misinformation and Big Lies, suppressing hard truths on issues mattering most – especially on war and peace.

It notoriously supports US imperial lawlessness, in lockstep with every war of aggression Washington wages, perpetuating the myth about humanitarian intervention – in Syria and Iraq claiming its air campaign aims to defeat ISIS and other terrorist elements.

Its latest article headlines “US and Iraqi Forces Take Offensive Against ISIS on Several Fronts,” saying “increased American air power” is aiding Iraqi forces put “pressure on the jihadists on multiple fronts.”

The usual unnamed source is one or more US officials, devoid of credibility. Since US warplanes began bombing Iraq in June 2014, then Syria in September last year, allegedly targeting ISIS, their forces made extensive gains in both countries, controlling more territory with greater numbers of heavily armed fighters.

In three weeks of Russia’s Syrian campaign, ISIS elements are being systematically routed, their weapons, munitions, above-and-below-ground facilities, command and control centers, and will to fight significantly degraded and destroyed.

How is this possible? Are US pilots inept? Are they poorly trained? Is US technology deficient? Is the Pentagon unable to locate ISIS targets to destroy them – what Russia’s campaign does effectively!

Putin’s righteous mission is defeating terrorism. He says what me means and means what he says, explaining ISIS and likeminded elements are “recruiting militants and continue doing so in many countries, unfortunately including Russia and CIS countries.”

He knows Washington’s dirty hands are involved, using imported death squads earlier in Libya, currently in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, intending to send them to Russia and Central Asia – to instigate violence, instability and turmoil like in all US direct and proxy war theaters.

Putin wisely intends defeating the threat at its source – quashing US plans, undermining its imperial agenda, challenging Washington for the first time in memory, making it very clear he won’t tolerate doing to Russia and CIS allies what it’s done throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and  elsewhere.

He changed the dynamic decisively – in full compliance with international law, unlike illegal US operations. “Russia is ready to adequately and effectively respond to the terrorist threat and any other challenges,” wherever they threaten its national security, he said.

“It is crucially important to bring to light the links of the Russian-based militants with the international terror groups and their patrons” – meaning, of course, Washington and its rogue allies.

Russian operations in Syria since September destroyed over 500 ISIS targets, severely hampering their ability to fight, enabling Syrian ground forces to achieve significant gains, liberating one village after another.

US airstrikes in Syria and Iraq (after over a year of operations in both countries) destroyed zero ISIS targets. Again, it deserves asking: How is this possible?

Because US warplanes target Syrian and Iraqi infrastructure, not ISIS, supporting its fighters on the ground, aiding their aggression and atrocities in both countries, using them as proxy foot soldiers – what the New York Times and other media scoundrels never explain, suppressing this vital hard truth, perpetuating the myth about Washington’s war on ISIS.

“Progress has been slow despite increased supporting fire from American air operations,” said The Times, “according to the Pentagon,” a notorious lying machine like The Times.

“Progress” is the way US officials want it, aiding ISIS, systematically destroying Iraqi and Syrian infrastructure -including an Aleppo power station days earlier, causing a major blackout, what US media never report, claiming only ISIS targets are hit, repeating official Big Lies, willfully deceiving the public.

The self-styled “newspaper of record” is a national disgrace. The same holds for all other major Western media sources – a collective lying machine.

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.

Image: An aerial view shows No. 4 (front L), No. 3 (front R), No. 2 (rear L) and No. 1 reactor buildings at Kansai Electric Power Co.’s Takahama nuclear power plant in Takahama town, Fukui prefecture, in this photo taken by Kyodo November 27, 2014. © Kyodo / Reuters

In the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power meltdown following the tsunami of March 11, 2011, the international community has totally failed in keeping the public properly informed and protected from the fallout.

Canada’s Liberals Sweep to Power on Phony Anti-austerity Vow

World Bank Report Challenges Notions of Declining Poverty in Africa

By Abayomi Azikiwe, October 20 2015

Despite the reports for the last several years that significant declines in poverty have taken place in sub-Saharan Africa, a recently-released World Bank study indicates that despite “growth” the actual number of people living in poverty on the continent has increased by 100 million over the last fifteen years.

