This video shows Israeli police and right-wing extremists violently attacking and assaulting Palestinians who had gathered outside the hospital where a Palestinian hunger striker is gravely ill.
Flag-waving Israeli extremists sing songs celebrating and calling for the slaughter of Palestinians, especially children.
As Allan struggled for his life, his supporters arrived aboard buses from Jerusalem, Jaffa and the north to hold a vigil outside Barzilai Medical Center where he is being treated and detained.
“Allan come and see, your people are supporting you openly,” the supporters call out in the video before they are attacked.
An Israeli police officer shouts through a megaphone: “This is an illegal gathering.”
Police assault protestors, dragging them away and confiscating Palestinian flags, and use a water cannon and pepper spray.
Genocidal songs
Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, who tries to intervene to prevent the police violence, says: “The police are beating people, young women and men.”
At the same time, extreme right-wing Israeli Jews can be seen assaulting protestors without police intervention and indeed with police protection.
“Zoabi, you are whore! You are a terrorist,” one of the right-wing demonstrators shouts at her. The mob then starts to chant “Zoabi is a terrorist! Death to terrorists!
Many openly declare support for Meir Kahane, the founder of the violent anti-Palestinian organization Kach.
They chant anti-Arab slogans including a song celebrating the mass killing of children in Gaza: “Why is there no studying in Gaza? Because there are no children left there.”
“Gaza is a cemetery,” they sing, and “Death to reporters!”
These same genocidal songs were heard on Israel’s streets during last summer’s 51-day assault on Gaza that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children.
Assaults and arrests
The extremists have been present at the hospital for a week, assaulting visitors and supporters of Allan.
“They don’t even let us gather in one place to demonstrate, to send a political message that we support Muhammad Allan,” Zoabi observes of the police ban. “A conqueror acts like a conquerer, so the oppressed need to act like the oppressed.”
Eight activists were arrested, at least four of whom required hospital treatment due to injuries from police violence, according to the photography collective ActiveStills, which produced the above video.
Allan, a 33-year-old lawyer from the occupied West Bank village of Einabus, recently fell into a coma for four days. On Tuesday he regained consciousness and, still gravely ill, vowed to continue his hunger strike until Israel frees him.
Video by Keren Manor, Faiz Abu Rmeleh and Oren Ziv of the ActiveStills collective.
There is a new entrant in the already crowded field of Israeli Lobby funded groups opposed to an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. It is the “wounded warriors” and their families denouncing the perfidious Persians. The first salvo was fired on August 4th in a letter to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post from the daughter of an Army Lieutenant Colonel killed in Iraq by “Iranian weapons,” who concluded that “we are already at war with Iran.”
After the letter ads began to appear in television markets where congressmen considered to be vulnerable to pressure from Israel’s friends were located. The ads were produced by a group called “Veterans Against an Iran Deal,” whose executive director is Michael Pregent, a former adviser to General David Petraeus who is also an “Expert” affiliated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spin off. The group has a website which claims that “the Iranian regime murdered and maimed thousands of Americans” but there is no indication who exactly supports it and is providing funding or what kind of following it has.
The group’s first ad featured as a spokesman a retired army Staff Sergeant named Robert Bartlett. In the video, Bartlett, whose face bears the scars resulting from being on the receiving end of an improvised explosive device in Iraq, claims he was “blown up by an Iranian bomb.” In addition to blaming Iran for providing Iraqi insurgents with the weapons that were used to maim him and kill his colleagues he also tells how Iranians would “kidnap kids” and kill them in front of their parents. Per Bartlett, those who deal with Iran will have “blood on their hands” and will be responsible for funding Iranian terror.
It is obviously easy to sympathize with Bartlett for the suffering he has endured as cannon fodder in one of America’s pointless wars, but a little introspection on his part might be in order. Iran did not invade a non-threatening Iraq in 2003. Bartlett’s own government did that. And the bad guys who took aim at Bartlett? They were people defending their homes and families against an invader and lacking tanks they had to resort to homemade weapons. If Sergeant Bartlett really wants to blame someone for what happened to him he would be much better advised to point his finger at ex-President George W. Bush and his close advisers.
Bartlett’s anger is nevertheless understandable, but his claim that he was maimed by Iranian provided weapons should not go unchallenged. In actual fact, it is a lie. In 2005 the Bush Administration began to claim that Iran had been “interfering” in Iraq. The claim, rarely backed up by an substance, was based on suppositions about Tehran’s likely interests regarding its predominantly Shi’ite neighbor and it was little more than an excuse to explain the persistence and intensity of Iraqi resistance to the American invasion.
Sophisticated roadside bombs using shaped charges, initially referred to as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and subsequently as Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs), first appeared in Iraq in the summer of 2004. Initial reports on the weapon in June 2005, stated that it was being used by Sunni insurgents and was likely produced by ordnance experts from the disbanded Iraqi Army. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had a large army with a sophisticated if limited ability to produce some weapons in its own armories. When the army was foolishly disbanded by the Coalition Provisional Authority, skilled workers who had been employed in the weapons shops were made redundant and took with them the knowledge to make any number of improvised weapons using the materiel that remained in Iraq’s arms storage depots.
The first suggestion that Iran might be involved with such weapons in an attempt to destabilize the situation in Iraq appeared on August 4th, 2005, in a report statingthat US soldiers had “intercepted” shaped charges “smuggled into northeastern Iraq only last week.” Shaped charges were the most successful weapons being used against the so-called Multi-National Force headed by the U.S. As northeastern Iraq borders Iran one version of the story stated that “it could not have happened without the full consent of the Iranian government.”
The indictment of Iran as the source of weapons being used by insurgents continued and intensified as the security situation in Iraq deteriorated. Some media coverage attributed the killing of hundreds of American soldiers to Iranian supplied weapons because any death by EFP was immediately attributed to Iran. In spite of the lack of any solid evidence, the largely neoconservative supporters of pre-emptive action against Iran stated specifically that Iran was “killing American soldiers” through its provision of sophisticated weaponry. A nearly hysterical progress report given to Congress by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on April 8, 2008 went even farther, claiming that Iran was responsible for most of the violence occurring in Iraq.
But the argument about Iranian involvement in Iraq was itself logically inconsistent, something that Crocker and Petraeus should have understood. The Iraqi insurgency in the period 2004-2006 was largely Sunni and hostile to Iran. That the Iranians would be supplying the Sunnis or that the Sunnis would have sought such aid was implausible.
The first rule of verification is who, what, when, where, why. While there continued to be numerous unsourced reports suggesting that Iran was supplying weapons to militias there was not a single bit of evidence identifying weapons that were unambiguously traced to Iran on a given day and at a given location that were used to kill Americans. Nor was there ever a credible report on how many alleged Iranian manufactured weapons were actually found in Iraq. Iranian weapons for the export trade were at the time relatively freely available in Asian secondary arms markets. If only a few weapons of uncertain provenance were found it would be difficult to imagine a systematic government supported attempt at smuggling in arms.
A chain of custody whereby the weapons can be seen to move from the Iranian government through channels controlled by that same government into the hands of insurgents and militias with the intent to use the weapons against the occupation forces is a sine qua non for claiming Tehran’s interference. As the United States controlled the ground inside Iraq smuggling mechanisms would have been identifiable using intelligence and police resources, even if the Iranians were attempting to conceal the process. This is particularly true as linking Iran to the weapons flow would have been a high priority objective for the multinational force and for the reconstituted Iraqi police.
As Sergeant Bartlett notes, the weapon of choice for the insurgency was indeed a “bomb,” the EFP, which was frequently deployed along roadsides against American armor. The EFP is very simple to make. It consists of a concave copper disk that is placed at the top of a tube. At the bottom of the tube is a military grade plastic explosive charge attached to a detonator. The detonator causes the explosive to go off, the heat and explosive power turning the copper disk into a molten jet of metal that can penetrate as much as eight inches of steel.
The claim that EFPs deployed in Iraq originated in Iran accepted in part that the EFP was actually a sophisticated weapon that could not be produced by Iraqis without Iranian assistance but there are problems with that assumption. The American military knew perfectly well that the Iraqis were more than capable of making the weapon because both U.S. and British forces captured machine shops assembling such devices. The weapon can, in fact, be made by any reasonably competent machine shop that has a metal lathe and access to explosives. U.S. Army Special Forces training manuals that provided instructions on making and using shaped charges were available on the internet at the time of the Iraq War. They have since been deleted but the information is still available online.
The often repeated charge that Iran had been responsible for 170 deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, leading inevitably to the still to be heard “they are already at war with us” rhetoric, comes from assuming that every EFP used in Iraq was Iranian in origin and that Tehran was complicit in providing the weapons or their components. There is no actual evidence for either assertion. As noted above, the EFP material could be produced locally without any Iranian government involvement in the process.
A related specific claim that as many as fifty Iranian Revolutionary Guards were on the loose in southern Iraq equipping Shi’ite militias with EFPs and training them in their use was a media invention that was never actually verified but became part of the folklore of war in Iraq. One assumes that the US and Iraqi authorities would have made a major effort to detain such individuals, which suggests that their existence was completely apocryphal.
Sergeant Bartlett, given all of the above, I hate to disillusion you, but there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran did anything to you either directly or indirectly. I don’t know if anyone is paying you to come forward to denounce an agreement reached by our president with Iran but your timing appears to be coordinated with the much broader well financed effort to denigrate the Iranians in every way possible. Your expressed hatred for a nation with which the United States has never been at war might only serve to bring about yet another conflict in the Middle East, quite likely far more catastrophic and pointless than the military intervention that maimed you and killed your buddies. Do you really think that is a good idea?
The costs of war, both direct and indirect, are so enormous that they are almost beyond comprehension. Globally, the institution of war interferes seriously with the use of tax money for constructive and peaceful purposes.
Today, despite the end of the Cold War, the world spends roughly 1.7 trillion (i.e. 1.7 million million) US dollars each year on armaments. This colossal flood of money could have been used instead for education, famine relief, development of infrastructure, or on urgently needed public health measures.
The World Health Organization lacks funds to carry through an antimalarial program on as large a scale as would be desirable, but the entire program could be financed for less that our military establishments spend in a single day. Five hours of world arms spending is equivalent to the total cost of the 20-year WHO campaign that resulted in the eradication of smallpox. For every 100,000 people in the world, there are 556 soldiers, but only 85 doctors. Every soldier costs an average of $20,000 per year, while the average spent on education is only $380 per school-aged child. With a diversion of funds consumed by three weeks of military spending, the world could create a sanitary water supply for all its people, thus eliminating the cause of almost half of all human illness.
A new drug-resistant form of tuberculosis has recently become widespread in Asia and in the former Soviet Union. In order to combat this new and highly dangerous form of tuberculosis and to prevent its spread, WHO needs $500 million, an amount equivalent to 1.2 hours of world arms spending.
Today’s world is one in which roughly ten million children die every year from starvation or from diseases related to poverty. Besides this enormous waste of young lives through malnutrition and preventable disease, there is a huge waste of opportunities through inadequate education. The rate of illiteracy in the 25 least developed countries is 80%, and the total number of illiterates in the world is estimated to be 800 million. Meanwhile every 60 seconds the world spends $6.5 million on armaments.
It is plain that if the almost unbelievable sums now wasted on the institution of war were used constructively, most of the pressing problems of humanity could be solved, but today the world spends more than 20 times as much on war as it does on development.
Medical and psychological consequences; loss of life
While in earlier epochs it may have been possible to confine the effects of war mainly to combatants, in the 20th century the victims of war were increasingly civilians, and especially children. For example, according to Quincy Wright’s statistics, the First and Second World Wars cost the lives of 26 million soldiers, but the toll in civilian lives was much larger: 64 million.
Since the Second World War, despite the best efforts of the UN, there have been over 150 armed conflicts; and, if civil wars are included, there are on any given day an average of 12 wars somewhere in the world. In the conflicts in Indo-China, the proportion of civilian victims was between 80% and 90%, while in the Lebanese civil war some sources state that the proportion of civilian casualties was as high as 97%.
Civilian casualties often occur through malnutrition and through diseases that would be preventable in normal circumstances. Because of the social disruption caused by war, normal supplies of food, safe water and medicine are interrupted, so that populations become vulnerable to famine and epidemics.
According to UNICEF figures, 90% of the casualties of recent wars have been civilians, and 50% children. The organization estimates that in recent years, violent conflicts have driven 20 million children from their homes. They have become refugees or internally displaced persons within their own countries.
During the last decade 2 million children have been killed and 6 million seriously injured or permanently disabled as the result of armed conflicts, while 1 million children have been orphaned or separated from their families. Of the ten countries with the highest rates of death of children under five years of age, seven are affected by armed conflicts. UNICEF estimates that 300,000 child soldiers are currently forced to fight in 30 armed conflicts throughout the world. Many of these have been forcibly recruited or abducted.
Even when they are not killed or wounded by conflicts, children often experience painful psychological traumas: the violent death of parents or close relatives, separation from their families, seeing family members tortured, displacement from home, disruption of ordinary life, exposure to shelling and other forms of combat, starvation and anxiety about the future.
Human Rights Watch estimates that in 2001 there were 15 million refugees in the world, forced from their countries by war, civil and political conflict, or by gross violations of human rights. In addition, there were an estimated 22 million internally displaced persons, violently forced from their homes but still within the borders of their countries.
In 2001, 78% of all refugees came from ten areas: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Eritria, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia and Sudan. A quarter of all refugees are Palestinians, who make up the world’s oldest and largest refugee population. 45% of the world’s refugees have found sanctuaries in Asia, 30% in Africa, 19% in Europe and 5% in North America.
Refugees who have crossed an international border are in principle protected by Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms their right “to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”. In 1950 the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees was created to implement Article 14, and in 1951 the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted by the UN. By 2002 this legally binding treaty had been signed by 140 nations. However the industrialized countries have recently adopted a very hostile and restrictive attitude towards refugees, subjecting them to arbitrary arrests, denial of social and economic rights, and even forcible return to countries in which they face persecution.
The status of internally displaced persons is even worse than that of refugees who have crossed international borders. In many cases the international community simply ignores their suffering, reluctant to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states. In fact, the United Nations Charter is self-contradictory in this respect, since on the one hand it calls for non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, but on the other hand, people everywhere are guaranteed freedom from persecution by the Charter’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Most insurance policies have clauses written in fine print exempting companies from payment of damage caused by war. The reason for this is simple. The damage caused by war is so enormous that insurance companies could never come near to paying for it without going bankrupt.
We mentioned above that the world spends roughly a trillion dollars each year on preparations for war. A similarly colossal amount is needed to repair the damage to infrastructure caused by war. Sometimes this damage is unintended, but sometimes it is intentional.
During World War II, one of the main aims of air attacks by both sides was to destroy the industrial infrastructure of the opponent. This made some sense in a war expected to last several years, because the aim was to prevent the enemy from producing more munitions. However, during the Gulf War of 1990, the infrastructure of Iraq was attacked, even though the war was expected to be short. Electrical generating plants and water purification facilities were deliberately destroyed with the apparent aim of obtaining leverage over Iraq after the war.
In general, because war has such a catastrophic effect on infrastructure, it can be thought of as the opposite of development. War is the greatest generator of poverty.
Warfare during the 20th century has not only caused the loss of 175 million lives (primarily civilians) – it has also caused the greatest ecological catastrophes in human history. The damage takes place even in times of peace. Studies by Joni Seager, a geographer at the University of Vermont, conclude that “a military presence anywhere in the world is the single most reliable predictor of ecological damage”.
Modern warfare destroys environments to such a degree that it has been described as an “environmental holocaust.” For example, herbicides use in the Vietnam War killed an estimated 6.2 billion board-feet of hardwood trees in the forests north and west of Saigon, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Herbicides such as Agent Orange also made enormous areas of previously fertile land unsuitable for agriculture for many years to come. In Vietnam and elsewhere in the world, valuable agricultural land has also been lost because land mines or the remains of cluster bombs make it too dangerous for farming.
During the Gulf War of 1990, the oil spills amounted to 150 million barrels, 650 times the amount released into the environment by the notorious Exxon Valdez disaster. During the Gulf War an enormous number of shells made of depleted uranium were fired. When the dust produced by exploded shells is inhaled it often produces cancer, and it will remain in the environment of Iraq for decades.
Radioactive fallout from nuclear tests pollutes the global environment and causes many thousands of cases of cancer, as well as birth abnormalities. Most nuclear tests have been carried out on lands belonging to indigenou peoples. Agent Orange also produced cancer, birth abnormalities and other serious forms of illness both in the Vietnamese population and among the foreign soldiers fighting in Vietnam
As bad as conventional arms and conventional weapons may be, it is the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear war that poses the greatest threat to humanity. There are today roughly 16,000 nuclear warheads in the world. The total explosive power of the warheads that exist or that could be made on short notice is approximately equal to 500,000 Hiroshima bombs.
To multiply the tragedy of Hiroshima by a factor of half a million makes an enormous difference, not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively. Those who have studied the question believe that a nuclear catastrophe today would inflict irreversible damage on our civilization, genetic pool and environment.
Thermonuclear weapons consist of an inner core where the fission of uranium-235 or plutonium takes place. The fission reaction in the core is able to start a fusion reaction in the next layer, which contains isotopes of hydrogen. It is possible to add a casing of ordinary uranium outside the hydrogen layer, and under the extreme conditions produced by the fusion reaction, this ordinary uranium can undergo fission. In this way, a fission-fusion-fission bomb of almost limitless power can be produced.
For a victim of severe radiation exposure, the symptoms during the first week are nausea, vomiting, fever, apathy, delirium, diarrhoea, oropharyngeal lesions and leukopenia. Death occurs during the first or second week.
We can perhaps be helped to imagine what a nuclear catastrophe means in human terms by reading the words of a young university professor, who was 2,500 meters from the hypocenter at the time of the bombing of Hiroshima: “Everything I saw made a deep impression: a park nearby covered with dead bodies… very badly injured people evacuated in my direction… Perhaps most impressive were girls, very young girls, not only with their clothes torn off, but their skin peeled off as well. … My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about. … I had never seen anything which resembled it before, but I thought that should there be a hell, this was it.”
One argument that has been used in favor of nuclear weapons is that no sane political leader would employ them. However, the concept of deterrence ignores the possibility of war by accident or miscalculation, a danger that has been increased by nuclear proliferation and by the use of computers with very quick reaction times to control weapons systems.
Recent nuclear power plant accidents remind us that accidents frequently happen through human and technical failure, even for systems which are considered to be very “safe.” We must also remember the time scale of the problem. To assure the future of humanity, nuclear catastrophe must be avoided year after year and decade after decade. In the long run, the safety of civilization cannot be achieved except by the abolition of nuclear weapons, and ultimately the abolition of the institution of war.
It is generally agreed that a full-scale nuclear war would have disastrous In 1985, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War received the Nobel Peace Prize. IPPNW had been founded in 1980 by six physicians, three from the Soviet Union and three from the United States. Today, the organization has wide membership among the world’s physicians. Professor Bernard Lowen of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the founders of IPPNW, said in a recent speech:
…No public health hazard ever faced by humankind equals the threat of nuclear war. Never before has man possessed the destructive resources to make this planet uninhabitable… Modern medicine has nothing to offer, not even a token benefit, in the event of nuclear war…
We are but transient passengers on this planet Earth. It does not belong to us. We are not free to doom generations yet unborn. We are not at liberty to erase humanity’s past or dim its future. Social systems do not endure for eternity. Only life can lay claim to uninterrupted continuity. This continuity is sacred.
The danger of a catastrophic nuclear war casts a dark shadow over the future of our species. It also casts a very black shadow over the future of the global environment. The environmental consequences of a massive exchange of nuclear weapons have been treated in a number of studies by meteorologists and other experts from both East and West. They predict that a large-scale use of nuclear weapons would result in fire storms with very high winds and high temperatures, which would burn a large proportion of the wild land fuels in the affected nations. The resulting smoke and dust would block out sunlight for a period of many months, at first only in the northern hemisphere but later also in the southern hemisphere.
Temperatures in many places would fall far below freezing, and much of the earth’s plant life would be
killed. Animals and humans would then die of starvation. The nuclear winter effect was first discovered as a result of the Mariner 9 spacecraft exploration of Mars in 1971. The spacecraft arrived in the middle of an enormous dust-storm on Mars, and measured a large temperature drop at the surface of the planet, accompanied by a heating of the upper atmosphere. These measurements allowed scientists to check their theoretical models for predicting the effect of dust and other pollutants distributed in planetary atmospheres.
Using experience gained from the studies of Mars, R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack and C. Sagan made a computer study of the climatic effects of the smoke and dust that would result from a large-scale nuclear war. This early research project is sometimes called the TTAPS Study, after the initials of the authors.
In April 1983, a special meeting was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the results of the TTAPS Study and other independent studies of the nuclear winter effect were discussed by more than 100 experts. Their conclusions were presented at a forum in Washington, D.C., the following December, under the chairmanship of U.S. Senators Kennedy and Hatfield. The numerous independent studies of the nuclear winter effect all agreed of the following main predictions:
High-yield nuclear weapons exploded near the earth’s surface would put large amounts of dust into the upper atmosphere. Nuclear weapons exploded over cities, forests, oilfields and refineries would produce fire storms of the type experienced in Dresden and Hamburg after incendiary bombings during the Second World War. The combination of high-altitude dust and lower altitude soot would prevent sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface, and the degree of obscuration would be extremely high for a wide range of scenarios.
A baseline scenario used by the TTAPS study assumes a 5,000-megaton nuclear exchange, but the threshold for triggering the nuclear winter effect is believed to be much lower than that. After such an exchange, the screening effect of pollutants in the atmosphere might be so great that, in the northern and middle latitudes, the sunlight reaching the earth would be only 1 percent of ordinary sunlight on a clear day, and this effect would persist for many months. As a result, the upper layers in the atmosphere might rise in temperature by as much as 100 degrees Celsius, while the surface temperatures would fall, perhaps by as much a 50 degrees Celsius.
The temperature inversion produced in this way would lead to superstability, a condition in which the normal mixing of atmospheric layers is suppressed. The hydrological cycle (which normally takes moist air from the oceans to a higher and cooler level, where the moisture condenses as rain) would be strongly suppressed. Severe droughts would thus take place overcontinental land masses. The normal cleansing action of rain would be absent in the atmosphere, an effect which would prolong the nuclear winter.
In the northern hemisphere, forests would die because of lack of sunlight, extreme cold, and drought. Although the temperature drop in the southern hemisphere would be less severe, it might still be sufficient to kill a large portion of the tropical forests, which normally help to renew the earth’s oxygen.
The oxygen content of the atmosphere would then fall dangerously, while the concentration of carbon dioxide and oxides of nitrogen produced by firestorms would remain high. The oxides of nitrogen would ultimately diffuse to the upper atmosphere, where they would destroy the ozone layer. Thus, even when the sunlight returned after an absence of many months, it would be sunlight containing a large proportion of the ultraviolet frequencies which are normally absorbed by the ozone in the stratosphere, and therefore a type of light dangerous to life. Finally, after being so severely disturbed, there is no guarantee that the global climate would return to its normal equilibrium.
Even a nuclear war below the threshold of nuclear winter might have climatic effects very damaging to human life. Professor Paul Ehrlich, of Stanford University, has expressed this in the following words:
…A smaller war, which set off fewer fires and put less dust into the atmosphere, could easily depress centigrade. That would be enough to essentially cancel grain production in the northern hemisphere. That in itself would be the greatest catastrophe ever delivered upon Homo sapiens, just that one thing, not worrying about prompt effects. Thus even below the threshold, one cannot think of survival of a nuclear war as just being able to stand up after the bomb has gone off.
Nuclear weapons are criminal! Every war is a crime!
War was always madness, always immoral, always the cause of unspeakablke suffering, economic waste and widespread destruction, always a source of poverty, hate, barbarism and endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge. It has always been a crime for soldiers to kill people, just as it is a crime for murderers in civil society to kill people. No flag has ever been wide enough to cover up atrocities.
But today, the development of all-destroying modern weapons has put war completely beyond the bounds of sanity and elementary humanity. Today, war is not only insane, but also a violation of international law. Both the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles make it a crime to launch an aggressive war. According to the Nuremberg Principles, every soldier is responsible for the crimes that he or she commits, even while acting under the orders of a superior officer.
Nuclear weapons are not only insane, immoral and potentially omnicidal, but also criminal under international law. In response to questions put to it by WHO and the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice ruled in 1996 that “the threat and use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and particularly the principles and rules of humanitarian law.” The only possible exception to this general rule might be “an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake”. But the Court refused to say that even in this extreme circumstance the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be legal. It left the exceptional case undecided. In addition, the Court added unanimously that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
Can we not rid ourselves of both nuclear weapons and the institution of war itself? We must act quickly and resolutely before our beautiful world and everything that we love are reduced to radioactive ashes.
John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago. He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in 1965. He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen. Fellowships, memberships in societies: Since 1990 he has been the Contact Person in Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was the Member of the Danish Peace Commission of 1998. Technical Advisor, World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988- 1997). Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy, April 2004.http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm. He can be reached at [email protected]
Today we have slammed the conditions imposed on Greece as part of its latest ‘bailout’ package. Campaigners say the programme is not simply misguided, but an attempt to ‘create a corporate paradise in the Mediterranean’, regardless of the level of suffering that entails.
Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now said:
This package amounts to some of the most extreme ‘free market’ fundamentalism we’ve ever witnessed – even by the standards of the International Monetary Fund programmes imposed on Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1980s. In short, it says that Greece is up for sale, and its workers, farmers and small businesses will have to be cleared out of the way.
The purpose of the bailout has little to do with ‘repaying debt’ and everything to do with creating a corporate paradise in the Mediterranean. The debts that matter to Europe’s elite have already been repaid. Today, debt has simply become a straightjacket to discipline Greek society. The real purpose of the programme is economic restructuring, through privatisation and deregulation.
Under the terms of the ‘bailout’, Greece is ‘up for sale’. From the national lottery to the port of Pireaus to swathes of Corfu, corporations are scrambling to get a piece of the action.
The package declares war on all who stand to lose: workers, small businesses and farmers. Gone will be laws protecting small business ownership, collective bargaining, the minimum wage, and help for farmers. The reforms are so specific that the EU is writing regulation on bread measurement and milk expiry dates.
No doubt Greece’s economy needs reform. That’s what Syriza was elected to undertake. But what is being imposed is the establishment and micromanagement of radical ‘free market’ economics, far more extreme than exist in many of Greece’s ‘creditor’ countries. This is not a solution to Greece’s debt crisis, but a solution to the profits of European capital.
About a week ago, on a late Wednesday night, a sight of almost Armageddon proportions confronted the residents of Tianjin. Whether they witnessed the red and orange blaze shooting up to the sky from their apartment windows; or whether they slept through it only to be confronted by a smoky black sky in the morning, the citizens of Tianjin have seen part of their city turned into something resembling a “war zone.”
By now, the story has travelled internationally: double explosions at a chemical storage plant – the first equivalent to detonating three tonnes of TNT, and the second equivalent to 20 tonnes – rocked the port, blasting windows out of their frames and flattening rows upon rows of shipping containers.
From the various amateur videos floating around, the reactions behind the camera go from sounds of complete awe, to utter shock and fear. So explosive was the blast it was seen from space and registered as seismic activity in China. The current and on-going toll is 114 dead and 70 missing.
The trigger for the explosion is still unknown. What is known, however, is that the Ruihai Logistics Company warehouse in the Tianjin Binhai New Area, an industrial base located along the coast of the Bohai Sea, was storing a number of highly hazardous and highly reactive chemicals, including hundreds of tonnes of sodium cyanide. According to the Tianjin Tanggu Environmental Monitoring Station, hazardous chemicals stored by the company concerned include sodium cyanide (NaCN), toluene diisocyanate (TDI) and calcium carbide (CaC2), all of which pose direct threats to human health on contact. NaCN in particular is highly toxic; and CaC2 and TDI react violently with water and reactive chemicals, with risk of explosion.
On Friday August 14, Greenpeace East Asia sent out a rapid response field team to bear witness to what is becoming an environmental and human tragedy. At four test sites located within 9 km from the main centre, we checked for the presence of sodium cyanide or cyanide in bodies of water around the blast site. High levels were not detected. However, they do not prove or disprove the presence of low levels of cyanide in Tianjin’s water compared to normal surface water concentration; nor the presence of other hazardous chemicals in the water. In fact, an evacuation zone of 3 km is ‘de facto’ in place over fears of chemical contamination and a change in wind direction.
But whilst the Tianjin blast is definitely severe, it is not China’s only case. What we have witnessed over the last few days is just the tip of the iceberg. Just this year thirteen other explosions have occurred in the provinces of Jiangsu, Fujian and Shandong according to media reports. In fact, as recent as last month an explosion hit a chemical plant in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjingspreading to three other chemical tanks nearby. What lies beneath the surface is years of negligence in regards to hazardous chemicals policies and their implementation.
Right now the residents of Tianjin’s port area are in a state of shock – the scene around them dominated by shattered windows, skeleton-like cars and an area covered in nothing but rubble and ash. In addition, many have had to stay in temporary homes and shelters, left with no resource but to cry and demand to know where the bodies of their loved ones are.
Over the years Greenpeace has campaigned for a toxic-free future. Whether it’s chemicals spilling in to our rivers from textile factories; or non-recyclable electronic products creating mountains of e-waste, the severity of the Tianjin explosion should be a wake-up call for the government in China and around the world. Loopholes must be closed, and regulations must be implemented strictly and effectively. If not, we will continue to see these kinds of dangerous accidents polluting our water, poisoning our air and ruining our cities.
Yixiu Wu, Toxics Campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported on Tuesday that nearly 8 children have been killed or wounded every day in the course of the air assault on Yemen spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, which began earlier this year.
The bombing has been more or less continuous, with multiple ceasefire agreements and so-called humanitarian pauses breached almost as soon as they were announced. Saudi Arabia and its allies have been seeking to push back the Houthi militias that seized control of most of Yemen’s western provinces in March, including the southern port city of Aden.
The countries contributing forces to the Saudi-led war include Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Sudan and Qatar. In less than five months, coalition jets have launched thousands of air strikes.
While the attack is nominally headed by Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration has made it possible by providing coalition jets with midair refueling and both intelligence for targeting strikes and the bombs necessary to carry them out. The coalition has deployed American-made laser-guided bombs as well as internationally outlawed cluster munitions.
Washington recently more than doubled, from 20 to 45, the number of advisors working at joint military operations centers in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. US spy satellites and drones relay live video of bomb targets to the coalition’s operations centers.
The Saudi monarchy and the US are seeking to reinstate former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who was forced to flee the country in the face of a Houthi assault on Aden. Military forces loyal to former longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh have been backing the Houthis, facilitating their advance from their northern stronghold of Sadaa to the capital Sanaa, and finally all the way to Aden.
According to official UNICEF tallies, there have been more than a thousand child causalities as a result of the unrelenting aerial assault by coalition jets and fierce fighting between pro-Houthi and anti-Houthi forces on the ground. Since March 26, at least 398 children have been killed by bombs and bullets, with a further 605 wounded. Children account for one quarter of the officially counted casualties so far.
Months of air strikes and fierce fighting on the ground between pro-Houthi and anti-Houthi forces have devastated much of the country’s infrastructure, killed more than 4,000, and plunged tens of millions into a dire humanitarian crisis.
Ten million children, approximately 80 percent of the country’s population under 18 years old, are in urgent need of some form of humanitarian aid. With at least one quarter of health facilities no longer providing vaccinations, at least 2.5 million children are at risk of contracting measles, a highly contagious and often deadly disease.
With electricity knocked out in many places and severe fuel shortages, at least 20.4 million Yemenis lack access to clean drinking water, putting many at risk of water-borne diseases such as cholera. Without a safe source of water, 2.5 million children are at risk of diarrheal diseases and another 1.5 million could fall victim to acute respiratory tract infections.
UNICEF also reported that at least 1.8 million children are falling behind in their education, as nearly 400 school buildings have been damaged or destroyed by air strikes and artillery shelling. Another 346 school facilities are being used as shelters for displaced families or have been requisitioned by armed militias.
A report by Amnesty International also released on Tuesday, titled “Nowhere Safe for Civilians,” documents the destruction being unleashed on the population of the Arab world’s poorest country. Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response advisor at Amnesty International, said the report outlined the “bloody trail of death and destruction in Ta’iz and Aden from unlawful attacks, which may amount to war crimes, by all parties.”
The report describes eight Saudi coalition air strikes in southern Yemen that killed 141 civilians and injured 101, mostly women and children. Amnesty International reports numerous strikes that apparently deliberately targeted civilians and non-military targets, including schools being used as shelters and food markets.
An air strike on July 24 on dormitories housing workers at the Steam Power Plant and their families in the southwestern city of Mokha killed 63 people and injured another 50. Amnesty’s researchers found no indications that housing units had been used for any military purpose by the Houthis.
A coalition air strike on July 9 killed ten members of the Faraa family in the village of Tahrur, north of Aden, when a bomb was dropped on the Mus’ab ben Omar school. At least a dozen families had taken up shelter in the school after being displaced by fighting. Again, the Amnesty researchers found no evidence that the building had ever been used for military purposes.
On July 6, the Saudi coalition dropped bombs on a livestock market in Fayush, killing up to 40 people and injuring many others. Residents who survived the attack reported a normal day of buying and selling of goats, sheep and other animals until the bombs fell.
“They were normal people, some desperate people who had reluctantly come to sell their animals because they have no other income to feed their children,” a market seller told the Amnesty researchers. “There was no fighting around here and there were no Houthis, just some unlucky people.”
On the same day these reports were released, Saudi coalition jets launched an attack on the port in the city of Hodeida. This port had been the main location for receiving deliveries of emergency aid for the country’s northern provinces. According to local officials, four cranes used for loading and unloading ships were destroyed, while nearby warehouses were also bombed, bringing work at the port to a halt.
The anti-Houthi forces on the ground backed by Saudi Arabia, known as Popular Resistance Committees, are composed of military units loyal to Hadi, members of the Islamist Islah party, which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, separatist fighters from the Southern Movement, and fighters from both Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic State (ISIS).
Thousands of Saudi and UAE troops have been deployed to Yemen to assist these forces in the push against the Houthis, which has gained momentum with the recapture of Aden and the nearby Al Anad airbase by pro-Hadi forces at the end of July.
Defense News reported on August 4 that, in advance of the offensive that retook Al Anad, 2,800 Saudi coalition Special Forces had been deployed in Aden along with LeClerc main battle tanks and other armored vehicles operated by the UAE. So far, at least five UAE troops have been reported killed in the fighting.
In Yemen, the United States is in a de facto alliance with AQAP and ISIS against the Houthis, despite being officially at war with AQAP and continuing its campaign of drone strikes against the group’s leadership in Yemen, while it carries out daily air strikes against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria.
The Saudi coalition has refrained from launching any air strikes against AQAP forces, even as it has taken control of large portions of the eastern province of Hadhramaut, including its main city Mukalla, as well as portions of Abyan province.
The US carried out a drone missile attack on August 12, killing 5 alleged AQAP members driving on the highway from Mukalla to the nearby city of Rukob.
On the one-year anniversary of the police murder of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis, Missouri, officers once again shot and killed an African-American youth, identified as Mansur Ball-Bey, 18. The murder took place roughly five miles from where Powell was shot to death. Over 100 people quickly gathered at the site of the shooting, including many protesters who had been commemorating Powell’s life nearby.
As the crowd grew in size, numerous backup police arrived in full SWAT gear, along with an armored vehicle. The police ordered the crowd to disperse, falsely declaring, “This is an unlawful assembly.” One reporter noted that they saw at least three people arrested and taken into custody.
As of yet, no witnesses to the shooting have come forward to contest the police version of events, which should nevertheless be given no credence whatsoever.
Swat officers on the scene of the shooting
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson claimed at a press conference Wednesday that while two officers were serving a warrant at around 11:30 am, two teenagers ran out of the home. Dotson alleged that Ball-Bey pointed a gun at the police, who responded by fatally shooting him, while the other teenager, as yet unidentified, ran away. One officer shot Ball-Bey three times, while the other shot him once. Dotson also reported that police made multiple arrests inside the house.
After hearing the official story alleging that Ball-Bey pointed a gun at police, Robert Phillips, 30, angrily told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “They always say that.”
The rapid police suppression of this minor protest in St. Louis reveals the advanced state of decay of democratic rights in the United States. When a crowd gathers to express anger and protest, the response of the state is increasingly to send in heavily armed, militarized police to intimidate protesters and quell social opposition.
Death of Zachary Hammond points to possible police murder and cover-up
Officer Mark Tiller shot Zachary Hammond, a 19-year-old white youth, twice, once in the back of his shoulder and once in the chest, during an undercover drug sting operation in Seneca, South Carolina on July 26. New information released by the lawyers of Hammond’s family points to the possibility that the youth was murdered to intimidate Hammond’s date, the target of the sting operation, Tori Morton.
In a letter from attorneys Eric Bland and Robert Richter addressed to the US Justice Department, the lawyers assert that Morton “had additional criminal information regarding Adam Covington,” the son of Seneca police chief John Covington and a former reserve officer for the Seneca police. The letter notes that Adam Covington has a history of receiving illegal favoritism within the department, and that he was sentenced to two years’ probation and one year in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to charges of theft of a controlled substance and misconduct in office.
Zachary Hammond
An investigation by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division found numerous other incidents in which Covington was suspected of similar misconduct, but was shielded by department officials due to the fact that he is the son of the police chief. Referring to a possible investigation into a 2013 burglary incident, one captain is quoted as having said, “this came straight from the big man that if you go forward with this it would be a career-changing move.”
In the letter, the attorneys also cite law enforcement sources from a neighboring department, who claim that officers on the scene “desecrated” Hammond’s body, raising Hammond’s hand and high-fiving it. The letter also reveals that an eyewitness claims to have seen an officer place something from the back of their patrol car underneath Hammond’ s body after he had been removed from the vehicle. The lawyers note that this likely explains the “white powdery substance consistent with powder cocaine” that was found on Hammond’s body.
In the past week alone, two officers from the department have resigned, including one who had been on the scene the night Hammond was shot.
In response to the letter, the Justice Department announced that it will launch its own civil rights investigation into Hammond’s death, but side-stepped the broader issues of nepotism and potentially a charge of murder by Tiller on behalf of reserve officer Covington.
Officers indicted for murder of handcuffed man whom they tased at least 14 times
Former officers Howard Weems and Marcus Eberhart of East Point, Georgia were indicted on multiple charges, including felony murder, in the April 2014 death of Gregory Towns, a 24-year-old unarmed black man whom the officers tased at least 14 times after handcuffing him.
Gregory Towns
The two officers chased Towns outside his mother’s apartment complex, until he tripped over a tree branch and fell. As Towns struggled to walk, the officers handcuffed him and both repeatedly stunned Towns to force him to move, effectively using their tasers as cattle prods.
The autopsy report lists the death as a homicide due to the use of the tasers, noting that Towns died from “hypertensive cardiovascular disease exacerbated by physical exertion and conducted electrical stimulation.” Towns’s family asserts that the officers stunned him at least 14 times.
In his police report, Eberhart wrote that the taser gun inflicted little harm to Towns, noting, “Towns did not state he was in pain or appear to be in any distress.” To elicit more pain, Eberhart states that he “then removed the cartridge from my taser to drive stun Towns.” Eberhart wrote that he stunned Towns at least two more times before Towns fell into a creek bed, where Eberhart then stunned him again. When paramedics arrived moments later, they informed Eberhart that Towns did not have a pulse.
Officer charged with murder for shooting unarmed man with hands near his head
Officer Adam Torres has been charged with second-degree murder nearly two years after he killed unarmed John Geer, 46, who was holding his hands near his head at the time he was shot in Fairfax County, Virginia. The shooting took place on the afternoon of August 29, 2013, at the front door of Geer’s house.
Police negotiator Rodney Barnes convinced Geer to place the weapon he was holding at his feet, yet Torres continued to aim his gun at the unarmed man. In the police report, Barnes noted that Geer repeatedly asked Torres to lower his weapon. At 3:34 p.m., while Barnes was speaking with Geer, Torres suddenly fired one shot at him without warning, surprising the other officers.
John Geer
Geer’s father and a friend who witnessed the shooting, as well as every officer on the scene except Torres, asserted that Geer’s hands remained above his shoulders when he was shot. Torres lied and claimed that he shot Geer only after “he brought both his hands down really quick near his waist.”
Torres was placed on administrative duty shortly after the shooting, where he remained until being fired on July 31, 2015, as the ensuing internal investigation sought to whitewash the brutal police killing.
For months, the police withheld all details surrounding the case and whether or not charges would be filed, sparking a series of protests in the region. Not until last January, 16 months after the shooting, did police even release Torres’s name for the first time.
After a full year had passed, Geer’s longtime partner, Maura Harrington, filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of herself and Geer’s daughters. Normally, civil lawsuits aren’t even filed until the completion of a criminal lawsuit in cases of police shootings. Last April, Fairfax County settled the civil case for $2.95 million.
Over 1,000 attend funeral of 19-year-old Christian Taylor
An overflow crowd of more than 1,000 people gathered at Koinonia Christian Church in Arlington, Texas on Saturday in remembrance of 19-year-old Christian Taylor, the unarmed African-American youth killed by Arlington officer Brad Miller on August 7.
Christian Taylor
The fatal shooting took place inside a Buick GMC car dealership, after six officers responded to a burglary call at around 1 am. Within minutes of arriving at the dealership, Miller shot Taylor four times without making any physical contact with Taylor. Taylor died of gunshots in his neck, chest and abdomen, according to the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office.
Miller, himself a rookie cop still undergoing training, was publicly fired by Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson shortly after news of the murder spread. A criminal investigation is under way, with further measures left to the district attorney’s discretion.
Security expert and hacker Morgan Marquis-Boire spends his days researching the shady underworld of government surveillance. Here he explains how governments are using malicious computer code to spy on journalists and human rights activists across the world.
What is spyware and how is it different to malware?
Broadly, malware is malicious code that does something harmful or undesirable on a user’s system that runs without their consent. Most people will be familiar with the concept of viruses, trojans, crimeware and even ransomware, which encrypts your data and tries to ‘ransom’ it back to you. Over the last few years there has been a rise in awareness of malware used for surveillance, or spyware. This is software installed on a victim’s computer by state actors, spies and police, rather than cyber criminals. It gives them access to the victim’s online communications and, as so much of our lives is now online, this is where most state surveillance now occurs.
How much can they see?
It depends on what you do on the device that has been compromised. For example, as mobile phones have become less about making phone calls and more about general online communication, we’ve seen a corresponding market for so-called ‘lawful intercept’ mobile spyware. If you have this type of software surreptitiously installed on your phone it allows people to track your location via GPS, access your contacts list, spy on your SMS messaging, record your phone calls, see what you’re talking about on Facebook chat and more.
Spyware on your phone allows people to track your location via GPS, access your contacts list, spy on your SMS messaging and record your calls.
Who is being targeted?
A group of Moroccan journalists and activists known as Mamfakinch were targeted with malware that appears to have been deployed by the Moroccan authorities. They were sent a “bait” document” in the form of a communication pretending to be a news “scoop”. When analysed, I found the document contained malicious code that secretly installed spyware on their devices, so the government could see what Mamfakinch were going to be writing and who their sources were.
I also discovered that Ahmed Mansoor, a prominent human rights defender in the United Arab Emirates, has been tracked using commercial spyware. He’s constantly subjected to physical and electronic surveillance, and has been beaten and physically assaulted. He has also received numerous death threats because of his peaceful activism.
There are smaller players that have become notorious for their sales to repressive regimes. A British-German company Gamma International distributed the spyware used to monitor the activists in Bahrain. Then there’s Hacking Team, an Italian company involved in the attack on Mamfakinch and who have previously sold spyware to a variety of repressive governments, including Sudan, Ethiopia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. A recent leak showed that they were contemplating selling to Libya as recently as May this year. And then there are the bigger multinational companies, such as Lockheed-Martin, BAE Systems and Raytheon, who also make this type of technology. This map shows many more of the players operating in the shady surveillance industry.
What can activists and journalists do about it?
The use of protective technologies like encryption, anonymization and privacy tools is pretty low among human rights activists. A lot of people have a good idea of the sensitive information – documents, communications, research – they might want to protect. So the next step is to educate yourself and start thinking sanely about security. There are a number of resources online, such as EFF’s comprehensive surveillance self-defence kit. For a quick and simple guide, you can also read this blog post by a colleague from Citizen Lab.
I tend to shy away from broadly advocating individual tools as if they’re a panacea, because nothing is a universal surveillance cure-all. People also need to realise they’re not only making that decision for themselves, but for other people they’re communicating with who may be in a more dangerous situation.
What should Amnesty be doing about it?
I think it’s really positive that organisations like Amnesty are starting to speak out about the dangers of surveillance for human rights groups. Amnesty, who have themselves been spied on, know directly what a harmful trend this is. I’m hoping that this will promote a more positive ‘security hygiene’ in this space. And it’s also great that Amnesty is lobbying for more positive policy change in this area too. I’d love to see more transparency around the use of this type of surveillance by governments, as well as a raised awareness among individuals and small organisations about the security measures they should be taking.
What will happen in the future?
It’s difficult to look too far in to the future since this is a rapidly changing area of technology. We’ve seen the NSA say they’re going to stop collecting metadata from mobile phones, but on the other side the UK government and the FBI have been fear-mongering about strong encryption on chat and messaging applications and arguing for greater access to users’ private data. It’s really difficult to predict how this will all pan out, but it’s never been more important for people to get involved in the debate and scrutinise what governments are doing.
Morgan Marquis-Boire is an acting Advisor on Amnesty’s Technology and Human Rights Council.
We have just marked anniversaries of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the US government against the people of Japan and Vietnam. Seventy years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US military unleashed an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing at least 140,000 people.
Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb, on Nagasaki, which killed 70,000. And 54 years ago, on August 10, 1961, the US military began spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam. It contained the deadly chemical dioxin, which has poisoned an estimated 3 million people throughout that country.
Devastating Effects of Radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
On the day of the first atomic bombing, 19-year-old Shinji Mikamo was on the roof of his house in Hiroshima helping his father prepare it for demolition when he saw a huge fireball coming at him. Then he heard a deafening explosion and felt a searing pain throughout his body. He said he felt as if boiling water had been poured over him. Shinji was three-quarters of a mile from the epicenter of the bomb. His chest and right arm were totally burned. Pieces of his flesh fell from his body like ragged clothing. The pain was unbearable. Shinji survived but most of his family perished.
Atomic cloud over Nagasaki from Koyagi-jima, August 9, 1945. (Photo: Hiromichi Matsuda)
Shinji’s daughter, Dr. Akiko Mikamo, told her father’s story at the Veterans for Peace convention in San Diego on August 7. She wrote the book, Rising From the Ashes: A True Story of Survival and Forgiveness From Hiroshima. Akiko’s mother Miyoko, who was indoors about a half-mile from the epicenter, was also severely injured in the bombing, but she too survived.
Akiko said 99 percent of those who were outdoors at the time of the blast died immediately or within 48 hours. A week after the bombing, thousands of people had experienced a unique combination of symptoms, Susan Southard wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
Their hair fell out in large clumps, their wounds secreted extreme amounts of pus, and their gums swelled and bled. Purple spots appeared on their bodies, signs of hemorrhaging beneath the skin. Infections ravaged their internal organs. Within a few days of the onset of symptoms, many people lost consciousness, mumbled deliriously and died in extreme pain; others languished for weeks before either dying or slowly recovering.
Southard notes that the US government censored Japanese news reports, photographs, testimonies and scientific research about the condition of the survivors.
Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, which created the atom bombs, testified before Congress that death resulting from exposure to large amounts of radiation takes place “without undue suffering.” He added it is “a very pleasant way to die.”
Thirty years after the end of World War II, numerous cases of leukemia, stomach cancer and colon cancer were documented.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were criminal because at the time Japan was already defeated and had taken steps to surrender. With these atomic bombings, the United States launched the Cold War, marking the beginning of its nuclear threat.
The Continuing Legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam
Sixteen years after the United States’ nuclear attacks on Japan, the US military began spraying Vietnam with Agent Orange-dioxin. In addition to the more than 3 million Vietnamese people killed during the Vietnam War, an equivalent number of people suffer serious diseases and children continue to be born with defects from Agent Orange. US veterans of the Vietnam War and their children suffer as well.
Agent Orange caused direct damage to those exposed to dioxin, including cancers, skin disorders, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity and nervous disorders. It resulted in indirect damage to the children of those exposed to dioxin, including severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases and shortened life spans.
Dan Shea joined the US Marine Corps in 1968 at the age of 19. He served in Vietnam a little more than two months. But he was in Quang Tri, one of the areas where much of the Agent Orange was sprayed. When Shea saw barrels “all over” with orange stripes on them, he had no idea the dioxin they contained would change his life forever. When they ran out of water, he and his fellow Marines would drink out of the river.
In 1977, Shea’s son Casey was born with congenital heart disease and a cleft palate. Before his third birthday, Casey underwent heart surgery for the hole in his heart. Ten hours after surgery, Casey went into a coma and died seven weeks later.
Just as the US censored information about the effects of radiation after the atomic bombings, the US government and the chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange – including Dow and Monsanto – also suppressed the 1965 Bionetics study that demonstrated dioxin caused many birth defects in experimental animals. The spraying of Agent Orange finally stopped when that study was made public.
Shea, who also addressed the Veterans for Peace convention, works with me on the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign. We seek to obtain relief for the Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American and US victims of Agent Orange through the recently introduced H.R. 2114. US vets have received some compensation, but not nearly enough. Vietnamese people and Vietnamese-Americans have received nothing for their suffering.