Jerusalem Chaos Is a Warning of Things to Come

By Jonathan Cook, October 20 2015

Among Palestinians and Israelis, the recent upsurge in violence has been variously described as the children’s, lone-wolf, Jerusalem and smartphone intifadas. Each describes a distinguishing feature of this round of clashes.

‘Caught on Camera’: Extrajudicial Killings of Palestinians

By Annie Robbins, October 20 2015

A new report summarizing Israel’s Arbitrary Killings and its System of Structural Violence was released by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor at a press conference in Geneva on Friday. The release included the following video, “Caught on Camera: Israel’s extrajudicial killings,” illustrating the killings of Palestinian civilians involved in political protests during the last two weeks.

An agreement between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and several coal sector firms has resulted in the end of a strike involving thousands of employees which lasted over a week.

Mining companies including Anglo, Glencore and Exxaro Resources Ltd. presented a revised two-year deal on Oct. 9.

Further changes to the deal were made on October 12. The agreement is for an extra 750 rand ($56) to 1,000 rand monthly, and will be paid retroactively to June. All workers returned to their jobs on Wednesday October 14.

NUM, which represents 72 percent of the 17,000 employees covered by the wage deal, had been demanding increases of as much as 14 percent for its members.

The bosses and unions began conciliation talks after reaching a deadlock in negotiations in August. The strike was the first related to wage negotiations in the coal sector since 2011.

Financial Crisis in South Africa Linked to Decline in Mining

Several factors have contributed to the current downturn in the overall economy in South Africa one of which is the problems that have developed over the last two decades in the mining industry. The mining of gold, diamonds, coal, iron ore and platinum turned the racial capitalist state into the largest industrial center on the African continent.

Other industries such as manufacturing would have never reached significant levels without labor intensive mining. Nonetheless, with the organization of the majority African mineworkers during the 1980s leading to the founding of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which became a key ally of the African National Congress (ANC) even under the former apartheid system, shifted the character of the relationship between labor and capital. The NUM demanded higher wages from mine owners and were in a position to shut down production as was done in major work stoppages during the 1980s.

The struggle for better wages and working conditions were firmly linked to the demand for an end to legalized racism and colonialism. Since the ANC took power in South Africa in 1994, there has been tremendous downsizing in the South African mining industry.

Many gold mines have been closed and production dominance shifted to other geo-political regions in Africa, China, Australia, the United States, Canada and Latin America. Prior to the first decade of the 21^st century, South Africa was the largest producer of gold internationally. This situation has changed dramatically over the last decade.

Technologies within the South African mining industry are becoming more mechanized due to what owners say are rising costs of production. The militancy of mineworkers over the last three decades has placed pressure on the owners who are always seeking to increase their profit margins.

A recent article written by Declan Vogt of the University of Witwatersrand School of Mining Engineering says that “Our deep level gold and platinum mines are in trouble. At today’s prices, most are not profitable. There are many explanations for the high cost: mines are getting deeper, infrastructure is old, and energy and labor costs exceed inflation. Given that we have little control over the price of the commodities, the only solution is improved productivity. (Mineweb.com, Oct. 18)

This same article goes on to note “In many other industries, technology has enabled huge strides in productivity. Even in South Africa, almost all underground coal mining is now mechanized.”

Consequently, other methods of reducing labor costs, namely massive layoffs, increased workloads and the cutting of real wages are currently underway in South Africa. Even in the platinum sector, which mines the overwhelming majority of the strategic metal globally, there have been over 10,000 layoffs in the last two years.

Since the unrest at Marikana in the Northwest Province during 2012, the platinum sector has experienced major changes. Owners have threatened to retrench up to 35,000 workers while the ANC government has pressured the capitalists not to engage in deeper job cuts.

Monique Mathys, an economist at the South African Chamber of Mines said “Work stoppages, which reduce mining volumes, reduce profitability. Reduced profitability results in companies needing to restructure, and to look at modernization options that improve profitability and ensure sustainability of the operations.” (Financial Times, May 25, 2015)

Workers Pay for Ownership Decisions

However, the mining firms have reaped billions in profits from the exploitation of African labor over the last century-and-a-half. A leading firm in the industry, Anglo American PLC, was initially formed by German émigré to London and South Africa, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, along with the U.S. bank J.P. Morgan & Co. Capital was raised from British and U.S. sources, and therefore naming the firm as such.