This bill would assist with the cleanup of dioxin still present in Vietnam. It would also provide assistance to the public health system in Vietnam directed at the 3 million Vietnamese people affected by Agent Orange. It would extend assistance to the affected children of male US veterans who suffer the same set of birth defects covered for the children of female veterans. It would also lead to research on the extent of Agent Orange-related diseases in the Vietnamese-American community, and provide them with assistance. Finally, it would lead to laboratory and epidemiological research on the effects of Agent Orange.
Agent Orange in Japan
The US government has also denied that Agent Orange is present on Okinawa, the Pentagon’s main support base during the Vietnam War. In February 2013, the Pentagon issued a report denying that there is Agent Orange on Okinawa, but it did not order environmental tests or interview veterans who claimed exposure to Agent Orange there. “The usage of Agent Orange and military defoliants in Okinawa is one of the best kept secrets of the Cold War,” according to Jon Mitchell, a journalist based in Tokyo.
The US government has been lying about Agent Orange on Okinawa for more than 50 years,” Mitchell said. An investigation by Okinawa City and the Okinawa Defense Bureau found dioxin and other components of Agent Orange in several barrels found on Okinawa. Many bore markings of Dow Chemical, one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange. The Japan Times cited reports of military veterans who said that burying surplus chemicals, including Agent Orange, “was standard operating procedure for the US military on Okinawa.
Two hundred and fifty US service members are claiming damages from exposure to Agent Orange on Okinawa during the Vietnam War, but very few have received compensation from their government. In spite of the Pentagon report, the US Department of Veterans Affairs granted relief in October 2013 to a retired Marine Corps driver who has prostate cancer. The judge ruled that his cancer was triggered by his transport and use of Agent Orange.
Abolish Nuclear Weapons and Compensate Victims of Agent Orange
Besides being criminal, the United States’ use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and poisoning of Vietnam and Okinawa with Agent Orange, are a shameful legacy. The denial and cover-up of each of these crimes adds insult to injury.
As we work toward a nuclear deal with Iran, the US government should abide by its commitment to nuclear disarmament in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It is also time to fully compensate the victims of Agent Orange and fund a total cleanup of the areas in Vietnam that remain contaminated by the toxic chemical. Urge your congressional representative to cosponsor H.R. 2114, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015.
Finally, we must hold our leaders accountable for their crimes in Japan and Vietnam, and ensure that such atrocities never happen again.
Those that run food banks all over America say that demand for their services just continues to explode. It always amazes me that there are still people out there that insist that an “economic collapse” is not happening. From their air-conditioned homes in their cushy suburban neighborhoods they mock the idea that the U.S. economy is crumbling. But if they would just go down and visit the local food banks in their areas, they would see how much people are hurting. According to Feeding America spokesman Ross Fraser, 46 million Americans got food from a food bank at least one time during 2014. Because the demand has become so overwhelming, some food banks are cutting back on the number of days they operate and the amount of food that is given to each family.
As you will see below, many impoverished Americans are lining up at food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning just so that they can be sure to get something before the food runs out. And yet there are still many people out there that have the audacity to say that everything is just fine in America. Shame on them for ignoring the pain of millions upon millions of their fellow citizens.
Poverty in America is getting worse, not better. And no amount of spin from Barack Obama or his apologists can change that fact.
This year, it is being projected that food banks in the United States will give away an all-time record 4 billion pounds of food.
Over the past decade, that number has more than doubled.
“Food banks across the country are seeing a rising demand for free groceries despite the growing economy, leading some charities to reduce the amount of food they offer each family.”
Those in need are starting to realize what is going on, so they are getting to the food banks earlier and earlier. For example, one food bank in New Mexico is now getting long lines of people every single day starting at 6:30 in the morning…
“We get lines of people every day, starting at 6:30 in the morning,” said Sheila Moore, who oversees food distribution at The Storehouse, the largest pantry in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one where food distribution has climbed 15 percent in the past year.”
Does that sound like an “economic recovery” to you? Just because your family doesn’t have to stand in line for food does not mean that everything is okay in America.
The same thing that is happening in New Mexico is also happening in Ohio. Needy people are standing in line at the crack of dawn so that they can be sure to get something “before the food runs out”…
Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, who has been working in food charities since the 1980s, said that when earlier economic downturns ended, food demand declined, but not this time. “People keep coming earlier and earlier, they’re standing in line, hoping they get there before the food runs out,” Hamler-Fugitt said.
So how bad will things be when millions more Americans lose their jobs and millions more Americans lose their homes?
Rising poverty is also reflected in the number of Americans on food stamps. The following graph was posted by the Economic Policy Journal, and it shows how food stamp use has absolutely exploded in the five most populated states…
I don’t see an “economic recovery” in that graph, do you?
Instead, what it shows is that the number of Americans on food stamps continued to rise for years even after the recession ended.
Sadly, things are only going to get worse from here. Eventually, the kinds of things that we are seeing happen in places such as Venezuela will be coming here as well. At this point, young mothers in Venezuela are sleeping outside of empty supermarkets at night in a desperate attempt to get something for their families when morning arrives…
As dawn breaks over the scorching Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, smugglers, young mothers and a handful of kids stir outside a supermarket where they spent the night, hoping to be first in line for scarce rice, milk or whatever may be available.
Some of the people in line are half-asleep on flattened cardboard boxes, others are drinking coffee.
Most Americans cannot identify with this level of suffering, but it is coming to our country someday too. Here is more from Reuters…
“I can’t get milk for my child. What are we going to do?” said Leida Silva, 54, breaking into tears outside the Latino supermarket in northern Maracaibo where she arrived at 3 a.m. on a recent day.
Just a couple of days ago, I wrote about how the number of Americans living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.
In case you are wondering, that is not a sign of progress.
Just because you might live in a comfortable neighborhood that does not give you the right to look down on those that are suffering.
And when you add increasing racial tensions to the mix, it becomes easier to understand why there is so much anger and frustration in our urban areas. According to Business Insider, the percentage of Americans that consider race relations to be in good shape in this nation has dropped precipitously…
Over the last two years there has been a 23% drop in the number of Americans who see relations between blacks and whites as “very good” or “somewhat good.”
Today, only 47% of Americans see black-white relations positively, according to a Gallup poll, the lowest it has been in the last 14 years.
The poll also showed that blacks see the relations more positively (51%) than whites (45%), but both percentages experienced sharp declines in the last two years.
All of the ingredients are there for civil unrest to erupt in cities all over the United States.
When the next major economic downturn happens, anger and frustration are going to flare to extremely dangerous levels. At this point, it will not take much to set things off.
Desperate people do desperate things, and desperation is rising even now in this country.
So how did things get so bad?
Stupid decisions lead to stupid results, and very soon we will start to pay a very great price for decades of incredibly stupid decisions.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent approval of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) resistant to new herbicides will soon unleash a flood of new toxic chemicals across the nation’s agricultural heartland, observers have warned.
Previously, nearly all GMO crops approved for planting were engineered for resistance to a single herbicide: Monsanto’s blockbuster product Roundup (glyphosate). The widespread adoption of these crops led to an explosion in Roundup use, which in turn spurred the evolution of Roundup resistance in agricultural weeds.
In response to the proliferation of Roundup-resistant “superweeds,” GMO companies have turned to engineering multi-herbicide resistance into their crops. Specifically, GMO crops are now available resistant to both Roundup and the Dow herbicide 2,4-D, or Roundup and another herbicide, Dicamba.
But as critics of biotechnology have repeatedly noted, the adoption of these new GMOs will merely exacerbate the problem – encouraging still more herbicide use and the evolution of ever-tougher superweeds. In a recent article, Dr. Jonathan Latham of the Bioscience Resource Project referred to the process as “a vicious cycle that threatens both our environment and our food supply.”
Poisonous to plants and people
The adoption of herbicide-resistant GMOs always leads to an increase in herbicide use, because farmers feel free to spray poison in higher concentrations to kill off more weeds, no longer worried about harming their crop. As weeds start to develop resistance (within a few generations), the herbicide doses needed to kill them begin to increase. Inevitably, residue from these herbicides makes its way into the food supply.
Unsurprisingly, chemicals designed to poison plants are not benign for animals, either. Roundup has been linked with endocrine disruption, birth defects and organ failure. An ingredient in the infamous Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange – 2,4-D – has been linked with hypothyroidism, Parkinson’s disease, reproductive problems and suppressed immune function. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has declared both chemicals “probable carcinogens.”
According to government documents, Dicamba can cause neurological damage in mammals and is also classified as a “developmental toxin.” This latter effect is particularly troubling given that a recent Environmental Working Group report counted more than 5,600 schools within 200 feet of agricultural fields likely to be planted with the new GMO crops.
Both Dicamba and 2,4-D are considered at high risk for environmental contamination, the former in the soil and the latter by drifting through the air.
Government protects industry, not health
People hoping that government regulatory agencies will step in and protect the public from this chemical violence are likely to be disappointed. Rather than taking measures to prevent the predicted explosion of 2,4-D use near schools throughout the Midwest, Congress is currently working hard to pass the DARK (Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act, which would ban GMO labeling initiatives and potentially even prevent state or local governments from regulating herbicide use on GMO crops.
And while the White House recently ordered a multi-agency update of the rules governing GMOs in the United States, the priorities of that review are made clear by a single sentence from the memorandum: “The objectives are to ensure public confidence in the regulatory system and to prevent unnecessary barriers to future innovation and competitiveness by improving the transparency, coordination, predictability, and efficiency of the regulation of biotechnology products while continuing to protect health and the environment.”
That is, the first priority is to make sure that people trust the government, specifically its GMO regulations (or lack thereof). The second priority is to protect the profits of the biotech industry by preventing “barriers to future innovation and competitiveness.”
Only at the end is there a mention of protecting health or the environment – with a presumption that these are already being protected.
Given the already astonishing rates of Roundup use nationwide, that presumption is certainly open to question.
The cease-fire decreed between the United States and Iran redefines the conflicts in the Near East and moves the war towards the Black Sea. Even though it is yet too soon to predict the way in which the rivalry between Riyadh and Teheran will evolve, and also what will become of Turkey, it is already clear that we are moving towards peace in Yemen and Syria.
The opposition between the United States and Iran, which had dominated Near-Eastern politics since the speech given by Imam Rouhollah Khomeiny at Teheran cemetery on the 1st February 1979, to the signature of the bilateral agreement with the government of Cheikh Hassan Rohani on the 14th July 2015, no longer exists. As from now, Washington and Teheran are both pusuing the interests of the same global ruling class.
At the time, President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Council advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński had to deal with the desertion of Iran, which, until then, had been Washington’s « local police force ». They reacted first by soliciting the Saudis for help in countering the Imam’s revolutionary, anti-imperialist message – this signalled the beginning of the Wahhabisation of world Islam – then by deciding to control the Near Eastern reserve of hydrocarbons.
During his « State of the Union » speech of the 23rd January 1980, Jimmy Carter declared – « Let our position be absolutely clear – any attempt by a foreign power to take control of the Persian Gulf region will be considered as an attack on the vital interests of the United States of America, and any such attack will be resisted by all necessary means, including military force. »
With this objective, the Pentagon organised a regional command for its army, the Central Command (CentCom), whose zone of competence included all the states in the region with the exception of Israel and Turkey.
The end of the artificial Sunnite/Chiite conflict
For 35 years, we have watched the slow development of an abyss between the Sunnites, commanded by their Saudi champion, and the Chiites, commanded by their Iranian leader. The former defended the United States and their capitalist economic model, while the latter hoped to die delivering the world from Anglo-Saxon imperialism.
This conflict, and this form of economic cleavage, had never before in History existed at such a degree of intensity. It peaked with the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaïda and Daesh, three movements financed by the Gulf monarchies and their allies, and from time to time, Israël against the Chiites.
Since the 14th July, and without the slightest explanation, Riyadh has ceased to evoke this religious conflict, which has clearly been resolved without the help of the theologians. Saudi Arabia is no longer fighting Iran, which is now a partner of its US overlord, but finds itself in opposition to Iran in the new Near East. So now Riyadh is no longer claiming to represent the Sunnites, but the Arabs, while Iran can no longer pose as the leader of the Chiites, but only the Persians.
However, until 2010, the Arab world was no longer under unilateral Saudi control, but governed by a triumvirate composed of Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
The evolution of CentCom
Although the reform of CentCom is not yet on the schedule, the subject will have to be addressed soon. Currently, its zone of competence includes the Near East and Central Asia. However, we should not only be seeing peace coming to Yemen and Syria very soon, but we may also see the war moving on towards the Black Sea, Turkey and Crimea.
The United Nations have announced their intention to organise inter-Syrian negotiations and refer them to a « contact group », in other words, the powers that have been sponsoring the war for the last four and a half years.
Globally speaking, we are moving towards an agreement which will recognise the « victory » of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, and that of Iran in Syria.
Stefan de Mistura, Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy, has declared :
« • I intend to invite the Syrians to participate in a round of simultaneous thematic debates, engaged in parallel within the framework of an inter-Syrian work group, to look closely at the fundamental aspects of the Geneva Communiqué, which they identified during the primary phase of consultations, and which specifically aim to guarantee the security and protection of all, to find a way to end the sieges, to guarantee access to medical care and to free prisoners.
• The second phase will concentrate on the political and constitutional aspects, notably the essential principles, the transitory authorities and the elections.
• The third phase will concern the military and security aspects, particularly an efficient opposition to terrorism with the participation of all, as well as the cease-fires and integration.
• The fourth phase will concern public institutions, construction and development, which means, as we have pointed out, that we must do whatever is necessary to avoid reproducing what happened in Iraq, specifically, when the institutions have brutally vanished, and the country is in a situation of great difficulty. These institutions must continue to ensure public services, under the direction of their universally accepted leaders, and who act in respect of the principles of good government and human rights. » [1]
At the same time, Turkey has opened a new front by declaring war on its Kurdish minority. This decision, if it were to continue, would plunge the country into a long and terrible civil war. After all sorts of contradictory declarations, the United States has forbidden it to pursue the PKK into Syria – where it is known under the name of the YPG – so that, finally, Syria will become the host nation for the Kurdish revolutionaries.
Above all, Turkey has broken off the economic relations that it had been building with Russia over the last eight months, and has constituted an « International Islamist Brigade » with Ukraine, in other words, a terrorist organisation destined to destabilise Crimea [2].
In the absence of a legitimate government in Turkey, a situation which has now lasted for more than a month, it is impossible to predict what will become of the country, but it is clear that the worst is possible.
What are the United States hoping to gain from Resolution 2235 ?
In the present context, we observe with anxiety the unanimous adoption by the Security Council of Resolution 2235. It has been agreed to create a mechanism for inquiry run conjointly by the OPCW and the UNO in order to determine who is using chemical weapons in Syria [3].
The investigators of the OPCW, who until now did not have a mandate to determine who is using chemical weapons, have established that at least 14 attacks using chlorine were perpetrated in 2014. The US ambassador claimed that these weapons were delivered by helicopter, which the « rebels » do not possess. In other words, the OPCW and the UNO were engaging the responsibility of the Syrian Arab Republic. However, a careful reading of the three preceding reports by the OPCW [4] reveals another possibility – these attacks may have been perpetrated by the Turkish army, as the Syrian ambassador claims. He also expressed his satisfaction that the resolution had been adopted.
Let us note that doubts about Turkey’s role are legitimate, taking into account that on the 11th May 2013, it organised a false-flag attack in Reyhanlı which killed fifty of its own citizens in order to accuse Syria, and that, on the 21st August 2013, it organised a chemical attack against the Ghouta in Damascus, once again in order to accuse Syria and attempt to drag NATO into war, and that in March 2014, the Turkish army entered the Syro-Armenian village of Kessab with al-Qaïda and the Islamic Army (pro-Saudi militia) to ransack the village and continue the genocide of the Armenian people.
The OPCW reports are already eight months old, but have only now given rise to this resolution. The five permanent members of the Security Coucil each have at their disposition a satellite system which enables them to determine the responsibility for these chemical attacks. In the event that the OPCW and the UNO were to establish the responsibility of Turkey, Mr. Erdoğan would become the scapegoat for the entire Syrian crisis.
The hardening of relations between Washington and Moscow
The US-Iran peace accord leaves Washington the latitude to concentrate on working to counter Moscow.
We mentioned earlier the transfer of Daesh jihadistes to Crimea by Ukraine and Turkey. Basically, this is no more than the reprise of the sabotage operations that were executed inside the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
More serious is the US attempt to use the destruction of flight MH17 to accuse Russia. On the 29th July, Washington presented the Security Council with a project for a resolution aimed at establishing an international penal Tribunal in order to judge the authors of this crime [5]. It was clearly a court created to condemn President Vladimir Putin, just as the special Tribunal had been created for Lebanon – using false testimony – to condemn Presidents Bachar el-Assad and Emile Lahoud.
Naturally enough, Russia opposed the project by using its veto. One can not avoid thinking of the proposition made by President Barack Obama to his Russian opposite number in 2011, promising to support him if he agreed to bring his Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, before an international court. There was talk at the time of holding the potential defendant responsible for the war in Chechnya, which had in fact been organised by Washington.
Thierry Meyssan is a French journalist and political activist. In 1994, he founded Voltaire Network and also created Project Ornicar, associations promoting freedom of expression and thinking, of which he is currently president. Translation
Europe is being overrun by refugees from Washington’s, and Israel’s, hegemonic policies in the Middle East and North Africa that are resulting in the slaughter of massive numbers of civilians. The inflows are so heavy that European governments are squabbling among themselves about who is to take the refugees. Hungary is considering constructing a fence, like the US and Israel, to keep out the undesirables. Everywhere in the Western media there are reports deploring the influx of migrants; yet nowhere is there any reference to the cause of the problem.
The European governments and their insouciant populations are themselves responsible for their immigrant problems. For 14 years Europe has supported Washington’s aggressive militarism that has murdered and dislocated millions of peoples who never lifted a finger against Washington. The destruction of entire countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, and now Syria and Yemen, and the continuing US slaughter of Pakistani civilians with the full complicity of the corrupt and traitorous Pakistani government, produced a refugee problem that the moronic Europeans brought upon themselves.
Europe deserves the problem, but it is not enough punishment for their crimes against humanity in support of Washington’s world hegemony.
In the Western world insouciance rules governments as well as peoples, and most likely also everywhere else in the world. It remains to be seen whether Russia and China have any clearer grasp of the reality that confronts them.
Here we have an American government so insouciant, and with nothing but tunnel vision, empowering the various elements that comprise Washington’s excuse for the “war on terror” and the destruction of several countries. Just as the idiot Europeans produce their own refugee problems, the idiot Americans produce their own terrorist problems. It is mindless. And there is no end to it.
Consider the insanity of the Obama regime’s policy toward the Soviet Union. Kissinger and Brzezinski, two of the left-wing’s most hated bogymen, are astonished at the total unawareness of Washington and the EU of the consequences of their aggression and false accusations toward Russia. Kissinger says that America’s foreign policy is in the hands of “ahistorical people,” who do not comprehend that “we should not engage in international conflicts if, at the beginning, we cannot describe an end.” Kissinger criticizes Washington and the EU for their misconception that the West could act in Ukraine in ways inconsistent with Russian interests and receive a pass from the Russian government.
As for the Idiotic claim that Putin is responsible for the Ukrainian tragedy, Kissinger says:
Kissinger is correct that Americans and their leaders are ahistorical. The US operates on the basis of a priori theories that justify American preconceptions and desires. This is a prescription for war, disaster, and the demise of humanity.
Even American commentators whom one would consider to be intelligent are ahistorical. Writing on OpEdNews (8-18-15) William Bike says that Ronald Reagan advocated the destruction of the Soviet Union. Reagan did no such thing. Reagan was respectful of the Soviet leadership and worked with Gorbachev to end the Cold War. Reagan never spoke about winning the Cold War, only about bringing it to an end. The Soviet Union collapsed as a consequence of Gorbachev being arrested by hardline communists, opposed to Gorbachev’s policies, who launched a coup. The coup failed, but it took down the Soviet government. Reagan had nothing to do with it and was no longer in office.
Some ahistorical Americans cannot tell the difference between the war criminals Clinton, Bush, Cheney, and Obama, and Jimmy Carter, who spent his life doing, and trying to do, good deeds. No sooner do we hear that the 90-year old former president has cancer than Matt Peppe regals us on CounterPunch about “Jimmy Carter’s Blood-Drenched Legacy” (8-18-15). Peppe describes Carter as just another hypocrite who professed human rights but had a “penchant for bloodshed.” What Peppe means is that Carter did not stop bloodshed initiated by foreigners abroad. In other words Carter failed as a global policeman. Peppe’s criticism of Carter, of course, is the stale and false neoconservative criticism of Carter.
Peppe, like so many others, shows an astonishing ignorance of the constraints existing policies institutionalized in government exercise over presidents. In American politics, interest groups are more powerful than the elected politicians. Look around you. The federal agencies created to oversea the wellbeing of the national forests, public lands, air and water are staffed with the executives of the very polluting and clear-cutting industries that the agencies are supposed to be regulating. Read CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair’s book, Born Under A Bad Sky, to understand that those who are supposed to be regulated are in fact doing the regulating, and in their interests. The public interest is nowhere in the picture.
Look away from the environment to economic policy. The same financial executives who caused the ongoing financial crisis resulting in enormous ongoing public subsidies to the private banking system, now into the eight year, are the ones who run the US Treasury and Federal Reserve.
Without a strong movement behind him, from whose ranks a president can staff an administration committed to major changes, the president is in effect a captive of the private interests who finance political campaigns. Reagan is the only president of our time who had even a semblance of a movement behind him, and the “Reaganites” in his administration were counterbalanced by the Bush Establishment Republicans.
During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a movement behind him consisting of New Dealers. Consequently, Roosevelt was able to achieve a number of overdue reforms such as Social Security.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt did not see himself as being in charge. In The Age of Acquiescence (2015), Steve Fraser quotes President Roosevelt telling Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau at the end of 1934 that “the people I have called the ‘money changers in the Temple’ are still in absolute control. It will take many years and possibly several revolutions to eliminate them.”
Eight decades later as Nomi Prins has made clear in All The Presidents’ Bankers (2014), the money changers are still in control. Nothing less than fire and the sword can dislodge them.
Yet, and it will forever be the case, America has commentators who really believe that a president can change things but refuses to do so because he prefers the way that they are.
Unless there is a major disaster, such as the Great Depression, or a lessor challenge, such as stagflation for which solutions were scarce, a president without a movement is outgunned by powerful private interest groups, and sometimes even if he has a movement.
Private interests were empowered by the Republican Supreme Court’s decision that the purchase of the US government by corporate money is the constitutionally protected exercise of free speech.
To be completely clear, the US Supreme Court has ruled that organized interest groups have the right to control the US government.
Under this Supreme Court ruling, how can the United States pretend to be a democracy?
How can Washington justify its genocidal murders as “bringing democracy” to the decimated?
Unless the world wakes up and realizes that total evil has the reins in the West, humanity has no future.
Last night, servicemen of the military commandant’s office of DPR detained a raid force of pro-Kiev militants at the Yasnoe settlement. A high activity of pro-Kiev infiltrators are observed at the whole contact line since last week.
Pro-Kiev artillery has been attempting to destroy a railroad haul connecting DPR with Ukraine. The Skotovskaya rail terminal is damaged. Train movements are temporary stopped. A real level of destruction is unknown.
Gorlvoka has continuing to stay under Ukrainian artillery fire. Pro-Kiev militants shell the town from Majorsk, Dzerjinsk, Novogorodskoe, Svetlodarsk. DPR Armed Forces have been exercising a coounter-battery fire and have repulsed a few of Ukrainian attacks.
From the direction of Avdeevvka, Ukrainian artillery shell Donetsk Airport and residential areas around it. The clashes are also going at Peski.
Yesterday, pro-Kiev militants attempted to claim the Spartak settlement but have failed because of actions of Novorossian warriors.
The Ukrainian pressure have raised at Mariinka. Sporadic clashes and artillery duels are there.
The Granitnoe settlement are under constant artillery fire from the direction of Kiev-controlled Volnovakha.
Some who made contact with it are reporting a burning sensation on their face and lips, while others are reporting a stinging sensation on their arms. Some have said they experienced an itchy sensation, according to a NetEase News report.
Meteorological experts said Monday that rainfall would no longer pose direct danger to people’s health, according to a CCTV News report.
However, authorities had expressed concern that the downpour, aside from hampering rescue efforts, would spread harmful substances across the city, after around 700 tons of sodium cyanide—a toxic chemical that creates a combustable substance when it meets with water—was found at the blast site.
Officials today said that at least 40 types of dangerous chemicals were detected at the blast zone, including 800 tons of ammonium nitrate and 500 tons of potassium nitrate, the Guardian reports.
Bao Jingling, chief engineer for the Tianjin Environmental Protection Bureau, previously said in an NBC Newsreport that “if there is rain, it will produce hydrogen cyanide, so we are monitoring it closely,” adding that the military’s anti-chemical warfare division had been sent to the site on Sunday and the situation “currently…isn’t very serious”.
Hydrogen cyanide gas is described by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as being a “rapidly fatal” toxic chemical that can reduce the body’s ability to use oxygen.