Today when workers are demanding a greater return on the productivity of their labor, the owners are seeking ways to undermine their rights to a decent wage and overall living standard. Without the militant organizing and activism of the South African working class, the ANC would not have been able to gain a majority within the non-racial government which took over in 1994 and therefore cannot ignore the plight of union members in the struggle against the bosses.

Ngoako Ramatlhodi, South Africa’s mines minister, said in May 2015 that the ANC government was “alarmed at the rate at which retrenchments have been taking place in the industry”. (Financial Times, May 25, 2015)

Nonetheless, the government is not willing to take control of the mining industry, nationalizing it under workers’ control as a means to halt the retrenchments and redirect the production of minerals based upon the interests of the laboring class. Such a series of measures would prove popular among the masses but would prompt a response less than positive among the mine owners, international financial institutions and western governments.

Nevertheless in spite of these dramatic changes, South Africa is still ranked as the fifth largest gold producer. But the sector has been consistently shedding jobs since the 1990s. Over the last two decades the number of people employed across the mining industry in general has declined precipitously from about 800,000 to below 500,000.

At the end of the final quarter of 2014, gold mines employed about 119,100 people, down from 142,000 in 2012. Platinum sites had 188,400 jobs in 2014, a decrease from a high of nearly 199,200 in 2012, according to the Chamber of Mines’ statistics. The Iron ore sector employed 21,800 people in 2014, a decrease from 23,400 in 2012.

In the platinum sector much blame can also be apportioned to the owners who over-produced during the commodities super cycle in the 2000s, and consequently have been faced with ongoing weak prices and rising costs. As in the capitalist system around the world, it is the workers that must bear the brunt of mistakes made by the owners and their executives.

The reduction in commodity prices has resulted in a myriad of financial problems internationally, particularly in the so-called “emerging economies.” Western capitalist states in Europe and North America are concerned by the increasing independent efforts of states such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) which has proposed the formation of an alternative global lending institution that could challenge the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Imperialist spending on defense and the continuing bailout of the banks based in the advanced capitalist states also drains resources that could be reinvested into infra-structural projects aimed at re-building the cities, improving public services, social services, scientific research and quality education. However, it will take a movement of the working class, farmers and the nationally oppressed to reverse the current course of economic policy which places the growth in profits as the primary aim of the ruling class.

Western civilization is in collapse. Every public and private institution in every western country, with the sole exception of Iceland, is corrupt. Government at every level is corrupt. The courts and judicial systems are corrupt. Justice is nonexistent. The financial systems are corrupt. The media is corrupt. The corrupt corporations continue to maximize their profits by destroying the environment and by replacing domestic workers with foreign ones. The income and wealth continues to gravitate to the One Percent.

Even sports, which once consisted of games played for fun, are corrupt. Participants in every competitive sport have to be drug tested, whether a skier, a bobsledder, a football, baseball, basketball, or hockey player, a boxer, a bicyclist, a distance runner, a sprinter, a high jumper, a pole vaulter, or whatever. Sports were corrupted by money. The rewards for success are so high that people sacrifice their personal integrity and cheat in order to obtain the money, just as government officials and regulators betray their constituencies in order to be rewarded by special interests who profit at the expense of society.

But not all corruption is financial or money-motivated. Spiritual corruption is even more dangerous as it erodes the character of people. Once people’s concerns do not go beyond themselves and their own feelings, a culture is dead. There has always been betrayal between husbands and wives, but not on the mass scale of today when vows play second fiddle to one’s personal desires. Another way of saying this is that keeping one’s vow or one’s word is no longer an important desire or contributor to self-esteem.

Consider something as ordinary as sexual relations between the genders. Sexual intercourse is one of the most common activities in which people engage. Yet there are those who go up the wall when the subject is mentioned. The prudery is silly, because the sexual relationship between a man and a woman is the foundation of society. Civilizations have protected the relationship in marriage, the basis for procreation and enculturation that perpetuates the society. What we see today is a growing separation of the sexual relationship from its social purpose and the loss of parental control over children to the state and outside forces. Indoctrination replaces enculturation.