In preparation for the rain, authorities reportedly built cofferdams around a 100,000-square-meter core area of the explosions which will be continually reinforced to prevent contaminated water from flowing out, Xinhua said.
Local monitoring centers reported a normal air quality reading in the city, and the Tianjin deputy mayor in charge of work safety said at a press conference yesterday that sodium cyanide within a three-kilometer radius of the core blast site would be neutralized by yesterday evening.
A total of 114 people have been confirmed dead with 70 more missing after two huge explosions and one smaller blast ripped through a warehouse storing hazardous materials last Wednesday.
As you’re no doubt aware, the Fed is fond of using the research departments at its various branches to validate policy and analyze away bad economic outcomes. For instance, earlier this year, the San Francisco Fed came up with an academic justification for the now infamous double seasonally adjusted GDP print – they call it “residual seasonality.” Then there’s the NY Fed, where researchers recently took to the bank’s blog to explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, Treasury liquidity is “fairly favorable.”
Be that as it may, someone will occasionally say something really inconvenient – like when, back in April, the St. Louis Fed warned that the American Middle Class was “under more pressure than you think,” a situation the bank blamed on the diverging fortunes (literally) of the haves and the have nots in the post-crisis world. The implication – made clear in the accompanying graphics – was that QE was effectively eliminating the Middle Class.
Now, the very same St. Louis Fed (this time in the form of a white paper by the bank’s vice president Stephen D. Williamson), is out questioning the efficacy of QE when it comes to stoking inflation and boosting economic activity.
Williamson says the theory behind QE is “not well-developed”, and calls the evidence in support of Ben Bernanke’s views on the transmission mechanisms whereby asset purchases affect outcomes “mixed at best.”
“All of [the] research is problematic,” Williamson continues, as “there is no way to determine whether asset prices move in response to a QE announcement simply because of a signalling effect, whereby QE matters not because of the direct effects of the asset swaps, but because it provides information about future central bank actions with respect to the policy interest rate.” In other words, it could be that the market is just reading QE as a signal that rates will stay lower for longer and that read is what drives market behavior, not the actual bond purchases.
But the most damning critique of Bernanke’s response to the crisis is this:
There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed inflation and real economic activity. Indeed, casual evidence suggests that QE has been ineffective in increasing inflation. For example, in spite of massive central bank asset purchases in the U.S., the Fed is currently falling short of its 2% inflation target. Further, Switzerland and Japan, which have balance sheets that are much larger than that of the U.S., relative to GDP, have been experiencing very low inflation or deflation.
And then there’s this:
A Taylor-rule central banker may be convinced that lowering the central bank’s nominal interest rate target will increase inflation. This can lead to a situation in which the central banker becomes permanently trapped in ZIRP. With the nominal interest rate at zero for a long period of time, inflation is low, and the central banker reasons that maintaining ZIRP will eventually increase the inflation rate.But this never happens and, as long as the central banker adheres to a sufficiently aggressive Taylor rule, ZIRP will continue forever, and the central bank will fall short of its inflation target indefinitely. This idea seems to fit nicely with the recent observed behavior of the worldís central banks.
And this:
Thus, the Fed’s forward guidance experiments after the Great Recession would seem to have done more to sow confusion than to clarify the Fed’s policy rule.
So in sum, the vice President of the St. Louis Fed has taken a look around and discovered that in fact, not only have trillions in asset purchases not worked when it comes to creating “healthy” inflation and boosting growth in the US, these asset purchases haven’t worked anywhere they’ve been tried. Furthermore, he’s noticed that central bankers that adhere, in a perpetual state of Einsteinian insanity, to the Taylor principle, will never be able to raise rates and finally, he thinks that the more the Fed talks, the more confused the public gets about what it is the central bank intends to do.
We would agree on all accounts here, although when it comes to forward guidance and discerning what the Fed’s goal is, actions, as they say, speak far louder than words and with the S&P 500 having levitated some 200% since March of 2009, we don’t think anyone is truly “confused.”
It appears that the Russian government has made a mistake with regard to its approach to the breakaway Republics consisting of Russian peoples in former Russian territories who reject being governed by the anti-Russian coup government installed in Kiev by Washington. The Russian government could have ended the crisis by accepting the requests of these territories to be reunited with Russia. Instead, the Russian government opted for a diplomatic approach—hands off Donetsk and Luhansk—and this diplomacy has now failed. The coup government in Kiev never had any intention of keeping the Minsk agreement, and Washington had no intention of permitting the Minsk agreement to be kept. Apparently, even the realistic Putin succumbed to wishful thinking.
The Minsk agreement, which the Russian government backed for diplomatic reasons, has served to allow Washington time to train, equip, and mobilize much stronger forces now preparing to resume the attack on Donetsk and Luhansk. If these Republics are overrun, Vladimir Putin and Russia itself will lose all credibility. Whether Putin realizes it or not, Russia’s credibility is at stake on the Donetsk frontier, not in diplomatic meetings with Washington’s European vassals who are powerless to act outside of Washington’s control. If Washington prevails in Ukraine, Russia and China can forget about the BRICS and Eurasian trade groups offering alternatives to Washington’s economic hegemony. Washington intends to ensure its hegemony by prevailing in Ukraine.
In his description of the situation, the leader of the Donetsk Republic appears to be worn down by having lost the advantages over Ukraine that Donetsk had prior to the failed Minsk agreement:http://russia-insider.com/en/moscows-top-man-donbass-says-all-out-war-will-start-soon-video/ri9255Perhaps he is thinking of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when Cassius says to Brutus, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries.”
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.
President Putin’s late-July decree to destroy all sanctioned EU foodstuffs caught at the Russian border has incited a flurry of backlash, even among some typically Russian-friendly foreign journalists. Russia Insider’s Danielle Ryan, for example, documents not only instances of domestic criticism over the initiative, but also personally laments that it’s “wrong” and “not right”. It’s completely understandable why the publicized destruction of food is appalling to many people worldwide, but the fact is that they’re largely missing the deeper reasons why this is happening, and that’s partly due to the Russian authorities not properly communicating them.
It’s not simply about saving the administrative resources and time that have to be directed to resending the products back to their original destination, nor in depriving a sanctions violator of the opportunity to profitably resell their said contraband back in the EU or elsewhere. There’s also more at play than just supporting Russian domestic producers and ending the country’s foreign food reliance. What’s really happening is that Russia is publicly defending itself from a clever form of psychological-economic warfare being waged against it by the EU, and it’s doing so at this specific time in order to limit the ability of this offensive to interfere with the upcoming general elections in September.
Full Transparency
The first thing that needs to be addressed is the reason why the Russian government is engaging in such a highly publicized destruction of the banned EU foodstuffs. The point here is to hold Russian customs officials to full accountability by retaining a retrievable record of their activity and transparently demonstrating to the people that the law is being complied with. Things brings about another point, which is that it’s impossible to have carried out such an action “quietly” since the whole point of the matter is to enforce a law that was publicly signed by the Russian President. As such, there’s obviously an accessible record of Putin having agreed to the decree, and correspondingly, investigative journalists (both Russian and foreign) that would naturally conduct follow-up reporting on it and monitor its implementation. Under such conditions, it would be scandalous for the government to ‘hide’ the very same activity that it had just recently committed to in public. Even more so, it would have been a conspiracy of epic proportions if the original decree had been ‘secret’ and pictures and/or footage of the Russian government burning and burying food were leaked to the international media. All things considered, this is why Moscow decided to publicly and proudly demonstrate to the world that the President’s law is actively being followed.
Prevent Dependence On Illegal ‘Humanitarian Aid’
The most common criticism surrounding Russia’s controversial measure is that the government should donate the smuggled food to those in need, perhaps even to the refugees in Donbass, instead of just destroying it. This well-intentioned and altruistic perspective forgets that that there are concrete health concerns behind the government giving its citizens or other recipients food products of unverified quality, but that’s not all. The main issue is that doing so would only be a short-term solution to whatever problem it was meant to address (be it poverty in Russia or helping war refugees in Donbass), albeit one with major external strings attached that are unacceptable for any self-respecting and patriotic authorities to fully agree to. To begin with, if Russia gave the food to anyone else, it would merely be acting as a conduit for de-facto ‘humanitarian aid’ from the EU to its population, and as with all examples of this type of international assistance, the donor’s image would be enhanced at the government’s expense and could easily be exploited by Brussels for soft power gains. It would also undermine Russia’s message that its domestic issues (even poverty) don’t need foreign interference to solve.
Moving along, another primary reason behind Moscow’s refusal to give the confiscated food away is that it establishes a dependency relationship between the recipients and the EU donor that could be broken at any time. Should the EU and its related companies decide to stop breaking the law and trying to smuggle their products into Russia, the civil beneficiaries would suddenly be left without the resources that they had previously come to expect, possibly even leading to unrest and discontent with the government intermediaries that had previously facilitated the ‘donations’.
Russia in that case would be forced to ‘pick up the slack’ for a commitment that it didn’t agree to nor budget for (amid a time of decreased revenue, it must be pointed out), and worse, the period of EU ‘humanitarian aid’ would have set unrealistic standards for the recipients. They would have come to expect that Moscow would continue giving them the same type of camembert cheese and other high-quality luxury foodstuffs that the EU was providing via the seized products, which in any instance is unfeasible for any government to indefinitely pay for and provide to its impoverished citizens. The EU is calculating that the comparatively lower quality of Russian-provided assistance to its poor could then achieve the same destabilizing consequences that Moscow had initially sought to avoid by continuing the unsolicited ‘aid’ in the first place.
Ensure A Smooth Election Process
The final issue that Moscow seeks to remedy by destroying the EU contraband is to ensure smooth regional elections on 13 September. Had there not been any visible decree such as the one that prompted the controversy, then citizens may have questioned their government’s commitment to its own counter-sanction policy, as banned EU food has still been slipping through the borders regardless. This will likely still remain the case to some extent (it’s impossible to stop everything from getting through, after all), but by publicly demonstrating its resolve in dealing with the issue, it’s thought that this will decrease any potential voter apathy in the upcoming polls or possible dissatisfaction with the ruling United Russia party.
On the other hand, there are certainly consequences to this patriotic measure, as theWestern media onslaught attests. The US and its EU allies have once more been caught unaware by the fortitude of the Russian government, hence why they’re reacting in such a hysterical manner (much as they did to Crimea’s seemingly unexpected reunification). The objective here is to intensify the information war against Russia by promoting the false idea that Moscow is depriving an unspecified amount of starving citizens from being fed by seized EU foodstuffs. The preconditioned foreign audience is expected to use their imagination in envisioning thousands of disgruntled people queuing up for food that they won’t ever receive (a hybrid mix of the late-Soviet-era bread lines and the recent untrue stories about a ‘food scarcity’ ever since the counter-sanctions). There’s also a domestic component at work here too, since external actors hope that Russian voters will be so upset by the decree and its coverage in the international (Western) media that they’ll vote against United Russia next month.
Concluding Thoughts
Russia’s decision to destroy seized EU foodstuffs has provoked a loud reaction from many forces, not least of which is the West, which is gleeful to use the highly publicized opportunity to denigrate the Russian authorities. It’s surprising then thatsome of those very same outlets are giving space to voices that suggest the food be given to those in need, but this just confirms that the West does in fact have a stake in Russian citizens establishing an indirect ‘humanitarian aid’ dependency on the EU. Moreover, there’s definitely a sizeable proportion of the population that is unhappy with the decree, but it’s now becoming clearer that the US and its allies aim to steer them towards expressing their dissatisfaction politically through the upcoming regional elections next month. The government isn’t likely to enact a policy reversal on the matter so soon, no matter what domestic opinion indicates at this point, since that could be manipulated into being presented as a capitulation to international pressure (which wouldn’t be the case at all, but would definitely be how the West would market it as).
The general motif still remains the same, however, and it’s that the EU has taken to using its sanctioned foodstuffs as an asymmetrical weapon against the Russian government and its people, attempting to push through tons of illegal product with the very intent that some of it will be seized and consequently end up furthering the psychological-economic war that’s Washington and Brussels have unleashed.
Andrew Korybko is the political analyst and journalist for Sputnik who currently lives and studies in Moscow, exclusively for ORIENTAL REVIEW.
On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, articles are appearing everywhere discussing the historical, philosophical, scientific, public health and social meaning of this event (I almost wrote ‘war crime’). The bombings can be extrapolated onward in time through the atmospheric testing fallout and Chernobyl, to the more recent contamination in Japan after Fukushima.
Today, the analysis of the health risks from the Japanese A-Bombs is being cleverly twisted to provide a rationale for the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not just some historical tableaux that we can weep crocodile tears over, and discuss as socio-historic phenomena. They are here today, present as ghosts, in all the manipulations and devious calculations made by the international radiation risk agencies and nuclear-industry scientists giving results that continue to permit the release into the environment of the same deadly substances that emerged for the first time in 1945.
I am currently presenting a case for the British Atomic Test veterans in the Royal Courts of Justice in London. The case pivots on the faulty radiation and health risk model that is based on the Lifespan Study of the Japanese A-Bomb survivors. This model, of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), is used by the Ministry of Defense in the courts to deny responsibility for the cancers in the Nuclear Test Veterans and the congenital disease in their children and grandchildren.
However, the Hiroshima model also predicts that those exposed to radiation and fallout from future nuclear “exchanges”would suffer little downstream genetic damage. Thus the Drs Strangelove and the generals can argue that a nuclear war is winnable and that the increases in cancer and genetic effects in those exposed to Depleted Uranium (DU) in Iraq somehow don’t exist.
The bogus analysis of the health outcomes from Hiroshima has left the world with a major public health problem. In an effort to refute the mounting evidence, the ICRP model was launched by the Lancet to coincide with the Hiroshima anniversary. A whole issue is given over to the presentation of wacko accounts of the health consequences of Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima through articles (at least partly) written by those who hold the reins of the ICRP chariot. The key issue is accurately described at the start:
The linkages between Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima are thus more than just symbolic, having shaped current health management practices, and the institutions that run them, as well as public responses to these events.
Correct: However, these current health management practices are wildly in error.
Everyone has seen the photos of Hiroshima. The primitive Uranium-235 bomb ‘Little Boy’ that fell on Hiroshima with an explosive power of 13 kilotons (13,000 tons of TNT, the conventional chemical explosive) flattened the city and killed some 80,000 people of which 45,000 died on the first day. Within four months the death toll was about 140,000. Three days after Hiroshima, a 20kT Plutonium bomb ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki (Why? Did the US think perhaps the Hiroshima bomb might have been overlooked?). Both weapons were mostly made of Uranium. Note that. Since then, from 1950, a study of the survivors by the US funded Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission ABCC (and later the Radiation Effects Research Foundation) has defined the relationship between radiation dose and cancer.
In passing, recall that the explosive power was 13 kilotons (Anyone who wants nightmares should buy the standard work:The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, by Samuel Glasstone, the physical chemist. The more recent versions of this book have a nifty little plastic calculator in the back where you may, by rotating the bezel, inform yourself of the radii of blast, radiation dose, building destruction etc. for any size of bomb). The US has spent lots of money and time blowing up stuff in the Nevada and Pacific test sites to obtain these data. Modern thermonuclear warheads, of which there are currently some 15,000, pack about 800kT. Just one of these jobs would put paid to most of New York, Tehran or Jerusalem. I visualize some poor civil defense chief sitting in a shelter somewhere desperately twisting the scales on this pretty “Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer” (developed by the Lovelace Research Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico) whilst waiting for the ground to disappear.
The problem we have in the world in 2015 is that the economic system and power relations between countries encourages those taking big decisions to think in terms of geopolitical strategies that include the use of nuclear weapons. There are potential resource wars; there are food-production issues following changes in global weather patterns, there are technological developments in what were historically manipulatable countries. Nuclear weapons are now in the hands of nine nations including three which are not party to the non-proliferation treaty (and why should they be?): India, Pakistan and North Korea.
Negotiations with Iran are currently argued to be “of tremendous importance” in a region where Israel has the nuclear potential to wipe out all the local Arab states at a sitting. The Russians have massive nuclear capability and are being baited on their borders in Ukraine by NATO and those who control NATO. This shit-stirring now has moved to the Baltic States. I live in Latvia, and this Spring I saw a new tank with a Latvian flag rolling though the center of Ropazi, a small town 40km west of Riga near where I live. Every day, the sky overhead had big helicopters and transport aircraft, donated to the Latvians by the US. Why? The Baltic States and Poland are conscripting armies to defend the motherland against invasion by the Russians. What’s going on? Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, my grandmother would say. Let us hope not.
In all the high level strategic thinking that is associated with this nuclear warmongering, the post attack population death yields from fallout are computed according to the ICRP risk model. But that Hiroshima model is a chimeric construction, built in the Cold War to back up the atmospheric testing. The observable effects (increases in infant mortality, the 1980s cancer epidemic) were covered up following a 1959 agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, which left the IAEA, the nuclear physicists, the bomb makers, the deniers of Chernobyl and Fukushima effects, in charge of the research into health. And so it remains today with the Lancet article. The health effects of the atmospheric tests is written (in part, we assume) by particle physicist Richard Wakeford, ex-head of research of British Nuclear Fuels at Sellafield, nuclear industry representative on the UK CERRIE committee, member of the ICRP, adviser to the Japanese on Fukushima, and so forth.
The evidence from real studies of the offspring of the test veterans, and the soldiers and civilians exposed to Depleted Uranium, is that a nuclear war will be the end of life on earth as we know it. The test veterans have a 10-fold excess risk of children with birth defects, 9-fold in the grandchildren. Although millions will be blasted away, the real outcome will be global sterility, cancer and malformation. All the Mad Max stuff but worse: Hollywood got it right.
Evidence and errors in the Hiroshima lifespan studies
If you find that there is a doubling of breast cancer or child leukemia in those living downwind of a nuclear power station, at an “estimated dose” less than external background, the ICRP model tells you that the effect cannot be due to the releases from the power station because the dose is too low. The epidemiologist Martin Tondel found in 2004 that there was a significant excess cancer risk in Northern Sweden after Chernobyl. He was told to shut up because what he found was impossible: In other words, the dose was too low. The same in Belarus and Ukraine where my colleague Alexey Yablokov has collected together an enormous compilation of peer reviewed evidence of appalling effects. Most recently we see the Hiroshima-based denials in the case of thyroid cancer in Fukushima prefecture (see below).
The study groups for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) probe were assembled in 1950. Thus there were 5 years in which those who were badly affected by the radiation could die. The study was of a “healthy survivor” group, something which the late Dr Alice Stewart demonstrated. But that is not the worst accusation. There were roughly 109,000 individuals recruited, including six dose groups from 0 to 200 rad (0-2+ Gy) and two Not in City (NIC) groups, the 4,607 Early Entrants (NIC-EE) and 21,915 Late Entrants (NIC-LE). These NIC groups should have been the controls, but they were not. If you look at the reports you find they were abandoned as being “too healthy.” The final exposure groups were defined by how far they were from the detonation.
But all groups were exposed to residual radioactivity from the bombs. The US and ABCC denied (and still denies) this. There were internal exposures to all the groups whatever their external dose had been at the detonation. The origin was the “black rain” which contained Uranium-235, Uranium-238 and particularly Uranium-234, which is the missing exposure, and is probably responsible for most of the cancer effects in all the survivors. We know that the Uranium was there because it was measured by Japanese scientists in 1983. A recently declassified US document tabulates the enormous U-234 content of the enriched Uranium used in the bombs, codename: Oralloy. The Uranium nanoparticles in the Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) black rain were available for inhalation by all the exposure groups in the ruins of Hiroshima for years after the bomb. All the bombs were made of Uranium, about 1 ton per Megaton yield. For all those tests in Nevada, the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, Christmas Island, the results were the same: Down came the nanoparticles to be inhaled by anyone nearby and distant.
Why does this matter? New research has been carried out on Uranium. We find that Uranium targets DNA through chemical affinity. This causes terrible and anomalous genetic damage, out or all proportion to its “dose” as calculated by ICRP. Other fallout components also bind chemically to DNA, e.g. Strontium-90, Barium-140. Those exposed: Uranium miners, Gulf Veterans, Test Veterans, DU civilians, Nuclear Uranium workers, Nuclear Site downwinders, all suffer chromosome damage, cancer, leukemia, heart disease, the works. All this is published, as are the results of laboratory and theoretical studies showing mechanisms. But in the Lancet: nothing.
SL Simon and A Bouville who wrote the article on the health effects of the nuclear testing did not even mention Uranium there, nor in their epic 2010 study of the Marshall Islands exposures. The Nevada site data that they used for their baseline calculations ignored it totally. In 2012, I made a presentation for the Marshall Islanders at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, attacking the Simon et al analysis. In their Lancet nuclear test article, Simon and Bouville major on Iodine effects. So let’s look at those.
Scientific Evidence
In Fukushima Prefecture, surveys have confirmed 103 thyroid cancers in 380,000 individuals between 0-18 years old (25 or so are still being checked out). The Lancet article by Wakeford et al. presents an excess Relative Risk culled from the Hiroshima studies of 0.6 per Sievert (Fig 2 p 473). In the very same issue, the maximum thyroid dose was given as 18mSv with the median dose as 0.67mSv. So in the two years of screening, if everyone screened got the maximum thyroid dose of 18mSv we should expect an increase of 0.018 x 0.6 = 0.011, a 1.1 percent increase in the background rate. This background is about 1 per 100,000 per year or 7.6 in two years in 380,000. So the radiation should increase this to 7.7 cases (i.e. one extra case in 10 years). There are 103, that is 95 more cases than expected, an error in the ICRP model of 95/0.14 = 678-fold. That is, there are 678 times more thyroid cancers than the Hiroshima-based ICRP model predicts.
This calculation is based on what was written in the Lancet – but nobody made the calculation. This on its own should show the authorities (and the public) that the game is up. But instead of doing the simple calculation, another article in the Lancet, written by Geoff Watts, praises the work of those at Fukushima Medical University, who are busy telling everyone that the increases in thyroid cancer cannot be caused by the radiation. In other words, once again, the predictions from Hiroshima are believed, rather than the evidence in front of their eyes. It’s a kind of mass hypnosis (or maybe not).
In case you think this is all mad stuff, there does at last seem to be some measure of concern evolving in this area of internal radiation, though no one in the Lancet articles mentions it. The European Union radiation research organization MELODI has finally moved into action, led by the French radiation protection agency IRSN. The matter was raised (by me) at the inaugural MELODI conference in Paris in 2011, but nothing seemed to develop. I said that there are likely to be dose estimation problems associated with internal exposure to nuclides which bind to DNA, and particularly Uranium; that this potentially falsified the Hiroshima risk model. A hugely expensive European research project has now been proposed. It is CURE: Concerted Uranium Research Europe. In the report launching this development in March 2015 the authors wrote: a large scale integrated collaborative project will be proposed to improve the characterization of the biological and health effects associated with uranium internal contamination in Europe. In the future, it might be envisaged to extend collaborations with other countries outside the European Union, to apply the proposed approach to other internal emitters and other exposure situations of internal contamination, and to open the reflections to other disciplines interested in the effects of internal contaminations by radionuclides.
In the future, Hiroshima should not be remembered for the destruction of its inhabitants so much as for being the flag for the epidemiological cover-up of the biggest public health scandal in human history, whose victims number hundreds of millions – in cancer deaths and miscarriages, infant deaths, loss of fertility and the introduction of genomic instability to all creatures on Earth. Let us pray that it will not be allowed to sanction the final nuclear exchange, on the mistaken prediction that such an event will be winnable.
Christopher Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia. See also: www.chrisbusbyexposed.org, www.greenaudit.org and www.llrc.org.
One of the rare, sane, objective accounts of the tragedies of internecine warfare in the former Yugoslavia was presented by former British Foreign Secretary, Lord David Owen, whose “Balkan Odyssey” recounts his intimate personal knowledge of almost every aspect of that horrific struggle, and places it in the historic context required for understanding the xenophobic passions that have sometimes characterized those atrocities.
We all learnt at school that on 28 June 1914 the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated while visiting Sarajevo. Yet I suspect I am not alone in never realizing that the visit was made with deliberate Austrian provocation on Serbia’s National Day, comparable – according to the historian A.J.P. Taylor – to sending a member of the British royal family to Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day at the height of the troubles. On 23 July the Austrian government, knowing that the assassination had been done by a Bosnian Serb with the nationalist motive of achieving a greater Serbia, sent a threatening and humiliating ultimatum to the Serbian government. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, offered to mediate and attempted to persuade the German government to restrain the incompetent militarists in Vienna. Despite the Serbian government accepting virtually every demand and satisfying Kaiser Wilhelm sufficient for him to comment ‘every reason for war disappears,’ on 28 July Vienna declared war and the Austro-Hungarian armies started to bombard Belgrade. Within six weeks Grey was declaring ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe,’ and a war which claimed 8 million lives in Europe had begun.
In April 1941 Germany attacked Yugoslavia and the German Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, killing between 5,000 and 17,000 civilians. Hitler proceeded rapidly to dismember Yugoslavia, giving parts of it to Nazi Germany’s allies Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The Nazis also endorsed the creation of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which included Bosnia-Herzegovina, divided into German and Italian spheres of influence, with the Croat Fascist Pavelic as its puppet ruler. Over the next few years Pavelic and his armed Ustashas committed atrocities and massacres of an unspeakable kind. Later Nuremberg judged what happened to the Serbs at the hands of the Croats and the Germans as genocide. No one knows exactly how many Serbs were killed The Serbs say three-quarters of a million, the Germans 350,000. Whatever the number, it is hard to deny that these killings are an essential part of the background to the wars of disintegration today in the former Yugoslavia. ..Although there were cases of Ustasha atrocities against Muslims, there were also other incidents where Muslims were encouraged by the authorities to massacre Serbs.
Carrying a peace plan designed to stem the hemorrhage of wars in the disintegrated Yugoslavia, Lord David Owen, a man of brilliance and intellectual integrity arrived at the United Nations, early in 1993, after confronting an obediently indoctrinated editorial board of The New York Times, where he denounced their servile demonization of the Serbs: Lord Owen scathingly declared:
“Don’t speak to me of Serb atrocities! All sides are guilty of committing atrocities.” As a result of his principled refusal to get on board the bandwagon demonizing the Serbs, Lord Owen was savagely attacked by the Times editorial Board. Appalled and disgusted by their crude attitude, David Owen walked out of that first meeting stating: “When you are prepared to behave in a civilized manner, I am prepared to discuss this.”
Lord Owen’s voice of reason and objectivity, and his determination to negotiate a peaceful end to the bloodshed in the Balkan wars was sabotaged by those whose geopolitical agenda was impeded by the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, and the efforts by Lord David Owen and former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to achieve a negotiated settlement of the crisis. Lord Owen was unpopular with the mainstream media, which was promulgating the US-NATO agenda, obsequiously cultivating Bosnian President Alia Izetbegovic, whom they, with great familiarity nicknamed: “Izzy,” while waiting sometimes twelve hours on a Sunday at the VIP entrance to the Secretary-General’s office, hoping for further opportunities to ingratiate themselves with him.
David Owen’s possessed an extraordinary capacity to illuminate even the most complex and obscure situations in the former Yugoslavia, and his great personal familiarity with the warring territories’ geographic terrain was the basis for his fascinating explanation of the imperative need for extreme caution in the use of air strikes. He stated:
“in densely forested areas, you think you are bombing a heavy weapons depot, and discover that instead you have just destroyed an entire village.” Lord Owen’s allegiance to fact and truth and peace was an impediment to another, and alien geopolitical agenda, and a mere 5 months after his arrival at the UN I was informed by a Washington Post colleague that “Lord Owen is no longer welcome on this side of the Atlantic.”
Having dispatched Lord Owen and the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, the way was now clear for further bloodshed in the Balkans, especially the events raised at the recent UN Security Council meeting SC11961, The Situation in “Bosnia and Herzogovina.” Russia vetoed the draft resolution put forth that day, which stated, among other allegations:
Agrees that acceptance of the tragic events at Srebrenica as genocide is a prerequisite for reconciliation, calls upon political leaders on all sides to acknowledge and accept the fact of proven crimes as established by the courts, and in this context, condemns denial of this genocide as hindering efforts towards reconciliation, and recognizes also that continued denial is deeply distressing for the victims.
China abstained on the draft resolution, with Ambassador Liu Jieyi stating:
“Currently, Security Council members still have grave concerns about the draft resolution to commemorate the Srebrenica event (S/2015/508). To force a vote on a draft resolution on which major differences still remain is not in conformity with national reconciliation within Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the region at large. It will also affect the unity of the members of the Council. China believes that the council members can continue their exchange of views on the draft resolution, but should refrain from hasty actions.”
Before the vote, Russian Ambassador Churkin stated:
“The British draft resolution immediately aroused an extremely painful reaction in Bosnia and Herzogovina and beyond. The diametrically opposed proposals coming from the various entities in Bosnia and Herzogovina serve to illustrate that the draft resolution before us will not promote peace in the Balkans, but will instead doom the region to tension and make the prospects for sustainable peace ever more remote…Given that there is no consensus on this issue in Bosnia and Herzogovina itself – as the Council is aware, neither in the country’s Parliament or among the members of the Presidency – the Council’s adoption of this draft resolution in its present form would be completely counterproductive and lead to greater tension in the region….We therefore appeal to the authors of the draft resolution and to you, Mr. President, not to put the draft resolution to the vote. Otherwise, we will be forced to vote against it for the reasons I have set out here..”
The United States Ambassador stated:
“I was a 24 year old reporter in July 1995 living in Sarajevo when the Bosnian Serbs made their move on Srebrenica. I was there when, a few days after the Srebrenica safe area fell, a colleague first told me about reports of mass executions. ‘No!’ was all I could say. ‘No!’”
The US Ambassador was evidently ignorant of facts documented by Lord David Owen, which would have tempered her self-righteous and melodramatic remarks: (page 105 of “Balkan Odyssey”)
“I sent a personal telegram to Robin Renwick in Washington which spelt out the issues and my frustration with the Clinton administration very frankly: ‘We have this Administration briefing the press in a way that could not but stiffen those Muslims who want to continue the war. We have Sacirbey openly telling everyone that the US Administration has said that they should not feel any need to sign the map. We know that Tudjman had formal representations from the US against the Croats putting any pressure on the Muslims to sign up for our package.’ The telegram also referred to the most flagrant and best-documented episode of Muslim army units provoking the Serbs to fire on their fellow Muslims. An UNMO team near Kosovo hospital in Sarajevo had witnessed a Bosnian government mortar crew set up in the grounds of the hospital and fire over the hospital into a Serb area. They had quickly packed up and gone, only for the UNMOs to see a television crew arrive and then record the retaliatory Serb shelling of the hospital. It was the very hospital that I had visited the month before and which had so shocked me with its shell holes in the recovery room. I asked General Morillon why the UN had not gone public on the issue; he wanted the truth out but said ‘we’ve got to live here.’ ..But I found this particular Muslim provocation, involving the very hospital about the shelling of which I had personally protested strongly to General Mladic a few weeks before, especially troubling. Even at that time there was a feeling among some in UNPROFOR that the albeit only a small element in the continuous sniping in the central part of Muslim held Sarajevo, was being undertaken by Muslim units firing on their own people. Those suspicions were never confirmed until August 1995 when a French UN team pinpointed some of the sniping to a building which they knew was controlled by the Bosnian government forces.”
Owen later stated:
“Against all the odds, even against my own expectations, we have more or less got a settlement but we have a problem. We can’t get the Muslims on board. And that’s largely the fault of the Americans, because the Muslims won’t budge while they think Washington may come into it on their side any day now. What do they want down there, a war that goes on and on?”
During the UN Security Council meeting on Bosnia and Herzegovina, the US Ambassador, selectively choosing the “genocides” she condemns, stated: “If the mothers of the boys executed in Srebrenica – boys executed just because they were Bosnian Muslims – were present today, they would ask how anybody could abstain on their reality,” (clearly a swipe at China), “but, far worse, they would ask how any country could use the privilege of permanent membership on the Council to negate entirely what has happened to them.”
The then 24 year old US Ambassador in Sarajevo in 1995 was evidently ignorant of, or flagrantly ignored the facts documented by the more impartial Lord David Owen: (Page 352, “Balkan Odyssey”): “The Croatian attack into Western Slavonia in the Western UNPA in early May 1995 resulted in 15,000 Croatian Serb refugees fleeing across the border into the Banja Luka district. The Croatian government attack on the Krajina in early August 1995 created the biggest single flood of refugees – over 150,000 Croatian Serbs – in the break-up of Yugoslavia….in the three and a half months from May to August 1995 the map of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was dramatically changed. The loss of life and casualties from the fighting were accompanied by appalling atrocities and ethnic cleansing by all parties on a scale that we had not seen before in such a concentrated period of time.”
Following the vote, the Chinese Ambassador stated:
“China notes that the draft resolution introduced by some countries on the commemoration of the Srebrenica event has given rise to controversy within Bosnia and the countries of the region, and that some Council members have strong reservations on the draft. In such circumstances, forcing a vote on a contentious draft resolution goes against the spirit of promoting reconciliation within Bosnia and Herzegovina and among regional countries, and undermines unity among the Council members. China regrets that, and was therefore compelled to abstain in the voting on the draft resolution.”
The West’s attempt to demonize the Serbs, a loyal ally of Russia, is discredited by that most courageous and honorable Englishman, Lord David Owen, who recognized, both that blame and responsibility must be shared by all parties to those deadly conflicts, and that there was a historic context that could never be ignored, which fueled the hatreds. As Jews could never forget Auschwitz, and the genocide called the “holocaust,” as Armenians could never forget the massacre by the Turks, which the UN has declined to describe as genocide, so the Serbs and the world should never forget the Jasenovic Concentration Camp, where more than half a million Serbs were hideously murdered, with the blessing of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII. The Nuremberg Tribunals described the massacre of the Serbs during World War II as genocide.
Probably the most relevant objection to the draft resolution was put forth by the Russian Ambassador when he stated:
“We recently marked the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war in Viet Nam. Why did we not hold a Security Council meeting to commemorate that? Why was no draft resolution presented to condemn the carpet-bombing of Hanoi, the use of napalm, or the massacre in My Lai led by Lieutenant Calley, who was pardoned by the President of the United States? We also recently marked the tenth anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom, as a result of which over a million people may have perished and the entire region remains in crisis to this very day. Why have the United States and the United Kingdom not suggested that the Security Council adopt a resolution on that topic, in which events could be called by their rightful names? The problem is that the humanism of these delegations can be switched on and off depending on political circumstances, which undermines our trust in their statements and actions.”
Analysis of the 30 September 2013 BBC Panorama documentary ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ and related BBC News reports, contending that sequences filmed by BBC staff and others at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of an incendiary bomb attack on a school in Urm Al-Kubra are largely, if not entirely, staged.
Introduction
On 29 August 2013, as the UK House of Commons vote on possible military intervention in Syria was underway [1], BBC News at Ten broadcast a report by Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway which claimed that a Syrian fighter jet had dropped an incendiary bomb containing a “napalm-type” substance – possibly thermite – on the playground of an Aleppo school.
The report contained harrowing scenes of teenage boys and young men, their skin apparently in tatters, racing into what the report describes as “a basic hospital funded by handouts” to be treated for burns. In one particularly disturbing scene a tableau of young men writhe, drool and groan, seemingly in great distress.
Alleged victim Ahmed Darwish appears to await instruction before turning to address the camera
On further viewings, however, this scene in particular is strikingly odd. The young men are initially quiet and static. The central figure (Mohammed Asi) looks directly into the camera for several moments before raising his arm, at which point the group instantly becomes animated and starts moaning in unison.
Asi begins to stagger and lurch; the boy in the black vest suddenly pitches onto his side, briefly looking up again in the same direction as the others before ultimately slumping onto his front; the boy in red (Anas Said Ali) raises his head and peers quizzically around, while the boy in the white shirt rises effortlessly to his feet before pulling up a chair. [2] As the camera pulls back a boy in a yellow ‘Super-9’ t-shirt (Lutfi Arsi) rises from the floor, flailing his head and torso and rolling his eyes as a team of medics sweeps in. Some images from the sequence are reproduced below. [3]
This and other questionable elements in this brief report prompted my first letter to the BBC on 4 October 2013.
While I was completing this letter, on 30 September 2013, the BBC broadcast a follow-up news report shortly prior to the transmission of the Panorama special Saving Syria’s Children the same evening.
Comparing the 29 August and 30 September reports a discrepancy in the soundtrack was apparent. In the first, Dr Rola Hallam (her face covered by a mask) had referred to “napalm”, in the second she said “chemical weapon”. I commented on this in the PS to my letter. The audio editing was subsequently discussed by former UK ambassador and blogger Craig Murray here and here. [4]Speculation on this point has since been widespread (see for example this RT report). My own concern remains on the evidence of wider fabrication in the hospital scenes.
The BBC’s initial response of 2 December 2013 dealt largely with the editing of Dr Rola Hallam’s words. My correspondence with the BBC has continued. Some of the main points which have arisen are as follows.
According to the BBC’s reports the alleged attack took place on Monday 26 August 2013. [5] Accounts of the time of the alleged bombing span a range of six hours.
A Human Rights Watch report which the BBC cited in its correspondence with me states (p12) that the attack occurred “around midday”; the same HRW report links to a further report by the Violations Documentation Center in Syria – a regularly cited BBC source – which claims (p4) the attack took place at 2.00pm and quotes an activist who says he first heard rumours of a “chemical attack” at 3.00pm.
‘Saving Syria’s Children’ reporter Ian Pannell has categorically stated that the attack happened “at around 5.30pm at the end of the school day”. Notably, this is contradicted by Pannell’s sole BBC colleague on the programme, its cameraman, director and producer Darren Conway, who has indicated that the alleged victims he filmed at Atareb hospital – some miles from the location of the attack – began arriving “between three and five”. Video of the Frontline Club event at which this contradiction arose remains unpublished: the Frontline’s justification for this change in its usual policy appears unpersuasive.
Another alleged eyewitness claims the attack may have occurred as late as 6pm.
‘Saving Syria’s Children’ cameraman, director and producer Darren Conway at the Frontline club on 15 October 2014, responding to a question about the time of the alleged 26 August 2013 “playground napalm bomb”: “It was the end of the day, yeah, I mean I don’t remember the exact time… …I would say it was around, I don’t know, between three and five, something like that.” (Footage filmed privately http://1drv.ms/1DfBr2T). Conway is speaking from his perspective as having been present at Atareb Hospital as the alleged victims arrived; Conway’s sole BBC colleague on “Saving Syria’s Children”, reporter Ian Pannell, has categorically stated that the alleged attack on the school in Urm Al-Kubra – some miles away from Atareb – occurred “at around 5.30pm at the end of the school day”. See http://bit.ly/1A1x62B.
A series of eighteen photographs showing two alleged victims originally appeared on the photo journalism website Demotix dated 25 August 2013. Demotix later amended the date of the photographs to 26 August. When the images were dated 25 August, Ian Pannell denied that they featured victims from his report [6]; after the date had been changed, the BBC acknowledged thatthey did.
Conflicting accounts of first victims
At 31 minutes in Saving Syria’s Children Dr Saleyha Ahsan is shown attending to the first alleged victim – a baby, accompanied by his father. Ian Pannell’s narration at this point states “no-one’s quite sure what’s happened.” Only subsequently do the “dozens” of other alleged victims begin to arrive. This sequence of events is portrayed in several other accounts, including others given by Dr Ahsan.
However in an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC on 27 November 2013 Dr Ahsan gives an entirely contradictory account (from 02:38):
“It was quite a quiet day and I was beginning to hink ‘ooh gosh I’ve really got my timing wrong ‘cause what’s the point in me being here if I’m not going to be helping out?’ and then suddenly, standing to my left I just saw this rather strange vision I ju… I I felt as if I was having an out of body experience because I couldn’t quite work out what I was seeing, there was a boy, covered in this strange white dust, had wide staring eyes, his clothes were hanging off him, and he had this huge laceration on the side of his face, and his skin looked like it had areas of burn, and he was saying in a very calm voice ‘where shall I go okhty?’ which means sister in Arabic…”
In this version, the baby and his father do not feature at all. Instead Dr Ahsan states “it was quite a quiet day” prior to the arrival of the person she now claims was the first victim – a boy covered in “strange white dust”, who had a “huge laceration on the side of his face” and who spoke to her, asking her where he should go. This clear and vivid account is entirely irreconcilable with what viewers saw in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’.
On the website of the charity The Phoenix Foundation, launched in January 2015, Dr Ahsan writes:
The sound of an ambulance siren and then the screams first of all from a baby and then young girls – that I still hear as I write this – alerted me that something disastrous had happened.
Previous accounts make no mention of an ambulance siren heralding the baby’s arrival (including, most notably, Dr Ahsan’s “quiet day” ABC interview). Moreover, the reference to the screams of “young girls” immediately following those of the baby appears to contradict ‘Saving Syria’s Children’, in which the first alleged victims to arrive after the baby are adolescent males. In fact only one young female alleged victim (Siham Kanbari) appears in the entire Atareb hospital sequence. [7] [8]
A further complaint (see here and here) regarding apparent breaches of the Geneva Convention by Dr Ahsan in Libya in 2011 has been lodged with the BBC and copied to Amnesty International’s Libya Team.
Grinning victim
This information was submitted to the BBC by email on 5 November 2014. Fuller details here.
The image below is from a sequence originally transmitted in the BBC News report of 29 August 2013. [9] The slim boy in the black vest at the right of the picture, allegedly the victim of a “napalm-type substance”, is looking into the camera and grinning broadly.
The same boy appears at 31:56 in Saving Syria’s Children, apparently moments later, running into the hospital with his jeans lowered and again at 35:15 exclaiming “cover me” while allegedly being treated for his injuries by Dr Saleyha Ahsan. (See further images here).
If this boy’s injuries are not genuine then presumably those of the others arriving in the pick up truck with him – at least – are also fabricated. These include Mohammed Asi, of whom Ian Pannell has providedthis image purporting to show him “two weeks after the attack in hospital in Turkey” and Anas Said Ali, whom the BBC claims died “a few days later in hospital in Turkey”. [10]
The baby featured from 31 minutes in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ does not appear to have suffered “severe burns” as claimed in the narration, and certainly not the 80% burns (elsewhere “full-body burns”) claimed by Dr Hallam which, as the high percentage indicates, would cover the majority of the infant’s body. Rather, he appears unscathed and in no unusual degree of distress (click images below to enlarge).
At 31:18 Dr Ahsan’s advises “this baby needs to be picked up” and the child is robustly handled by Dr Ahan and the supposed father. If the baby had suffered severe burns covering up to 80% of his body this would appear extremely inappropriate and reckless.
A BBC News article by Ian Pannell states that the baby’s father “was also burnt and sat helplessly on a stretcher clutching his son”. Dr Hallam states here (from 22:17) that the infant’s father “also had a burnt face” and here that he “had head burns”. However the supposed father (seen over Dr Ahsan’s left shoulder at 31:16 and again holding the baby at 31:31) is animated, vocal and appears unscathed. [11]
The baby’s alleged father (right), who according to Dr Hallam “also had a burnt face” http://bit.ly/1zcKgI3
The baby’s alleged father, speaking and gesturing animatedly to someone off-screen.
According to Ian Pannell he “was also burnt and sat helplessly on a stretcher clutching his son”
Plausibility of injuries and demeanour of alleged victims
A practicing doctor has offered this opinion of the alleged injuries presented in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’:
I have watched the panorama BBC documentary. Makes for interesting viewing but I think the scene of the school children coming in with the burns was an act.
I worked on trauma and orthopaedics last year for four months, so I have worked with burns victims first hand. These victims displayed what appeared to be “less painful” burns. They were able to sit down, be touched by others even talk. This is not how a severe burn victim would present. Most victims:
would be screaming the place down in agony. Even after treatment and with all sorts of pain drugs they still hurt and still scream.
Many burns victims cannot even focus enough to follow instructions such as sit down and wait because of pain. This young boy, I found very odd (I don’t think it is cultural thing as pain is pain and it can drive a person mad).
would have difficulties with their airways, almost immidiatley, hence in the UK many are intubated and treated in ITU. This shows them able to speak and breathing very well no obvious signs of respiratory distress like coughing, shallow breathing etc. In such an attack the poisons are inhaled.
They say they douse them in water (wouldn’t the high spray of the hose cause more problems to burnt skin).
when they came to the hospital they have evidence of this white powder on their skin but not evident burn blisters which fill with fluid with in minutes. Some are shown with skin hanging off but the flesh beneath is not that convincing it actually looks like more skin.
The walk is very odd. why??
The other concern in burns is their fluid status as they will be losing large amounts of fluid through their burns. The cannula is essential to resuscitate them. Im not sure what A and E that doctor worked in but I have not worked in A and e this year and I have placed I think almost 6 cannulas in peoples feet. [12]Any access is essential in burns, a standard training skill!
If the poison was dropped from above (a plane) their hair would have been lost and patches would be evident. Many still had a full heads.
Ahmed Darwish appears to await instruction before turning to address the camera
Alleged victim Lutfi Arsi http://bit.ly/1FiYu3k. A doctor comments: “Some are shown with skin hanging off but the flesh beneath is not that convincing it actually looks like more skin” (click to enlarge)
The doctor’s opinion is congruent with that of former UK ambassador Craig Murray who, in a 31 March 2014 email regarding the nomination of Ian Pannell and the “Chemical School Attack” report for One World Media awards, wrote: “having personally been in my career in rather similar conflict situations, I was struck by the strange absence of panic and screaming both by patients and surrounding family – I have seen people in that sort of pain and situation and they are not that quiet and stoic, in any culture.”
Most of the alleged victims presented in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ are notably calm and quiet. Some mill around in the hospital and its yard.
From 33:05 – 33:46 Lutfi Arsi (in the yellow ‘Super 9’ t-shirt) calmly inspects his fellow alleged victims, helpfully directs a member of staff towards them, ambles to the back of the room, pulls up a chair and takes a seat.
In the same sequence note the exaggerated swaying and lurching of the man in the white t-shirt at the back of the room; identifiable by the three black marks on his t-shirt, this is the supposed teacher who some time later (judging by the addition of bandages to his arm) provides a relaxed and cogent interview, partially translated here. (See images immediately below) [13]
At 36:52Anas Said Ali speaks, incongruously, in English (“I’m so bad, so bad”) .
At 38:13, allegedly suffering 86% burns, Lutfi Arsi sits up to peer inquisitively at the camera.
Compare the demeanour of these alleged victims with footage of napalm bombing survivor Kim Phuc.
The “victims” presented in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ appear to have retained their eyebrows, despite white cream suggesting treatment for facial burns. Note in particular the undamaged eyebrows of the alleged teacher and those of Siham Kanbari “a few weeks after the attacks in hospital”.
In her decision of 26 September 2014 the BBC Senior Editorial Complaints Adviser cites the opinion of a “consultant plastic surgeon with training and experience in the presentation, prognosis and outcome of traumatic burns injuries”. This opinion does not take into account the possible use of medical simulation techniques such as HOSPEX, discussed immediately below.
More (non-BBC) footage of the alleged victims presented in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ is on the “Free Halab” blog.
Alleged teacher (white t-shirt with black marks) swaying and lurching from 33:38 to 33:46
in Panorama prior to giving relaxed and cogent interview below.http://bit.ly/1FcaK3Q
Alleged teacher interviewed here http://youtu.be/za_PByVBkJ4?t=40s. Black marks on t-shirt identify him as the swaying figure seen from 33:38 to 33:46 in Panorama (above)
In a BBC Newsnight report of 11 August 2014 Dr Saleyha Ahsan, one of the two British doctors featured in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’, described “how British Army medical services prepare for deployment using HOSPEX” (Hospital Exercises), a “macro-simulation replicating exactly the conditions medics will face in the field”. Dr Ahsan states:
“The principle behind ‘macro simulation’ is that it’s as close to reality as possible. Actors and make-up artists mimic even the most severe of injuries”.
The level of expertise in fabricating injuries and emergency situations demonstrated in this report would appear to be more than adequate to account for the hospital scenes in Saving Syria’s Children. In the report Dr Ahsan states that the officer in charge of the operation, Brigadier Kevin Beaton, was her squadron commander in Bosnia and inspired her to study medicine.
Compare the first image below, featuring a “simulated burns casualty played by a professional actor” and published in an article about the Army Medical Services Training Centre (AMSTC) near York, where HOSPEX exercises are held, with the subsequent image of Victim X from the BBC Ten O’Clock News report of 29 August 2013:
Above: image and caption from 2008 Army Medic article about the AMSTC facility near York
‘Victim X’ from BBC Ten O’Clock News 29 August 2013
As noted below, it may be significant that Atareb hospital staff were attending a battle first aid training course in Turkey on the date of the alleged napalm bomb attack.
Identity of western male filmed at Atareb hospital
A western male in a grey shirt and spectacles appears at 2:06 in the BBC News report of 30 September 2013. He is carrying a camera and demonstrates concern that the BBC’s interview with Dr Rola Hallam is recorded without interruption, extending his arm to prevent others getting into shot.
The presence of this person is perplexing, as at no point in its correspondence has the BBC suggested that the Panorama crew in Syria at that time consisted of anyone other than reporter Ian Pannell, cameraman/producer Darren Conway and fixer/translator Mughira Al Sharif, plus presumably local drivers/minders.
In an appeal review request of 28 December 2014 another complainant directly asked the BBC to identify the man in the images below. In its rejection of this request the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee ignored this question, along with several other potentially significant points.
Update: The editor of Panorama ‘Saving Syria’s Children’, Tom Giles, has commented here.
A woman wearing a black dress with a distinctive gold design rushes throughAtareb hospital gates at around 36 minutes in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ with a man claiming to be her father (they appear of similar age).