It is dangerous for a society to neglect erosion in its basis. The subject is too large for a column. This article deals only with the disassociation of the romantic element, with its implication of love and commitment, from sex. An article in Cosmopolitan, a women’s magazine, testifies to female liberation from love and commitment by casual sex:

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a47604/best-things-about-having-a-vacation-boyfriend/

I remember when sex was romantic. Apparently those days are gone. Today sex is about two people (or more) getting each other off. Sex has been reduced to an orgasmic act. The Ashley Madison website, where wives and husbands sign up for extramarital sex with strangers, testifies to the purely orgasmic character of sex today.

Another article in Cosmopolitan explains sex as “fun. If it weren’t we would never bother leaving the house to meet new people to have sex with and we’d all just masturbate instead.”

Years ago in a waiting room I picked up a copy of Cosmopolitan. The cover story was “How to get your man hard and keep him coming back for more.” At least it was normal sex, if denatured. But we have moved on. The October 9 digital issue of Cosmopolitan has an article by a “former escort and current dominatrix who specializes in balloon fetish play.” She calls herself “an adult play facilitator” and “the type of work I do is much broader than just BDSM or fetishistic type stuff. I specialize in helping people to open this part of their sexual selves, and be playful and creative.” She puts them inside giant balloons. Balloons are “erotic and playful” and “a very friendly catalyst.”

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a47457/i-put-people-into-balloons-as-a-sexual-fetish/

Playboy magazine has announced that it is ceasing publication of photos of nude women. The ubiquity of pornography has destroyed the thrill and excitment of the female body and made such images “passé.”

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/13/playboy-magazine-to-stop-publishing-pictures-of-naked-women Men are being desensitized, and the female body is losing arousal power. Perhaps this explains why there is a demand for a dominatrix to put couples inside giant baloons as a method of stimulating sexual arousal. The role of the imagination in stimulating male arousal is apparently a thing of the past. Men have seen too many images of women engaged in sexual activity.

Women experience “the gift of orgasm” more readily through clitoral stimulation than penetration. To faciliate oral sex, women have abandoned pubic hair. They look like little girls with big boobs. Perhaps this “innocent” look has contributed to the perverted sexual interest in child porn and child sex trafficking.

Feminism taught women promiscuity so that no man wants to marry them, because so many of the wedding guests have already slept with the bride.

Promiscuity brought female empowerment. The woman can be on top and set the pace, while the man restrains himself by thinking about distracting subjects. If he can last long enough, she can get off and think he is a fantastic lover.

The emotional side of sex with its components of love and commitment, if still present, is in the background. Sex is about pleasurable physical feelings, which is why we leave “the house to met new people to have sex with.” This is a bigger change than people realize. The young don’t even know what has been lost. Today a girlfriend is a convenience. You don’t have to go to a brothel.

People still get married, but the percentage is declining for economic and divorce court reasons and because of the availability of sex outside marriage. Moreover, in the marital bedroom there is no dominatrix with a giant balloon to help to get you off. Today the people most interested in marriage are homosexuals, lesbians, and transgendered. Marriage is a way of legitimizing themselves and what would once have been called perverted sexual preferences.

Economic adversity has brought older women increasing competition from younger women, who advertise their availability to older men who have the financial resources to help them with college tuition, student loan debt, car payments, utility bills and apartment rents. Perhaps it is this development that has led to the websites where older women advertise that all they want is one night stands. Younger women move away from young men because the men have no financial resources. Perhaps this is the reason for the enormous amount of youthful male homosexuality, a sexual preference that in my day was either very well hidden or as rare as a unicorn.

If the point is simply to get off, it doesn’t matter who or what you do it with. A robotic sex doll has been created that talks dirty, has simulated female genitals, and is programed with sexual movements. A male sex robot can’t be far behind.

Perhaps Americans will cease procreating, which might save the planet and its remaining animal and plant life from habitat destruction.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/extinction-of-animal-life-on-planet-earth-exceptional-loss-of-biodiversity/5481544

Who’s to say the world wouldn’t be a better place without us.