In other footage from Atareb, shot after nightfall, a younger woman is seen wearing an identical dress and blue headscarf. This woman claims that she and other alleged victims are students in “Orm Alkubra academy”, all of whom are under 18 (transcript here). A medic in the video observes that, while the majority of alleged victims required transfer to other hospitals, the young woman, with only 20% burns, was “among the lucky ones”. [14] [15]
It is abundantly plain that the two women are separate individuals: not only is the age difference readily apparent, the younger woman in the non-BBC footage explicitly states that she is a student under the age of 18, while the woman who features in Panorama is entirely implausible in this role. Further, Dr Saleyha Ahsan has stated that the woman seen in Panorama (in daylight) was waiting to be evacuated to a Turkish or border hospital, whereas the medic in the non-BBC footage (shot after dark) explicitly states that this was not necessary in the case of the younger woman.
The question arises as to why these two different women should apparently have shared the same clothing.
On 8 August 2014 BBC Senior Editorial Strategy Adviser Natalie Rosestated (p16) that the two women were “clearly the same individual”.
Same clothes worn by younger woman later same day
Same clothes worn by younger woman bit.ly/16GapbZ
FSA commander attests attack did not take place
This information was submitted to the BBC on 13 October 2014.
A team of Syrian investigators which has been researching the alleged attack has been in contact with a former commander of the Al-Tawhid Brigade who was based in Aleppo province in August 2013 and who was in close contact with events in Urm Al-Kubra. The team has provided me with the commander’s name.
The commander attests that the “napalm bomb” story is untrue and that none of the events depicted by the BBC occurred. He has provided this brief declaration (his voice is disguised) which the lead investigator has transcribed as follows:
In the name of God the most gracious the most merciful.
We the fighters of the Free Syrian Army in the North West areas of the City of Aleppo we declare that we were present in this region in August 2013 and we did not meet any air strike with the substance of Napalm on Urum al Kubra or on any other region in the North West Aleppo countryside and we deny the cheap fabrication of the BBC and of the stations that imitate her because it undermine the credibility of the Free Syrian Army. Saying this we do not hesitate to criminalize the criminal acts of the Assad regime and its murderous extermination of its people. And we have done a field investigation with the help of the delegate of the Free Syrian Red Crescent and this has conducted us to confirm what we are saying : no victims, no traces and no memory with anybody of the alleged air strikes with the substance of Napalm. And may peace be upon you and the mercy of God and His blessings.
The commander has agreed to provide a full statement to the BBC providing that his identity is protected. He is also willing to testify publicly under appropriate international protections. The commander, who is now attached to another faction allied to the Free Syrian Army, has offered to provide BBC journalists with safe transit from Antakya, Turkey to Urm Al-Kubra to interview witnesses assembled by the Syrian team and to conduct their own investigation.
A July 2014 telephone conversation between two members of the Syrian investigative team, transcribed here, provides an account from another local resident who also affirms that the alleged napalm bomb attack did not occur.
A 51 year old Dutch-Armenian woman (first two images below) contacted me through Facebook in June 2014 to request that I remove a screengrab from ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ which I had posted on the site, claiming that she was in it and that she did not wish others to see it.
Although the woman was not featured in the particular image I had posted, I interpreted her words as possibly meaning she had been photographed or filmed at Atareb hospital on 26 August 2013, the day of the alleged attack. The woman did not respond to my requests for clarification.
Some weeks later I came across this video shot at Atareb hospital on 26 August 2013 in which at 20:36 a woman is briefly seen having white cream applied to her face and hands (third image below). The resemblance between this person and the woman who contacted me is extremely striking and they would indeed appear to be one and the same.
The woman’s Facebook page demonstrates that she has previously travelled between Syria and the Netherlands, where she resides. There is a gap in her Facebook posts in the weeks around 26 August 2013.
Dr Rola Hallam and Hand in Hand for Syria
Dr Rola Hallam, who features throughout Saving Syria’s Children, is described as “a British doctor visiting for the charity Hand in Hand for Syria”.
On 30 August 2013, the day after the first BBC report on the alleged attack, Dr Hallam appeared on Newsnight expressing her disappointment at parliament’s rejection of a military strike against Syria.
Dr Hallam’s father is Dr. Mousa al-Kurdi. [16] According to a February 2013article written Dr Hallam’s colleague, Dr Saleyha Ahsan, Dr al-Kurdi is “involved politically with the Syrian National Council”. In an Al Jazeera interview Dr al-Kurdi proclaims the Syrian National Council to be the “representative of all Syrians” and relates how, following his address to the Friends of Syria summit in Istanbul in 2012 (attended by Hillary Clinton), he told Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu “You’re not doing enough” and demanded of Professor Davutoğlu and several other foreign ministers, including Victoria Nuland of the US State Department, “either you defend us or you arm the Syrian Free Army to defend us – you have the choice”.
At a Save the Children event in November 2013 Dr Hallam stated that her father “is certainly not a member of the Syrian National Council; he is a gynaecologist, who like most Syrians has taken an interest in what’s happening in his country”.
Dr Hallam is a member of the charity Hand in Hand for Syria’s executive team. Hand in Hand’s original three-star logo is plainly based on the flag adopted by the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Council. In 2014 the charity removed the stars from its logo.
Until July 2014 the Facebook banner of Hand in Hand’s co-founder, Faddy Sahloul, read WE WILL BRING ASSAD TO JUSTICE; NO MATTER WHAT LIVES IT TAKES, NO MATTER HOW MUCH CATASTROPHE IT MAKES. The image was removed shortly after this comment on an article in The Guardian newspaper was made.
Further questions about the financial affairs and political affiliations of Hand in Hand for Syria have been raised by Dr Declan Hayes of the University of Southampton in a 436 page dossier and here. Dr Hayes’ research has been submitted to the police and the Charity Commission. This video also asks questions about Hand in Hand for Syria’s ethics and motivations.
The Facebook banner of Hand in Hand for Syria founder Faddy Sahloul, deleted July 2014
Original logo of Hand in Hand for Syria bearing the three stars of the Free Syrian Army/Syrian National Council flag
Dr Hallam (white mask and green scarf) strolls unhurriedly upstairs at Atareb Hospital on 26 August 2013 in the midst of what she later described as a “mass casualty event“ in the first five seconds of this video, one of those collected on the Free Halab blog.
A campaign page dated 10 June 2014 (since deleted) on Hand in Hand for Syria’s website stated that Atareb Hospital opened in May 2013 as a small A&E unit and that (my italics):
“The hospital’s funding comes from a European donor which supports global emergency response. This funding reaches Hand in Hand for Syria via an INGO partner. Although that funding is still very much in place, after one year our agreement with our INGO partner has come to an end – and the funding has to come through a partner.”
This makes clear that funding for Atareb Hospital – “from a European donor”, “via an INGO partner” – was secured prior to Ian Pannell’s description (03:17) of it as “a basic hospital funded by handouts”. [17] Indeed, images on the Atareb Facebook page posted before 26 August 2013, the day of the “napalm bomb”, depict a relatively well-equipped facility, including a kidney dialysis machine and surgical and x-ray facilities. (Please note there are some highly distressing images on the Atareb Facebook page).
The campaign page states that Atareb “now offers 68 beds and a wide range of services – from maternity and neo-natal facilities to many outpatient departments, three excellent operating theatres and a laboratory”. Elsewhere, Atareb is described as “One of the country’s most sophisticated remaining hospitals” with operating costs, according to Dr Hallam, of “between $60,000 and $70,000 a month”. Atareb’s current facilities are further indicated in the campaign materials.
The Syrian team investigating the alleged attack has produced this report which provides further information on the connections between Hand in Hand for Syria and Atareb Hospital, which the report claims “is facing very serious problems of administration, honesty, transparency and professionalism.” [18]
Post on Atareb Hospital’s Facebook page showing a new dialysis machine in use over one month prior to Ian Pannell’s description of Atareb as “a basic hospital funded by handouts”.
Regular Atareb Hospital staff absent on day of alleged attack
A post on Atareb Hospital’s Facebook page shows that on 26 August 2013, the date of the alleged attack, hospital staff were “attending a battle first aid training course in Antakia, Turkey”. This may indicate that some of the medics filmed by the Panorama team were not regular Atareb staff members.
Violations Documentation Center in Syria
A report by the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (a regularly cited BBC source) links to a list of 41 alleged victims of the attack. Several of the names are identifiable as those ascribed to individuals featured in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’, however their date of death in all cases is given as 26 August 2013.
While this reflects the Panorama account in respect of Lutfi Arsi (Loutfee Asee on the list), whom the BBC claims “died on his way to hospital in Turkey”, it contradicts it in respect of Anas Sayyed Ali (Anas al-Sayed Ali), whom the BBCclaims “died a few days later in hospital in Turkey” and whom Dr Ahsanstates (p15) died “two weeks later”; Ahmed Darwish (Ahmad Darwish), who was filmed by Panorama “a few weeks after the attack in hospital in Turkey”; Siham Kanbari (Siham Qandaree), also filmed later in the same hospital and whom Dr Ahsan has stated died on 20 October [19]; and Mohammed Asi (Muhammad Assi) who is pictured in an image provided by BBC Audience Services “two weeks after the attack in hospital in Turkey”.
The list omits Mohammed Kenas who according to Panorama “died on the way to hospital in Turkey”. [20]
The list includes a Muhammad Abdullatif, age 15. Mohammed Abdullatif is the name of the adult eyewitness who appears in the 29 August 2013 BBC News report (02:54) and in this non-BBC footage of the same “interview”.
Videos on the ‘Free Halab’ blog
The collection of videos of the alleged events of 26 August 2013 assembled by the “Free Halab” blog poses further questions as to the veracity of the BBC’s account.
For example, the opposition fighter speaking in this film[21] shot at Atareb Hospital on the day of the alleged incident, refers to “seven martyrs and about 50 wounded from the religious college for women and girls”. [22] This contradicts the BBC’s account in which the majority of student victims are seen to be adolescent males. [23]
This fighter in a video from Atareb Hospital on the day of the alleged attack refers to “seven martyrs and about 50 wounded from the religious college for women and girls”. Most alleged victims filmed by the BBC are adolescent or older males. http://1drv.ms/1CvSEox
Misleading and manipulative editing
The hospital scenes in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ and associated BBC News reports are extensively and misleadingly edited. Some examples are:
At 02:08 in the 29 August 2013 BBC News reportMohammed Asi is shown climbing down from a truck, accompanied by Dr Ahsan’s words “more coming? More? More?” However Asi had already been shown walking into the hospital from 01:44.
At 34:08 in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ the narration states “within minutes the hospital is overwhelmed” over footage of Lutfi Arsi being carried into the hospital. However this is Arsi’s third appearance in the programme, having previously been seen at 32:26 and from 33:05 – 33:44.
Victim X is shown arriving in the hospital yard at 35:35 in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’, heralded by Dr Ahsan’s words “I think there’s more coming, I think there’s more coming”, despite his having previously seen being “treated” inside the hospital from 34:36 – 34:55.
A woman exclaims “yama yama yama” as she enters the hospital at 34:02; the same audio clip is also used over footage of Victim Y entering the hospital at 31:44.
On 23 April 2014 BBC Complaints Director Colin Tregear wrote:
…the programme-makers felt they were justified in using footage out of chronological order “to show the mayhem and the mood of what was happening around”. I am satisfied that the editing would not have affected the audience’s overall impression of what took place.
Victim who “fought to be allowed into hospital” had already been treated
In a contemporary BBC World Service report Ian Pannell states (at 3:06) “Fathers and mothers, desperate for help, fought to be allowed into the hospital, cursing their president Bashar al-Assad”.
However the cries and rants heard at this point are those of the alleged father and mother of the woman in the black dress seen at 2:37 in the BBC Ten O’Clock News report of 29 August 2013 (compare audio).
On 23 April 2014 the BBC explained (pp 6 & 7) that in this sequence the woman had already been treated inside the hospital with white burns cream. She then “went back outside” (to be evacuated to a Turkish or border hospital according to Dr Saleyha Ahsan) prior to rushing back through the hospital gate (at 36 minutes in Saving Syria’s Children) with her family to declaim Assad to the BBC camera.
To say that the family was at this point fighting “to be allowed into the hospital” is therefore false. Furthermore, none of the alleged victims in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ are seen fighting “to be allowed into the hospital” – they are carried or walk inside, entirely unimpeded.
In his BBC web article of 30 September 2013 Pannell repeats the claim that “Fathers and mothers” “fought to be allowed into the hospital” but here substitutes the phrase “desperate for help” with “desperate for news”.
Ian Pannell claimed that here this family was fighting “to be allowed into the hospital”. The BBC later stated that the woman in the centre had already been treated. See http://bit.ly/16GapbZ
Bias and lack of analysis in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’
On 2 July 2014 Susan Dirgham, National Coordinator of Australians for Mussalaha (Reconciliation) in Syria, lodged a complaint about ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ invoking sections of the BBC Editorial Guidelines which relate to Accuracy, Impartiality, Fairness, Conflicts of Interest and Accountability. Ms Dirgham’s complaint was rejected by the BBC as untimely.
Mughira Al Sharif
Mughira Al Sharif is credited as “Fixer/Translator” on ‘Saving Syria’s Children’. He can be glimpsed at various points in the programme, most distinctly at the wheel of the car which takes Ian Pannell through an ISIS checkpoint (at 10:33).
A 2011 article tells how Sharif helped to found the Syrian Revolution Istanbul Committee and reports his aim as being “to help bring down the Syrian regime”.
Sharif’s Instagram site contains numerous images demonstrating his fervent support for armed opposition forces in Syria, including one in which he proudly bears the standard of the Idlib Martyrs Brigade. Several images jocosely celebrate the involvement of children in the conflict, with captions such as “the youngest revolutionary”. [24]
An image in which Sharif poses with “some friends” in the armed opposition was posted on Monday 26 August 2013, the day of the alleged napalm bomb attack. Notably, Sharif was clearly not so traumatised at witnessing dozens of allegedly injured and dying children and teenagers at Atarab hospital that he felt any qualms about posting another celebratory image of child fighters the next day.
Both Susan Dirgham in her letter to the BBC of 2 July 2014 and another complainant have argued that Al Sharif’s involvement in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ breaches BBC Editorial Guidelines.
BBC Worldwide blocks You Tube copies of ‘Saving Syria’s Children’
At the start of July 2014 BBC Worldwide began blocking You Tube copies of ‘Saving Syria’s Children’, including the copy I had been linking to in mycorrespondence with the BBC and that referenced by Susan Dirgham in her complaint to the BBC.
I began substituting links in my blog to correspond with an alternative You Tube copy of the programme. On 20 July this too was blocked. (On 23 July it was removed by the channel owner). Notably, part one of a version originally shown on Australian television and which included excerpts from the hospital scenes was blocked sometime after 20 July, while part three – which features no Panorama footage – remains available. [25]
The final existing You Tube copy of ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ was blocked by BBC Worldwide between 25 and 28 July 2014. Dozens of other Panorama programmes remain freely available on the site.
The UK BBC iPlayer version of ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ expired on 30 September 2014 (17 October with BSL). This copy adheres to the timings in this blog and can be downloaded here. A somewhat higher quality copy is here.
On 1 August 2014 BBC Worldwide provided this response to questions about the You Tube blockings.
At least four full-length You Tube copies of ‘Saving Syria Children’ have been blocked by BBC Worldwide since the start of July 2014.
Substitution of footage – BBC Newsnight 29 August 2014
Fuller details here. Subsequent correspondence with the BBC here, here, here andhere.
This edition of BBC2’s Newsnight was devoted to the consequences of the UK Commons vote on intervention in Syria exactly one year previously. It included footage of the “napalm bomb” incident accompanied by the narration “by chance, just as MPs voted, these images of a chemical [sic] attack were shown for the first time”.
A subsequent broadcast on the BBC News Channel some hours later substituted the “napalm bomb” images with footage from an alleged chemical attack on Saraqeb, Northern Syria on 29 April 2013, originally broadcast in a BBC News report of 16 May 2013. The images were not identified and the substitution was not acknowledged. The narration continued to inform viewers that the substituted images had been “shown for the first time” on the evening of 29 August 2013.
This matter is now the subject of a separate complaint to the BBC. (Links to correspondence above).
Update July 2015: the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit has acknowledgedthat the substitution of footage represents a breach of BBC editorial standards for accuracy. Concerns about BBC editorial policy and practice raised by this matter remain to be pursued.
Breaches of Geneva Convention by Dr Saleyha Ahsan
A further complaint (see here and here) regarding apparent breaches of the Geneva Convention and other concerns regarding the ethics and integrity of Dr Saleyha Ahsan has been lodged with the BBC.
Panorama – Saving Syria’s Children – BBC One, 30 September 2013 (relevant section commences 30:38). BBC Worldwide has blocked all You Tube copies of ‘Saving Syria’s Children’. Please consider downloading this copy.
Other reports and commentary
Some of the analysis in these reports has been superceded. I do not agree with every interpretation contained in them.
Correspondence between the BBC and myself (and latterly another complainant) is logged here.
Notes
[1] Hansard reports the two Commons votes on Syria on Thursday 29 August 2013: Division No. 69 (9:59pm) on the Labour amendment and Division No. 70 (10:17pm) on the government motion.
The Daily Telegraph’s live reporting of the day’s events notes between 22:15 and 22:30:
As MPs vote, the BBC is playing a report into a horrific incendiary weapon strike on a school near Alleppo. Many children have been badly burnt.
[2] In its initial response the BBC stated that that boy in the white shirt “appears relatively unscathed”. The same boy appears at 01:17 in this non-BBC video from the day, calmly walking downstairs accompanied by the caption “These are not performing actors”.
[3] Note that the left hand curtain at the back of the room has been pulled back from its previous position (see below and images 6 – 10 here).
[4] Craig Murray has more recently commented here.
[5] In an article for Foreign Policy Dr Saleyha Ahsan, one of the British doctors featured in Saving Syria’s Children, gave the date of the alleged attack as 27 August, a highly surprising error for a journalist to make, especially considering her statement that “out of all the war zones I have ever been to, today has been by far the worst”.
In a 3 October 2013 article Dr Ahsan wrote “This month, Dr. Hallam and I found ourselves in a school that had been hit by a napalm-like bomb”. This seems intended to suggest that Doctors Ahsan and Hallam were present at the school as it was allegedly being attacked, rather than at the hospital treating the alleged victims; “this month” is also odd as Dr Ahsan claims elsewhere to have visited the school two days after the attack, i.e. on Wednesday 28 August .
[6] The Demotix images had been used to illustrate the “napalm bomb” incident in contemporary UK and international media reports.
[7] Dr Ahsan now gives Siham (or “Seham”) Kanbari’s age as 16, whereas previously both she and Ian Pannell had stated she was 18.
[8] A display at The Phoenix Foundation’s launch stated “A French class was taking place just as the bomb was dropped”. Ian Pannell states that Siham Kanbari “had been in a maths class when the blast ripped through the window”.
[9] The screengrab is from BBC Two’s Newsnight of 29 August 2014. Issues surrounding this programme are discussed here.
[10] On page 15 of this Human Rights Watch report Dr Ahsan claims that Anas Said Ali died “two weeks later”.
[11] The female nurse who appears alongside Dr Saleyha Ahsan at 31:17 in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ also features in an image on this site dated 17 June 2014, apparently treating a child combatant at Atareb Hospital. The site names the child as fifteen year old Mujahid Omar and claims he has spent three years in the “revolutionary movement service”. Hand in Hand for Syria’s logo is visible on the nurse’s white tunic, raising furtherquestions for this UK registered charity (see section above Dr Rola Hallam and Hand in Hand for Syria).
Hand in Hand for Syria nurse (left) next to Dr Saleyha Ahsan (checked shirt), ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ (31:17)
Hand in Hand for Syria nurse (left) next to Dr Saleyha Ahsan (checked shirt, holding infant), ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ (31:17)
Hand in Hand for Syria nurse apparently treating a child fighter at Atareb Hospital in an image posted on this website http://slnnews.co/?p=2578 in June 2014
[12] The reference is to 37:37 in Saving Syria’s Children where Dr Saleyha Ahsan attempts to insert a cannula into Mohammed Kenas‘ foot, stating “As you can see there’s nothing coming up for me to put a cannula in”.
“Im not sure what A and E that doctor worked in but I have not worked in A and e this year and I have placed I think almost 6 cannulas in peoples feet. Any access is essential in burns, a standard training skill!” – practicing doctor on the efforts of Dr Saleyha Ahsan to insert a cannula at 37:37 in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’
[13] On 18 July 2014 BBC News published a short “retrospective” on the “napalm bomb”. From 32 – 40 seconds the background figures in the hospital, includingLutfi Arsi and the alleged teacher, are heavily blurred.
… while escaping they called us to return to the school as the war-plane has not finished bombing yet .. they were sure that it will bomb again .. and then the war-plane bombed us .. I did not hear any sound but all what I saw is people burning .. I got burnt and so my friends .. we did not know what happened and why .. a war-plane bombed us and bodies in flames all over the place .. I felt like it is the judgement day.
The highlighted sections are strikingly similar to the words “told” to NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel by a female witness, as reported in this (subsequently deleted) NBC article (note in particular the reference to “Judgement Day”):
A girl who witnessed the attack told NBC News’ Richard Engel that the plane attacked the school twice.
“As we were going inside the classroom, it hit again. I didn’t hear anything. We just saw people burning,” said the student, who was not identified. “My classmates were burning. It felt like Judgment Day.”
Note further the reference to the plane attacking the school twice; the BBC andHuman Rights Watch (p13) claim there was one strike on a residential building followed by a second on the school (as indeed does the young woman in the translation above).
[15] After the younger woman in the black dress and blue scarf has finished speaking another young woman appears in this video (at 02:30). She appears unscathed.
[16] Until at least October 2013 the Deputy Commander of the Free Syrian Army was identified as a Colonel Malik al-Kurdi.
[17] On 30 September 2013 Ian Pannell describes Atareb as as a “field hospital”. Dr Hallam also refers to Atareb as a “field hospital” at 38:04 in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’.
[18] The team’s second report detailing local insurgent factions is here.
[19] The BBC now states that Siham Kanbari died on 19 October.
[20] This Human Rights Watch report, which uses the Violations Documentation Center information as the basis for a list of deaths from the “Urm al-Kubra Attack”, states (p20) that “A witness told Human Rights Watch that one of the dead was identified as Mohamad Feda Khenass, 15 years old”.
[22] I understand that other videos in the collection contain similar references to a religious teaching centre specifically for females. It is questionable whether it would be likely or indeed permissible for a male teacher to be engaged at a girls’ religious school. The BBC’s reports also feature a male headmaster, named by Dr Ahsan as Mohammed Abu Omar. Both men’s attire would seem to be incongruously casual for staff of a “religious college”.
[23] Other elements in the “Free Halab” videos warrant further scrutiny, for example the plausibility of the claim which I understand is made by the medic interviewed here that he was able to listen to the conversation between the pilot of the MIG and his command centre via a walky-talky.
[24] The Frontline Club states that it’s highly unusual decision not to publish video of an interview with ‘Saving Syria’s Children’” cameraman, director and producer, Darren Conway, in which Conway contradicted his colleague Ian Pannell over the time of the “napalm bomb”, was made in order “to protect those colleagues whose names were mentioned that work in extremely dangerous locations”. As noted here the only individual named in reference to Conway’s then most recent work, in Syria, was “Mughi”, or Mughira Al Sharif, who is both listed in the credits of ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ and who, as demonstrated above, openly proclaims pro-opposition sentiments on social media and elsewhere.
[25] On 17 March 2015, within hours of being posted and with only one view, another video (copy here) containing scenes from Saving Syria’s Children was blocked.
The nature of the war in Afghanistan has shifted dramatically in recent months. While the US and NATO continue to be actively involved in the country – their strategic objectives having changed very little since the Bush administration launched the war nearly a decade and a half ago – the complexion of the battlefield, and the parties actively engaged in the war, has changed significantly.
The emergence of ISIS in Afghanistan, along with the impending withdrawal of US-NATO troops from the country, has driven the Taliban into a marriage of convenience, if not an outright alliance, with Iran. What seemed like an unfathomable scenario just a few years ago, Shia Iran’s support for the hardline Sunni Taliban has become a reality due to the changing circumstances of the war. Though it may be hard to believe, such an alliance is now a critical element of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. But its significance is far larger than just shifting the balance of power within the country.
Instead, Afghanistan is now in many ways a proxy conflict between the US and its western and Gulf allies on the one hand, and Iran and certain non-western countries, most notably China, on the other. If the contours of the conflict might not be immediately apparent, that is only because the western media, and all the alleged brainiacs of the corporate think tanks, have failed to present the conflict in its true context. The narrative of Afghanistan, to the extent that it’s discussed at all, continues to be about terrorism and stability, nation-building and “support.” But this is a fundamental misunderstanding and mischaracterization of the current war, and the agenda driving it.
And what is this new and dangerous agenda? It is about no less than the future of Afghanistan and Central Asia. It is about the US and its allies clinging to the country, a key foothold in the region, and wanting to find any pretext to maintain their presence. It is about Iran and China positioning themselves in the country for the inevitable moment of US withdrawal and the opening up of Afghanistan’s economy. At the most basic level, it is about access and influence. And, as usual in this part of the world, terrorism and extremism are the most potent weapons.