 We are waging war on terrorism even as we embody terrorism. No wonder we seem sometimes to be at war with ourselves, and have been for most of the 21st century….. No American under 12 has Lived in a Country at Peace…whatever the U.S. government knows, or thinks it knows, is not widely shared with most of its citizens….. The American Enemies List Is Decided Anonymously and Secretly. William Boardman (“America a country at war with an Illusion”).

Wars and societal conflicts do not end with political statements. The mankind is fraught with painful experiences of the unwanted Two World Wars. The perpetrators escape the consequences pushing humanity into unthinkable disasters generations after generations. A war of words and conveniently arrived erotic hypothesis of the few sadistic warlords on complex global issues are draining out the positive energies, time and opportunities for peaceful dialogue towards conflict prevention and conflict management.

If Israel and the PLO had moral and intellectual capacity to talk and reconcile, the killings and stabbing of innocents could have been averted by ending the occupation and coming to terms with the two state solution. While Israelis and Palestinians live in open prisons of mutual fear and hatred, their leaders compete for numbers in opinions polls and are unable to provide proactive leadership role for conflict resolution. Likewise, the sectarian conflicts inSyriaandIraqrequire moral and intellectual foresights and creative strategies to strike peaceful conclusion. Ironically,America,Russia and a few West Europeans are competing in bombing the civilians and causing unthinkable losses of life and destruction of human infrastructures across the Arab world.

Is the UN just a Spectator?

Under the UN Charter, the member states are prohibited to intervene in the internal affairs of another member state. The hard lessons learned from the 2^nd WW are flagrantly ignored by the leading superpowers. None of the leading aggressors care about the UN principles and obligations to support global security and peace.Russia and theUS and other hired allies are bombingSyria andIraq and other areas of the Arabian heartland. The displacement of people and forcible expulsion of civilian population is reminiscent of the Palestinian expulsion in 1948. The continuous bombing ofSyria andIraq is destroying the environment and the productive earth for ever.

Do the Superpowers care about human life and sustainability of futuristic generations? The ISIL excuse is self- deceptive and on paper only. At issue is the extension of military operations to safeguard the Bashar Al- Assad dictatorship inSyria and to further disintegrate the Arab states adjoining Syria and Iraq.

What should have been alarming to the UN Security Council is not even discussed in the current sessions. Ostensibly, UNO is powerless without the participation of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Ironically, how irrational is the systematic built-in inequality whereby the UN Charter calls for equality of all the member states. Large scale forcible displacement of refugees and unprotection of civilian population, sectarian warmongering and daily aerial bombings ofSyria andIraq draw no challenge from the UN leadership – the body responsible for global peace and security.

Why the UN Security Council cannot intervene and stop the emerging bloodbath between Israel and Palestine? The UN is obliged to workout two states solution betweenIsrael andPalestine. The call is urgent to have peacemakers on the ground to restore normalization of human affairs when animosity is inflicting inhuman policies and behaviors. What if the US and Britain come out of the political cynicism and make a genuine call to end the occupation and arrange the two states co-existence? Has the UNO been a futile experiment in modern history? Has the UNO been just a window dressing to deceive and destroy the mankind all over the world? Is it the right time to plan and initiate another international organization made up of the citizens of the globe and responsible to the people of the globe rather than hypothetical phenomenon of the states?

Warriors are Competing to Inflict Maximum Deaths and Destruction on the Arab People and Habitats

Across America and the EU political and economic powerhouses, common citizens were led to believe that America and EU as one powerful group of influential agents possessing unchallenging strength in global power and intelligence hub, not necessarily marginalized by Russia or any other countries in the world. IfRussiawould dare to challenge the American-EU strategic psyche, the invincible armies would rush to challenge the Russian might and interference. Courageously, President Putin has marched into Syria and Iraq to counteract theUSpolicies and operations.

If this is not humiliating to theUS and the EU military stance, what else could be defined as an insult to common sense? Could President Obama and the Europeans accept Putin as winner before losing the face in a politically sensitive global culture? If this is not shameful, how else could they lead when they are victims of their own obsession and a failure on the competing war front? It was widely held that after the collapse of the former USSR, American would not tolerate any rising challenge to its principal objective of strategic hegemony all over the globe.