The New Afghan War: Enter ISIS
However, within a few weeks, ISIS militants committed a mass beheading in the strategically vital Ghazni province, an important region of the country that lies on the Kabul-Kandahar highway. This incident officially put ISIS on the map in Afghanistan, and marked a significant sea change in the nature of the conflict there.
While the western media was replete with stories of ISIS and Taliban factions fighting together under the Islamic State’s banner, it has become clear since then that, rather than a collaboration between the groups, there has simply been a steady migration of fighters from the Taliban to ISIS which, if the stories are to be believed, pays much better. In fact, the last few months have demonstrated that, there is in fact competition between the two, and that Taliban and ISIS groups have fought each other in very intense battles. As Abdul Hai Akhondzada, deputy head of the Afghan parliament’s national security commission told Deutsche Welle in June:
Local residents and security officials confirmed that “Islamic State” (IS) fighters killed between 10 and 15 Taliban members in Nangarhar province…The Taliban have been fighting for a long period of time in Afghanistan and they see their position threatened by the emergence of IS. Of course, they won’t give up easily… While IS is fighting to increase its presence in the whole region – not only Afghanistan – the Taliban are fighting to overthrow the Afghan government.
Such skirmishes have now become a regular occurrence, pointing to a growing war between ISIS and Taliban factions. Increasingly, the war is being transformed from one waged by the Taliban against the Kabul government and its US and NATO patrons, into a war with competing groups fighting each other for supremacy on the battlefield and in the political life of the country.
But of course, the true nature of the conflict can only be understood through an examination of the key interests backing each side. And it is here where the shadowy world of terror factions and proxy armies are brought into the light of day.
It is now no secret that ISIS is an asset of western intelligence agencies and governments. The group has been directly sponsored and facilitated and/or allowed to develop unhindered in order to serve a useful purpose in Syria and Iraq. As the now infamous secret 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document obtained by Judicial Watch revealed, the US has knowingly promoted the spread of the Islamic State since at least 2012 in order to use it as a weapon against the Assad government. The document noted that,
“… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria…and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
Moreover, intelligence agencies such as Turkish intelligence agency (MIT) have been facilitating ISIS militants crossing the border into Syria, as well as supporting an international network of terrorists to as far away as the Xinjiang province of China. Even US Vice President Joe Biden has noted that:
Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends… [and] the Saudis, the Emirates, etcetera. What were they doing?…They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad — except that the people who were being supplied, [they] were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world.
Given all of this information, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that ISIS is to a large degree an asset of the US and its western allies. As if one needed further confirmation of this point, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, himself no stranger to the machination of US intelligence, bluntly declared just last month that ISIS could not possibly have expanded into Afghanistan “without a foreign hand, without foreign backing.”
In Syria and Iraq, ISIS has essentially done the dirty work for the US and its Gulf and Israeli and Turkish allies. In Libya, ISIS has become a dominant terrorist force led by a documented US asset. In Yemen, ISIS has gained a foothold and carried outterrorist actions in support of the Saudi – and by extension, US – mission against the Shia Houthi rebels and their allies. Taken in total then, ISIS has proven very effective in furthering the US-NATO-GCC-Israel agenda. So too in Afghanistan.
Iran and Taliban Ally to Counter ISIS and Its Patrons
And it is for this reason that the Taliban has turned to Iran for support. Though Tehran has officially denied providing any weapons or financial support to the Taliban, sources in the region have confirmed that indeed such support is given. A senior Afghan government official speaking to the Wall Street Journal explained succinctly that, “At the beginning Iran was supporting [the] Taliban financially. But now they are training and equipping them, too.” Afghan security officials have claimed that Iran is hosting Taliban militants at training camps in the cities of Tehran, Mashhad, and Zahedan, and in the province of Kerman. If true, it means that the level of cooperation between the two has moved to a whole new level.
While one might want to maintain some skepticism about all the claims made by US and Afghan officials regarding Iranian support for the Taliban, the alliance makes good strategic sense for Tehran. As Iran fights against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, so too must it check the spread of this terror group in neighboring Afghanistan.
Moreover, Iran understands that ISIS is, in effect, an arm of the power projection of its regional rivals Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both of whom have been primary instigators of the war in Syria and the attempt to break the alliance of Iran-Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah. Therefore, from the Iranian perspective, the Taliban’s war against ISIS in Afghanistan is essentially a new theater in the larger war against ISIS and its backers.
Additionally, there is still another important political rationale behind Tehran’s overtures to the Taliban: leverage and access. Iran is preparing for the impending departure of US-NATO forces from Afghanistan, and it desperately wants to make sure it has friends in the new government which will likely include some key members of the Taliban in important positions. And the recent moves by the Taliban to engage in peace talks only further this point; Iran wants to be part of a peace deal which could unite the non-ISIS forces in Afghanistan thereby giving Tehran both access and, most importantly, influence over the decision-making apparatus in an independent Afghanistan.
China and the New Afghanistan
Iran certainly has partners in the charm offensive toward the Taliban, most notably China. The last few months have seen a flurry of rumors that China has played host to a Taliban delegation interested in engaging in substantive peace talks with the Kabul government, a move which threatens to fundamentally alter the balance of power in Afghanistan and the region. Assuming the reports are true – by all indications they are – China is positioning itself to become the single most important player in a post-occupation Afghanistan.
Earlier this month in fact, an Afghan delegation from Kabul met with Taliban representatives in Islamabad, Pakistan to begin the dialogue process. It is a virtual certainty that such talks would never have taken place had the Chinese not intervened and opened direct channels of communication with the Taliban earlier this year. In this way, Beijing has become the key intermediary in the peace process in Afghanistan, a development which is likely to cause a fair amount of consternation in Washington. China has a multitude of reasons for pushing so hard for this dialogue process.
First and foremost, China sees in Afghanistan one of the main keys to its entire regional, and indeed global, strategy, from the New Silk Roads to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Sitting in the middle of the strategically critical Central Asia region, Afghanistan represents for China both a bridge to its partner, Pakistan, and the key to the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. Moreover, it represents a critical node in the potential pipeline networks, as well as trading routes.
Beijing also intends to be a major player in the exploitation of the mineral wealth of Afghanistan. The US Geological Survey has estimated that the mineral wealth of Afghanistan is worth roughly $1 trillion, making it some of the most prized land in the world. Iron, copper, cobalt, gold, lithium, and many other minerals are to be found just underneath the surface of Afghanistan; clearly an enticing prospect for China. Indeed, China has already heavily invested in copper mining concessions among others.
It is in this arena where China and its longtime rival India have come into conflict, as Delhi has also been a major player competing for key mining concessions in Afghanistan, including the vast iron ore deposits. Iran also figures into this question as its port of Chabahar, seen as an important prize for both India and China, is the likely destination for the iron ore extracted from Afghanistan, especially if it is to be shipped to India.
Not to be overlooked of course is the security issue. China’s ongoing struggle against Islamic extremism in Xinjiang has led to fears in Beijing that any economic plans could be jeopardized by terrorism-related instability. Xinjiang has seen a number of deadly terrorist attacks in the last eighteen months, including the heinous drive-by bombings that killed dozens and injured over 100 people in May 2014, the mass stabbings and bombings of November 2014, and the deadly attack by Uighur terrorists on a traffic checkpoint just last month which left 18 people dead.
And it is here where all these issues converge. China needs Iran both for economic and counter-terrorism reasons. Beijing wants to see Iran act as the driving force in the battle against ISIS terrorism in Afghanistan, as well as in the Middle East, in order to destroy the Saudi-backed and Turkey-backed terror networks that support the Uighur extremists. China also wants to be an active player in Afghanistan in order to both buttress its own national security and to instigate itself as the central economic force in the region. The strategic imperatives couldn’t be clearer.
Seen in this way, Afghanistan is at the very heart of both China’s and Iran’s regional plans. And this fact, more than any other, explains exactly the purpose that ISIS serves in Afghanistan. From the perspective of Washington, nothing could serve US imperial ambitions more effectively than a destabilization of Afghanistan both as justification for continued occupation, and to block Chinese penetration.
So, once again, we see ISIS as the convenient tool of western power projection. No doubt strategic planners in Tehran and Beijing see it too. The question is: will they be able to stop it?
Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Let me confess, I am now confused as to what Jeremy Corbyn’s policy is on budget deficits, their causes, impacts and remedies. Two weeks ago, I thought I understood what he was saying, and was mainly supportive of his approach. Now those speaking on his behalf (I assume) have made things a lot less clear, and probably a lot worse. They seem to want to swallow Osborne’s deficit poison pill, but also to spit it out. This doesn’t work.
Corbyn’s deficit policy – via John McDonnell
On 11th August, the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section published an article by Labour MP John McDonnell headed “Jeremy Corbyn would clear the deficit – but not by hitting the poor”. So far so maybe OK. But he goes on to say:
Let’s see if, at least on economic policy, we can return to some level of rational debate. Let’s start by tracing out where there is absolute agreement.
First, it is unarguable that no modern party leader can win an election if behind in the polls on economic competence. Ed Miliband, sadly, was proof of this truism. Second, deficit denial is a non-starter for anyone to have any economic credibility with the electorate. This was a key finding of the poll recently published by Jon Cruddas, examining why Labour lost the election.
So let me make it absolutely clear that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is committed to eliminating the deficit and creating an economy in which we live within our means. [my emphasis].
Rational debate? No way – “deficit denial”… “eliminating the deficit and living within our means” – these phrases are straight out of the George Osborne “My greatest political hits” songbook.
But clearly John McDonnell was not speaking out of turn, for on the Today programme this morning, up popped Ken Livingstone to defend Jeremy Corbyn – and his first line was also to talk about getting rid of the deficit.
Intermezzo – governments are in no way like households
Underlying much of the political discourse is the flawed analogy, “the government is like a household”. So Let’s get the following basic points out of the way:
The government is not like a household, whose members can ultimately be made bankrupt, or lose their home if the mortgage or rent is not paid
The government is not even like a local authority (e.g. the former Greater London Council which Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell once ran), which has a legal duty to balance its budget annually, whatever the impact
Unlike a household, or indeed Eurozone governments like Greece, the UK government has its ‘own’ central bank that uses monetary tools (including e.g. low interest rates and QE) to support both the private and public sectors of the UK economy
Unlike a household, the government has almost guaranteed income in the form of tax revenues; these may fluctuate, but unlike a private firm’s income from sales etc., payment is a legal duty
Unlike a household, a government cannot be ‘liquidated’ – it cannot go bankrupt – so while it may get in difficulties for a while, it cannot be ‘liquidated’ in the way a company can.
Unlike a household, the government cannot control its deficit, which rises or falls depending not just on its own acts and decisions (as with individuals), but largely on the health of the rest of the economy
Unlike a household, the government has overarching responsibility – which it cannot shirk – for the well-being and security of all citizens (including future citizens), not just its own “family and friends” or a set of selected charities
What Corbyn has said
Back to Messrs McDonnell and Corbyn. Let me concede, you don’t need to run a current budget deficit in years when the economy is doing well – though it is not likely to be a problem if you do have a modest current deficit if the economy is doing well.
There is however a strong political and economic argument for always treating borrowing for long-term investment, which benefits future generations, separately from current expenditure.
This is a distinction that Jeremy Corbyn is well aware of, and stoutly defended in his policy document, “the Economy in 2020”. In a recent PRIME article “What the Labour leadership canadidates say on macroeconomic policy”, I quoted this passage:
We all want the deficit closed on the current budget, but there was no need to try to do it within an artificial five years or even the extra five years George Osborne mapped out two weeks ago.
If the deficit has been closed by 2020 and the economy is growing, then Labour should not run a current budget deficit – but we should borrow to invest in our future prosperity.
You don’t close the deficit fairly or sustainably through cuts.
You close it through growing a balanced and sustainable economy that works for all. And by asking those with income and wealth to spare to contribute more.
If Osborne’s forecasts are right there won’t be a deficit by 2020, but if – like last time – he is proved wrong and he only again manages to halve the deficit then I make this pledge:
Labour will close the current budget deficit through building a strong growing economy that works for all. We will not do it by increasing poverty…
Rather than remove spending power from the economy and damage growth and future prosperity, Britain needs a publicly-led expansion and reconstruction of the economy.”
This is a very different tone from the “living within our means” meme in John McDonnell’s piece – and rightly argues that developing “a balanced and sustainable economy that works for all” is the only progressive and sensible way to deal with (eliminate!) current budget deficits. Moreover, he makes clear that borrowing for investment is part of his positive policy for building “a strong growing economy”.
The multiplier
The reasons for this are evident – it’s our old friend the multiplier. When times are bad, cuts in spending on public services (or major increases in taxation) reduce the size of the economy by more than the size of the cut, because of the knock-on effects in terms of loss of spending power of those made unemployed, plus the cost of an increase in unemployment benefits – the negative multiplier.
But when the economy is not fully productive, increases in publicly-supported investment (much of which will be implemented via the private sector) tend to provide more decently-paid jobs, paying more taxes, and reducing the cost of social security benefits. The workers thus employed buy more stuff, leading to more employment and production… And society ends up with new bridges, or railways, or energy-efficient buildings, or a universal fibre-optic network…The financial benefits (including knock-on economic effects) to the public purse outweigh the cost. This is the positive multiplier at work.
Let us note too that Liz Kendall – seen by many as the most right-wing candidate of the four – has argued that deficits are indeed sometimes necessary:
“It is also true that countries are not like households. Sometimes, in some years, governments need to run deficits. If Britain had not run a deficit at the start of the financial crisis the social and economic costs would have been much higher.”
As we have pointed out before the UK has very rarely, since at least 1960, NOT had an overall budget deficit. But for much of this period the debt to GDP ratio fell or was stable because the borrowing did not exceed the rate of expansion of the economy. So “living within our means” – if by that one means having an overall balanced budget – does not mean never having an overall deficit. Far from it.
Tackling the deficit
John McDonnell combines two very different strands of “deficit tackling” in a single sentence, which to my mind confuses the issues:
We don’t believe that the vast majority of middle- and low-income earners who didn’t cause the economic crisis should have to pay for it through cuts in tax credits, pay freezes, and cuts in essential services. Instead we believe we can tackle the deficit by halting the tax cuts to the very rich and to corporations, by making sure they pay their taxes, and by investing in the housing and infrastructure a modern country needs to get people back to work in good jobs.”
First, if, for example, you aim to get rid of a 3% deficit in a single year in this way, tax income from the rich needs to rise by more than the same amount, i.e. around £60 billion. Not all of this sum would reduce current year private sector spending in the UK (we don’t adhere to trickle-down economics!) but undoubtedly some of it would do so, and is therefore somewhat deflationary, and acts as a negative multiplier.
(This point is independent of the positive role of tax justice as an instrument of social policy, as an issue of justice and for diminishing wealth and income inequality – not mainly for instant deficit-crashing, since tax increases can have a bad economic impact (recall the recent VAT increase in Japan as part of Abenomics). If tax rises diminish economic activity, the deficit will – perversely – rise. )
Second, the investment programme added here as a deficit-tackling instrument does not (in the short term) “save” money, but spends it – for good reasons. The financing can be by borrowing, but if so, the borrowing counts towards the overall deficit which may therefore tend to rise initially! The positive multiplier expected from the investment will give benefits in future years, not in year 1.
Carney on the “bridge-building” role of deficits
For why be so coy and defensive? Even Bank of England Governor Mark Carney is clear about the need for public deficits in difficult times. In a speech in Dublin on 28 January 2015, he pointed out that
In the decade before the crisis, private financial balances became unsustainable…
Yes, private finances… He went on
The UK had the space to allow its automatic stabilisers [i.e. benefits etc.] to cushion the impact of the recession. With the deficit rising to a peak of more than 10% of GDP before steadily consolidating, fiscal policy effectively recycled elevated private savings and built a bridge to the period when private balance sheets were repaired and confidence returned.
That is, the public deficit is a function of the overall state and balance of the economy as a whole, not a thing-in-isolation. UK public debt in 2007/8 was just 37% of GDP, and the current budget deficit 0.5% of GDP. Borrowing for capital investment was 2.2%of GDP. Yet the financial crash occurred, for reasons quite unrelated to public debt and deficits.
In defence of deficits
Maybe I have misunderstood something in all this. Maybe “living within our means” – for Messrs McDonnell and Livingstone as well as Corbyn – is to be understood and treated as a longer cyclical issue, covering a span of years, so that deficits in bad times are still okay. Maybe it is intended that references to “eliminating the deficit” should really be understood as “eliminating the current deficit”. Maybe it is agreed that borrowing for long-term investment is acceptable even though it may create an equivalent “deficit” .
In which case, they should make this clear, and not dress up key points of policy in the linguistics of the radical right, nor hide the actual policy behind their veil.
It may be politically hard to make this case for the positive role of deficits – in many circumstances – with a public who have for so long been lectured by Very Important People from the Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties that deficits are by nature lethal, and There is No Money.
But if even politicians of the left come to adopt language and arguments that underpin Osbornian politics – and are constantly preached from the neolithic (pre-Keynesian) cult temples of classical economics – we are lost in a new Dark Age.
Jeremy Smith is the co-Director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME) and a barrister by profession, with a strong and sustained interest in political economy. His career has spanned the public, private and non-profit sectors. From 1990 to 1996 he was Chief Executive of the London Borough of Camden, and later worked for local government in the European and international domain. He was Secretary General of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions from 2002 to 2009. He is an expert in international urban development, as well as EU and national constitutional issues.
The State Council established a task force on August 18 to probe into the massive warehouse explosions that rocked Tianjin’s Binhai New Area last Wednesday.
The team, which includes members of the Tianjin government and other related departments, is investigating the cause of the explosions in accordance with laws and regulations.
The investigators will define the nature and gravity of the incident, determine liability and also advise on punishment. A statement issued by the State Council on August 18 said the team will “give a responsible answer” to the Party and the people, and that those found to be responsible will be severely punished.
Ten people with connections to the company that owned the warehouse have been taken into custody on August 13, according to the officials from the Tianjin police bureau.
Yu Xuewei and Dong Shexuan, directors of Ruihai International Logistics, were among the senior managers and shareholders taken in for questioning.
A total 114 deaths have been reported, 101 of which have been identified, while 65 people remain missing as of 9:00 am on August 19. Those missing include five firefighters in active service, 44 firefighters working for the Tianjin Port Group Co, and five policemen.
Efforts to identify victims with DNA tests are ongoing, and related departments will continue to release updated information, officials said.
Bao Jingling, chief engineer of the Tianjin Environmental Protection Bureau, responded to queries on the white foam that appeared on streets following rains in Tianjin at the press conference on August 19, saying that nothing abnormal was detected in samples tested by the environmental watchdog.
Photos circulating online show large amounts of white foam on streets after the rain, while some on social media reported discomforted after getting wet from the brief rains on the morning of August 18 in Tianjin’s Binhai New Area.
Zong Guoying, Party secretary of Binhai New Area, said the government has set up a special services center to deal with repairs of damaged residential areas. The center also is supplementing affected residents with temporary housing costs and processing compensation claims.
Afterwards, the government will hire a third party to assess damages and compensate according to related laws.
Zong also noted that after the investigation, the government will provide a clear, just and transparent report to the public, addressing issues such as proximity of the exploded warehouse containing hazardous chemicals and residential districts.
The blast revealed that serious work safety loopholes exist in China’s chemical industry. The whole industry should learn from the fatal blasts. Now local governments in China are carrying out inspections of companies engaged in the processing, storage and transportation of dangerous chemicals.
Ukraine has no money to pay off its public debt and under certain circumstances risks turning into a forever-in-debt country, Jeffrey Albert Tucker, Distinguished Fellow of the Foundation for Economic Education, said.
Earlier in August, Ukraine managed to avoid a technical default by paying off its $120 million eurobond coupon. The next payment, $500 million, is due to be made in September.
“Creditors are always in a bad situation under these conditions – there’s no money to be had, but they still want their money. But I actually think there’s no chance that Ukraine’s going to be able to pay what they owe, and 5 percent is not going to fix the problem… The creditors are going to have to take a bath this time… Six to twelve months from now we could be looking at another Greece,” Tucker told RT.
According to the analyst, the new Ukrainian government has taken no significant measures to improve the debt issue. Currently, a default is not the worst scenario in comparison with problems which would result from austerity measures.
“The one thing you learn from international politics is that regimes can come and go, but government debt lasts forever unless there’s a default… Nobody wants a default, but if you can’t pay, you can’t pay. The Ukrainian economy is in a free fall and unless they can tap some more money from the IMF – I don’t see any another option. There’s no tax base that can possibly cover a debt this gargantuan,” Tucker pointed out.
A Ukrainian governmental delegation arrived in San Francisco for the final round of the talks with the international committee of creditors. Led by Franklin Templeton, the committee comprises the five major holders of Ukrainian bonds worth $10 billion.
The memorandum of intent between Kiev and the International Monetary Fund presumes the restructuring of $22.7 billion in debt, including companies’ debts. This provision is the key condition for providing Ukraine with $17.5 billion of financial aid under a four-year program of extended funding.
As it appears, Washington has succeeded to stage a soft coup in Iran under a carefully planned “Iran Project” initiated in 2001. The project objective was to dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure by installing a puppet government in Tehran. [1] Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Javad Zarif have been the leading actors of this coup. The nucleus of the coup was a group of former Iranian diplomats at the United Nation, the so-called New York Circle (Halgheh), which included Zarif and Hussein Fereydoun, Rouhani’s brother.
Zarif has had friendly relations with some well known Americans. Over a decade ago, Zarif met then Senator John Kerry first in a party hosted by the Wall Street investor George Soros.[2] Under the Project, helped by the US-financed media outlets and collaboration of compradors in Iran, Hassan Rouhani became president in 2013.[3] The Key figures in his administration happen to be the members of the New York Circle, including his Foreign Minister Zarif. After becoming president, Rouhani in consultation with the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, decided to capitulate to all US demands and dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which ultimately led to the Vienna agreement.
The Vienna Agreement
After years of coercive diplomacy, the United States and its European allies finally forced the clerics in Tehran to dismantle the vital parts of Iran’s nuclear program. At the end of a marathon negotiations session in Vienna on July 14, 2015, the Six World Powers, led by the US, imposed on Iran the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA or Vienna agreement was unanimously approved by the European Union and by the UN Security Council on July 20. As a result, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the UNSC issued Resolution 2231, making the Vienna agreement a formal international accord binding on Iran. According to the agreement all nuclear related sanctions against Iran will be eventually lifted pending implementation of all steps the agreement requires Iran to take and can snap-back in case of violations.[4]
Propaganda to Fool Iranians
As soon as the deal was agreed on in Vienna, Rouhani began spreading propagandas to fool and mislead Iranians concerning the details of the agreement. His government ordered the media not to criticize the agreement and instead show it as an exceptionally good deal for the country. The university professors were dictated to praise the agreement in classrooms for the students. At the same time, his government put under pressure the critical media outlets; the weekly newspaper Nohome-Dey that had criticized the agreement was banned, and the widely circulated daily Kayhan and the radical website Raja News were given notices for criticizing the agreement.
Surprisingly, Rouhani’s government issued permit for the BBC to operate inside Iran after years of prohibition. Moreover, the US based Iranian NGOs and the US funded Persian Language radio and television programs along with the US fifth column in Tehran began spreading propagandas that the agreement was good for Iran.[5] The factions affiliated with Rouhani’s government preached people to believe that Iran had won. On July 17, in a sermon given at the Friday Prayer, a senior cleric, Mohammad Ali Movahedi said “in the negotiation we forced the West to accept Iran’s rights”; while in reality, it was just the reverse for the reasons explained below.
Dismantling the Nuclear Facilities
The agreement requires Iran to dismantle its main enrichment facility in Fordow, destroying 98% of its enriched uranium stockpile, and not to produce enriched uranium above 3.75% level. Also, Arak Heavy Water Reactor, a domestically designed 40 mega watts nuclear reactor that is 95% complete, must be destroyed (its core has to be filled with concrete), and only about 6000 old centrifuges will stay in Natanz to function, the remaining two-thirds of the centrifuges have to be stored for 15 years at which time they become technically obsolete. Overall what is left is a useless nuclear program that does not produce any benefit to Iran. In brief, the US coerces Iran to destroy its vital nuclear facilities under supervision of the IAEA, wiping out billions of dollars of investment in its nuclear energy industry.
More importantly, the agreement forces Iran to accept the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, which makes the country subjected to the most severe preventive inspections and supervisions that have ever been imposed on any country to date. The IAEA will have access to all phases of Iran’s nuclear program as well as Iran’s military sites to monitor a possible military dimension of Iran’s nuclear activity. Iran has to let the Agency to interview the Iranian nuclear scientists and military men. This agreement is disastrous for the Iranian people as it will pave the way for future military interventions in the country.
Rouhani’s government has already implemented most of the steps JCPOA requires in advance without informing the parliament (Majles). Destruction of Iran’s main nuclear facilities must be verified and confirmed by the IAEA Board of Governors and then be reported by the Agency Director General to the UNSC. Iran will go under IAEA’s supervisions beyond the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requirements. Under the agreement, Iran must let the IAEA inspectors to access its suspected military sites within 24 days. Therefore, Iran’s military sites will be vulnerable to IAEA inspections and their strategic structures will be identified for possible future military attacks.