How much more America and its allies could lose once Russia achieves its policy aims in just few weeks comparing to what theUSand coalition could not attain in five years. One obvious outcome is clear that Western strategic interests are not at risk as long as deaths and destruction are inflicted on the Arab people and their habitats. This is what facilitates the meeting of minds to which the Arab leaders could never understand. They are willfully an object of annihilation sooner than later. Global politics is fast becoming a chronic sickness embracing heinous crimes and political wickedness to conduct international affairs.

Felicity Arbuthnot (“Syria: Russian Intervention Exposes Coalition Lies.” Global Research: 10/7/2015), is an award winning international journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in theGreatCity series for World Almanac books, and she provides a descriptive imagery of the prevalent realities:

A mirror image of Basra, Iraq, exactly ten years ago, September 2005, when British Special Forces, dressed in Arab clothing, were arrested by Iraqi police in an explosive laden car. Had the car detonated, “Iraqi insurgents” would, of course, have been blamed. The British military demolished the police station in order to free the would-be bombers.  How many were not caught and “insurgency” for which Iraqis were blamed, killed, tortured, was actually “made in Britain” and the US, as Syria now?……. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is anything but selective about the head chopping, culture erasing monsters besieging Syria – CIA trained or not – stating last week: “If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it’s a terrorist, right?  Syria, from lies, to heartbreak, to cultural destruction has become a microcosm of the demented, ridiculous “war on terror.” The lies and subterfuge to justify the horror have become more desperate but only the most obtuse can avoid noticing that terrorists R US.

How to Rethink of Wars and Stop Insanity against the Mankind?

To dispel pride and prejudice, the global community prefers a new approach to tackle the current political problems. When facts of life warrant a change, concerned intelligent leaders must find navigational change. The Arab leaders are victims of their own authoritarian obsession enhanced by militarization of the region and being puppets to the Western policy aims. Their political incapacity is joined by complacency, and the outcome is the worst combination of loss of human life, foreign aggression and destruction of the environment. This has impact on degeneration and failure to resolve the Palestineconflict with Israel.  The oil-generated economic prosperity was used by the West to destroy the inner consciousness, moral and intellectual heritage of the Arab people.

Their egoistic instinct facilitated foreign interventions to undermine the societal peace and sectarian harmony. Sigmund Freud (Civilization and its Discontents, 1930) noted it correctly:

“the inclination to aggression is an original self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.”

The aggression of wars goes on unabated across the Arab Middle East. Those claiming to be concerned with hydrocarbon emissions and greenhouse effects on the planet must realize that they are committing heinous crimes against the humanity by bombing and using chemical weapons inSyria andIraq. The need is urgent to establish a new global organization of the people, by the people and for the people. Such an effort should be a rational approach to replace the UNO debating club. This should provide hope and optimism to the present and future generations to imply means and strategies befitting to the aspirations of the global humanity. All wars have ripple effects for the mankind.

There is growing trend of “Big Thinking” in American politics and policies. Throughout its evolving history of over two centuries, theUS government has been continuously engaged in more than 220 wars. What a tragedy and loss to human thinking, intellect and values – Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Shakespeare and Bertrand Russell and their souls put to tormenting torture – the treatment they did not deserve from George Bush, Barrack Obama, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and Rumsfeld and so many others full of embittered conscious and cancerous ego to annihilate the mankind.

Confronting the major paradoxes of history as Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History), described warriors as dreamers devoid of moral and intellectual imagination… when they come close to stagnation they jump to irrational outbursts and conclusions about the facts of life. Wrong people, glued to wrong thinking, do the wrong things without any rational sense of time, people’s interest and history. If the human nature is in part wicked and in part foolish, how can human beings be prevented from suffering of the result of their own wickedness and folly?”

Robert Briffault (The Making of Humanity, London, 1918), Professor at Cambridge University, the 20th century proactive scholar offers a rational context to the sadistic warriors of the 21^st century:

The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against

it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in

their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Academic Publishing Germany, May 2012.