Also, Iran has accepted a separate confidential agreement with the IAEA to clarify its past nuclear activity. Critics contend the IAEA and its organs are the tools of the United States to break up the sovereignty of developing countries. The pattern of destroying a resource-rich country by the US is familiar: manufacture a pretext, impose economic sanctions to weaken the country, denuclearize it, eliminate its missiles and other key defense capabilities, and ultimately attack the country. That was the pattern in the invasions and destructions of Iraq and Libya by the US and its European allies.
Restricting Defense Capabilities
The UN restrictions on arms and nuclear-related materials will continue to be imposed on Iran. Moreover, the agreement goes beyond the nuclear program by forcing Iran not to manufacture or test ballistic missiles for 8 years and not to export arms for five years. Ballistic missiles are the most important conventional weapons that Iran manufactures. According to Annex B, item 3 of the UN Resolution, Iran is not permitted to manufacture or test the missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.[6] Yet, Ballistic missiles that carry nuclear warheads do not differ much from those without nuclear warheads. Iran’s ballistic missiles are in the range of 1000 to 3500 kilometers and do not have nuclear warheads. That prevents Iran from sending satellites into space. Therefore, the resolution bars Iran not only from nuclear technological progress but also from advancing in conventional missiles and that significantly weakens Iran’s defense capabilities. Provisions 11 and 12 of the Resolution provides If Iran does not comply with the JCPOA agreement, upon request of any of the Six Powers, the sanctions can snap-back, and even China and Russia are not able to veto re-imposition of the UNSC sanctions.[7]
The Revolutionary Guards oppose the agreement because it endangers Iran’s defense capabilities. However, the government has told the Guards not to intervene in politics. As it appears, behind the scene the top clerics, Ali Khamenei and Hassan Rouhani, have accepted all the US requested demands and now are trying to contain the Guards to prevent a possible revolt.
Ratification of the Agreement
The agreement is currently reviewed by the legislative bodies in the US and Iran. While JCPOA is under scrutiny line by line in the US Congress, in Iran it is just the opposite. Rouhani wants the Majles to give up its authority to review the agreement. He wants the agreement to be approved by the Supreme National Security Council, a non-elected body, and bypass the Majles. This is because the Majles had earlier devised a law which requires the government to preserve Iran’s nuclear rights and achievements. That could cause the Majles to reject the agreement. The head of Atomic organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, wrongly has said JCPOA is not a treaty, so it does not need to go through the Majles. [8] Rouhani’s negotiators have made a legal blunder by letting the agreement first go to the UNSC before the Majles reviews it. According to Articles 77 and 125 of Iran’s constitution, Majles must approve all agreements and treaties negotiated with foreign countries.[9]
Khamenei wants the agreement to be approved by the Majles, using his influence.[10] The Majles’ Head and some of its representatives are sided with Khamenei and want to vote on the overall JCPOA without going through the details of the document. The Iranian parliament is feeble; its bills can be overruled by non-elected councils or by the Supreme Leader. There are 290 representatives in the Majles, forty of whom are clerics and some 25 are close relatives of the Majles Head, Ali Larijani, and some others have close relations with the clerical families. Some Majles’ Representatives do not have good knowledge of the agreement they are reviewing. The agreement has 104 pages of text, including 5 annexes.[11]
It is full of technical details beyond Iran’s nuclear program and gives the powerful countries and IAEA the ability to intervene in Iran’s defense policy. The translation of the agreement by Iran’s Foreign Ministry has been questioned for inaccuracy by some Majles Representatives and has been returned to the Foreign Ministry. No official Farsi version of JCPOA has been prepared. The foreign ministry translation does not have legal basis because it is not a formal document. The Majles intends to delay voting on the agreement until the US congress makes its mind. The Majles representatives are obligated to the Iranian people and not to the top clerics who have sacrificed Iran’s sovereignty to keep their regime. Therefore, the Majles must reject this shameful agreement at this important historical juncture.
Instead of capitulation, Iran has the right to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty under Article X.1 of the Treaty, contending the Treaty has jeopardized its national sovereignty.[12] This option still is open to the country if the Majles rejects the agreement and rules to stop its implementation. Iran has legitimate reasons to withdraw; five of its scientists have been assassinated by foreign backed agents, its nuclear facilities have been sabotaged by computer viruses, and its economy has been illegally sanctioned by the US and its European allies. In case of withdrawal, Iran can have more power to negotiate and can preserve its nuclear rights and achievements. Also it can maintain its nuclear deterrent capability in case of attacks by the US and Israel.
There are now mock fights in the US congress over the agreement. Republicans feel if Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is approved, it can lead to Democrats’ victory in the 2016 presidential election. For that reason, they are trying to oppose the deal. However, Obama has said he will veto the Congress if the deal is rejected. As of this writing, most members of the US congress have said they do not want to support the deal. There is also a mock fight going on by Israel Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who says the agreement should be rejected. This is despite Obama’s administration consultations with him and Israeli eavesdropping at the negotiations. Israeli nuclear experts had hidden in nearby rooms throughout the negotiations and had been consulted.[13] Iran’s deal benefits Israel because it enables Israel to remain as the sole nuclear power in the region.
The Reminiscence of Capitulation
In March 1962, the US pressured Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to grant immunity from trial under Iranian laws to all American military advisors and technicians serving in Iran, including those hired by the Iranian government. The Shah pushed Iran’s Senate and the Majles to grant the immunity. The legislative bodies narrowly approved the immunity bill on October 13, 1964. This privilege gave the US exclusive rights and permanent jurisdiction over all American military and civilian employees.[14] On October 26, 1964, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini denounced the capitulation granted to Americans and used it as a political tool to mobilize the opposition against the Shah. It is now astonishing that Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, has awarded another capitulation to foreign powers on a much more important issue than the Shah did. The Shah’s capitulation to the United States was the reminiscence of capitulation privileges the Qajar King Fath-Ali Shah granted to Russian military personnel to end the Russo-Persian war of 1826-28. Under the treaty of Turkamanchai, signed on February 21, 1828, Iran recognized capitulation rights for Russians living in Iran, and Russia gained the right to send consulate envoys anywhere in Iran. Also, Russia striped Iran from large parts of its land in the Caucasus and prohibited Iran from navigation on its own shores along the Caspian Sea.[15] The capitulation to Russia was eventually revoked in 1927 by the Shah’s father Reza Shah Pahlavi.
Prime Minster Mohammad Mosaddegh did not want to capitulate, the control of Iran’s oil, to the British government. For that reason, his service to his country was ended by the Anglo-American military coup in 1953. It is regrettable that now a few individuals under the banner of Mosaddegh’s “Jebhe Melli”, have joined the US fifth column to promote another capitulation to foreign powers.
By conceding to the nuclear agreement in Vienna, Tehran has granted a very shameful capitulation to foreign powers. The clerics have sacrificed Iran’s national security and sovereignty in return for survival of their regime. By imposing the JCPOA, the US has forced the clerical regime to accept the most shameful capitulation in Iran’s contemporary history. Rouhani and his foreign minister Zarif must be ashamed of imposing such a capitulation on the Iranian people.
Akbar E. Torbat teaches economics at California State University, Los Angeles. He received his PhD in political economy from the University of Texas at Dallas. Email: [email protected], Webpage: http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/atorbat
[3] Television Serial 24, aired between 2002 to 2010, part VIII, according to the this clip Iran’s president name is Hassan, and Iran is permitted to have only 6000 , the same as in in JCPOA. https://www.facebook.com/348107372048510/videos/390516254474288/.
[8] Reuters, Iran’s parliament has no power over nuclear deal, top negotiator says, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/01/us-iran-nuclear-parliament-idUSKCN0Q637220150801
(Please read Part I and Part II prior to this article)
Perceptions and Motivations
The third part of the series deals with the perceptions and motivations behind the possible polar reorientations. Much can be discussed in terms of these broad topics, but for comprehension’s sake, they’re split into eight separate themes:
Energy Market Disruptor:
Iran has the very real potential to be the world’s greatest energy disruptor, provided that all of its oil and gas eventually gets to market (and it’s predicted that the Europeans and Chinese will be working at a feverish self-interested pace to expedite this).
If it comes to pass, then Russia and Saudi Arabia would receive major blows to their budgetary and economic forecasts, possibly even resulting in some sort of social destabilization as a forerunner to US-planned political unrest, which is why these two actors have the most to lose if Iran decides to disrupt the system (for maximum economic benefit to itself).
Strategically speaking, Russia is actually even worse off than Saudi Arabia because it has the most to lose in terms of its regional influence and grand strategy if Iran builds pipelines to Europe (and even more so if it assists Turkmenistan with doing the same). If Iran’s energy riches are largely directed towards feeding the hungry Asian market and invested primarily in LNG, then Russia and Saudi Arabia would both have substantially less to lose, but they’d still be facing a strategic loss regardless.
Cycle Of Suspicion:
The current situation can be summed up with the following dilemmatic axiom: the closer that the US and Iran move to one another, the more suspicious this makes Russia and Saudi Arabia; likewise, the closer that Russia and Saudi Arabia move to one another, the more suspicious this makes the US and Iran. In both instances, each pair feels compelled to continue moving in their newfound direction out of fear that failure to do so would place it in a comparative disadvantage vis-à-vis its primary rival’s engagement with its thought-to-be ally, as such is the nature of this strategic security dilemma.
Proxy Battlegrounds:
The Wars on Syria and Yemen hold an important place in guiding the interests of the four examined players, and here’s a very cursory look at what significance they have for decision makers;
Syria
Russia and Iran want to save Syria, while the US wants to destroy it. The Saudis had attempted to crush the country but obviously failed, and now they seem possibly open to a deal (likely conducted bilaterally with Russia) to enact a ‘face-saving’ pull-out to focus on their efforts on ‘winning’ the War on Yemen. If Russia and Saudi Arabia reach such arrangement, then that would leave the US and Turkey as the only two significant actors to be continuing the War on Syria, which of course could make the battlefield situation much more easier for the Syrian Arab Army (provided that the US and Turkey don’t launch a conventional invasion first or in response to Saudi Arabia’s retreat).
Yemen
Iran is in favor of the Houthis, while the US and Saudi Arabia are fighting to restore ousted President Hadi to power. Russia is pretty much on the sidelines in this entire mess, powerless to enact any real change in the situation except to possibly reach a deal with Saudi Arabia for it to transfer its proxies from Syria to Yemen in exchange for advanced weaponry and deeper bilateral cooperation. Yemen has become something of an obsession for the Saudis, so it’s probable that they would be interested in any likeminded Russian proposal, but of course, even though this would save Syria, it could also enrage Iran, which might see Russia as having conspired against Iranian interests in the southern Arabian Peninsula for what it may feel is no necessary reason (or even worse, an opportunistic one).
American Anti-Russian Blowback Turns Against The Saudis:
In the 1980s, the US and Saudi Arabia created Al Qaeda to fight the Soviets, and they also cooperated with one another in waging the first oil war against Moscow. The effects of this twin-tracked anti-Russian campaign was for the US to eventually be attacked by the same terrorists that it once supported, but neither they nor the Saudis ultimately received any lasting negative impact from the oil campaign. In 2014-2015, despite the strategic template for American-Saudi geopolitical sabotage being similar, the consequences of strategic blowback couldn’t be any more different. The US and Saudi Arabia helped created ISIL, but it turned around to attack the Kingdom twice, and the oil war that the two were cooperating in somehow spun out of control to inflict damage on both of them and turn the two partners into fierce energy rivals. All of this, it appears, is to the Saudis’ detriment and less so to the Americans’.
Opposing Motivations:
Saudi Arabia and Iran couldn’t have more divergent motivations for their possible reorientations. Saudi Arabia fears economic sabotage by the US due to the oil war; feels itself under asymmetrical pressure by American-guided ISIL; and is experiencing what it seriously views to be a strategic rejection by the US in favor of Iran. On the opposite side of understanding, Iran thinks that it secured itself from conventional and Color Revolution attack (the latter always being a threat, whether Tehran realizes it or not); stands on the cusp of an economic bonanza from investment, pipelines, trade, etc.; and feels vindicated and proud that the West recognizes it as a Great Power. To sum up their differences, Saudi Arabia has everything to fear, while Iran has everything to be excited about (or so it believes), and these spectrum-opposite ‘emotions’ (if one can personify these states for a moment) are the primary motivations behind their respective outreaches to Russia and the US.
New Silk Road:
Iran is a key node on the New Silk Road, and if it becomes a focal point of rapid Western investment there (which is what both sides want), then it would consequently become a Western outpost along the main non-Russian New Silk Road continental chokepoint. The West could ‘play nice’ in the interest of mutual profit and ‘let the good times roll’, but as explained in Part I, if the proper political motivation comes up to return to sanctions to at least threaten to do so (e.g. Iran doesn’t follow the West’s ‘advice’ to aggressively promote its interests along Russia’s southern former Soviet frontier), then they’d be turning their investments into strategic disruptors not only in the heart of Iran, but also in the heart of the New Silk Road. Iran sincerely thinks that it can have the best of both worlds and deal equally with the West and the New Silk Road, but the Chinese and Russians have never invested anywhere and then pulled out or threatened to do so, but the West has, and their lengthy history of sanctions (not least against Iran itself) testify to this fact. If forthcoming Western investment can get Iran to establish a tight enough economic dependency with it, then they can exploit this process at any time of their choosing for the chosen geopolitical reason (“activate the time bomb against Iran to harm Russia/China”).
The Southern Front:
The US awaits the day that it can use Iran as an indirect proxy of destabilizing influence against Russia’s southern former Soviet periphery. Part I touched upon this possibility in citing the Hoagland-Blinken Doctrine for Central Asia and how it holds open the prospect of strategic collaboration with Iran in penetrating that region. While short in words, it’s big in implications, and with Iran feeling rightfully confident and newly assertive as a result of its nuclear ‘victory’, it could very well be guided into a ‘Northern Pivot’ of influence projection along the Caucasus, Caspian, and Central Asia if ‘properly’ manipulated. This would relieve Saudi Arabia of whatever ‘pressure’ it feels and ease some of its anti-Iranian paranoia, which could help the US convince them that the deal wasn’t ‘so bad’ for its interests and thus work to reverse the Russian reorientation to a certain degree. This would leave Russia as the biggest loser, since it wouldn’t really have anything to show for its advances with Saudi Arabia, and it would also have a heated rival in Iran (which would be behaving that way both for its own ‘self-interested’ reasons [supported by the US, directly or indirectly] and perhaps even to pay Russia back for its prior relationship with Riyadh).
Putin’s Tightrope:
One of the main factors at play here is that President Putin needs to walk a fine line in his country’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran. He must balance the changing nature of the Mideast’s strategic reality with both Russia’s new (Saudi Arabia) and existing (Iran) interests, but the US wants to pressure Russia to ‘take sides’ so that it can set itself up for a strategic trap of ‘double isolation’ (burning both bridges at the same time as a result of failed diplomacy, per what was just discussed in the above theme). Moscow has taken to exercising masterful diplomacy in the past couple of years, but the stakes in managing relations with such large, important, mutually rival states as Saudi Arabia and Iran are historic and a lot more difficult to handle that that of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and could literally be a make-or-break moment for the Mideast that sees Russia promoting/losing its overall influence there with the resultant peaceful/disastrous consequences. Also, if played perfectly right, then a reasonable scenario could develop where the US ends up as the big loser, falling into its own trap of ‘double isolation’ and finding itself squeezed out of the region that it once controlled so firmly.
Yanis Varoufakis is in the process of becoming an important figure in Greek political life and beyond. In the break-up process affecting Syriza, which seems now well underway [1], he will be called to play a major role, together with the former Minister of energy, Panayiotis Lafazanis, and the President of the Parliament, Mrs Zoe Kostantopoulou. But Yanis Varoufakis has also indubitably become a major figure for the Left which is critical of the Euro and someone who will be an important factor in the political reconfigurations which are in the offing. There are good reasons for this.
A man of the “system” rebelling against it
Yanis Varoufakis is a rare case, without being an oddity. He is an economist who has taken squarely pro-European positions in the past, but who is at present very critical as far as the governance of the European Union is concerned, and in consideration of the behaviour of European leaders. He is also an economist who came out in favor of the Euro, for essentially theoretical reasons, but who is today quietly considering the possibility of an exit of his country from the Eurozone. Evidently, his experience as a Minister, and as a negotiator, has changed the vision he had of the Euro and there is much to learn from his experience for any true Left. The Left which is critical of the Euro, or even anti-Euro, must be sensitive to his trajectory. He comes from inside the “system,” but in the same time he is apprehending it critically, and he declares himself ready to break with it rather than accepting what one is reduced to calling a capitulation, to which Tsipras finally had to give in. This is a most important point. At any rate, Varoufakis is keeping up his criticism, be it against the Diktat of July 13th or against the new memorandum which is to be ratified by August 20th. He recently declared on the BBC: “Ask all those who know the state of Greek finances and they will tell you that this agreement will not work»[2]. His moral authority and his competence as a former Minister of finances are playing in his favour.
For the agreement which Greece and the other countries of the Eurozone are going to achieve will not solve anything and it is “done for” even before it has seen the light of day. The situation in Greece has terribly deteriorated in July and in the beginning of August, as a result of the measures which were taken against Greece by the Central European Bank. Some 86 or 89 billion euros are mentioned for this agreement. But today, it is clear that between 110 and 120 would be needed. Similarly, it is evident that one would have to proceed very quickly to the annulment of part of the Greek debt. Even the IMF has been saying so since early July. Yet, we know that Germany is refusing flatly and that it is dragging its feet to sign this agreement [3]. Under such conditions, it is just as evident that the agreement, which should be concluded by August 20th will not help anything and that it will be overtaken and rendered obsolete by events to come. Moreover, the economic situation in Greece keeps deteriorating. Clearly, an exit from the Eurozone remains more than ever in the cards for the weeks, or months, to come [4].
An image of competence
So that Varoufakis has become the very incarnation of a competent Left (he was a highly esteemed and recognized professor of economics), yet one which does not abandon any of its critical dimensions and who makes use of his competence in order to push ever further his criticism of the « system. » He is incidentally a product of the ruling classes (even if his father was jailed during the Greek civil war for his communist sympathies) but one who is not playing according to the codes of his background.
He is, need we remind of it, a specialist in game theory, a domain which has much thrilled economists [5]. He is recognized by his peers, whether they are economists of the orthodox or the heterodox currents. His book, The Global Minotaur, received a well-earned international success [6]. Moreover, he did not hesitate to conceive a credible alternative plan for Greece, which could have avoided the country the shameful capitulation to which it was compelled to, as well as the looming disaster of a new memorandum, at a time when many people are still maintaining that « there is no alternative. »
A future leader of the anti-Euro Left ?
Yanis Varoufakis was a charismatic Minister of finances, who did not hesitate to voice certain truths within the stuffy setting of European reunions. He clearly has the potential for becoming the herald of an anti-Euro Left. The fact that the decided at first in favor of the Euro, and that he then considered the possibility of an exit from the Euro, lends him an undisputable authority on this point.
Moreover, he has hosted on his blog Stefano Fassina’s appeal for a front of anti-Euro liberation movements [7]. This is an eminently symbolic gesture. For Fassina too is an insider of the « system. » He was vice-minister of finances of the Letta government in Italy. He is an influential member of the center-left party, the Democratic Party, to which belongs the present Prime-Minister, Matteo Renzi. However, today, he has become one of the most virulent opponents to the Euro in Italy and his appeal is nothing less than one of fiercest polemical tracts which have been written against the single currency. Varoufakis and Fassina are representative of the fracture which has occurred inside the « system, » or what one of my Italian friends, Professor Bagnai, calls the PUDE, or Partito Unico Dell’Euro. Their trajectories bringing them to anti-Euro positions carry the more significance for their having earlier been supporters of the Euro. One could say the same of Oskar Lafontaine who, as the leader of the SPD, was one of the founding fathers of the Euro and who, in 2013, made a radical change to becoming a resolute opponent of the single currency. This development is now very important. More and more the camp of anti-Euro, or at the very least Euro-critical economists and politicians, is being joined by people who were even recently still supporters of the Euro, but who have been caught up by the reality of the Euro and who have figured out that there is no future possible in Europe as long as one is holding onto the Euro.
Moreover, Varoufakis has been attacked most viciously, not only in the Greek political spheres, where some would like to sue him for high treason, but also in the Europeist circles of Brussels and elsewhere. He has answered roundly to these criticisms on his blog and in the press. Concentrating upon himself the hatred of the Europhiles and of the supporters of the Euro, he is quite normally attracting the sympathies of those who fight against the Euro.
A figure of protest
It is evident therefore that Yanis Varoufakis is cumulating the characteristics which should make him into an example for a certain left, but not for all the left, and certainly not in the ranks of the French government, a government supposed to belong to the Left. For the personality of Yanis Varoufakis, and especially the discourse of which he is the carrier, are clearly insufferable for this moderate right disguised as a « government Left. » It is clear that nothing in his personality can be attractive to the official socialists, to people like Moscovici, or Martin Schulz and Sigmar Gabriel, Michel Sapin or François Hollande. In short, the so-called “government socialists” who are the heirs to Hebert and Noske of the Germany of 1918.
Quite the opposite; Yanis Varoufakis is the very example of the fact that, contrarily to what these are asserting, there are alternatives and that austerity is not unavoidable. He is the living proof of their compromises, of their cowardice and of their multiple treasons, when other roads were open to them. Which is why he must necessarily be hated by them. But he will certainly attract to himself some of the “trouble-makers” of the French Socialist Party, at any rate those who did not accept the Diktat of July 13th, as well as the partisans of Arnaud Montebourg, and of course, the members of the radical left. Varoufakis is the living proof that other policies are possible in the European Union, even if one is entitled to think that he did not carry out this project fully, and to its full consequences. In any case, he brought it quite far, and it is not his fault if the project could not be carried through.
It remains to be seen if he knows that he has become a symbolic figure and if he will be able to live up to the symbols he is presently incarnating. For, and this is the contradiction which he will have to face up to and solve, he, the man who always wanted to stand for rational government, a legacy of his work on game theory, [8], will have to admit that he has become an actor in a game which no longer obeys rationality but one in which symbols and ideology are occupying a major place. At the same time, in politics, analysis too calls for rational calculations. If he doesn’t want to lose himself, he will have to hold firm onto both poles of this contradiction.
Translated by Anne-Marie de Grazia
Jacques Sapir is a French economist who currently runs the blog www.russeurope.hypotheses.org. He studies Russian economic policy, financial crises, economic transitions, economic institutions, and individual behaviour. In 2000, he started investigating the interactions between regime changes, the structuration of financial regimes, and macroeconomic instabilities. Since 2007, Sapir’s research focuses on the current global financial crisis in general, and the Eurozone crisis in particular.
It’s hard imagining Venezuelans rejecting Bolivarian governance under Chavez and now Maduro – responsible for vital social benefits most Americans can’t imagine, including free education to the highest levels and universal healthcare.
Despite economic hard times because of destabilizing US policies and low oil prices, Venezuelans reject returning to the ugly pre-Chavez past.
The support Maduro’s PSUV-led (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) 12-party GPP (Great Patriotic Pole) coalition first established by Chavez in 1998.
Maduro said “(w)e have achieved a perfect and expanded alliance.” For the first time in Bolivarianism’s history, all coalition candidates are on the same electoral list.
PSUV member Jorge Rodriguez said “(w)e are going to fight against the economic war. Let’s take out the deputies of the right, from within the National Assembly. All they have done is conspire, sabotage and act against the people of Venezuela.”
In February 2014, Maduro restructured the GPP to achieve greater “grassroots revolutionary hegemony.” He explained “(t)he revolution has demonstrated that it’s capable of creating good and powerful values of patriotism, of love for the nation, of popular, sovereign and true democracy.”
In June, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced parliamentary elections will be held on December 6. Applications from 1,270 candidates were received to contest for 167 National Assembly seats – a unicameral legislature.
Citizens are automatically enfranchised at birth. Everyone over age18 may vote by registering.
CNE President Tibisay Lucena said over half a million new voters registered from February through late June – responding to a continuing grassroots drive to get all Venezuelans of voting age to participate in the electoral process Jimmy Carter calls the world’s best.
In 11 of 12 elections held in the past 15 years, Bolivarianism triumphed. A December victory appears likely based on newly released Hinterlaces poll results.
It showed two-thirds of Venezuelans intend voting in December – a large turnout for parliamentary elections. High participation favors the PSUV-led coalition.
Only 4% indicated no plan to vote. Another 9% are undecided but lean toward participating. Over one-third favor the Great Patriotic Pole (GPP) PSUV-led coalition compared to 19% for the main opposition right-wing Roundtable of Democratic Unity (MUD) party.
Journalist Jose Vincente Rangel said “(a)fter 15 years of the Bolivarian Revolution, the opposition fails to still be perceived as an alternative.”
Expect the GPP to maintain its National Assembly majority – crucial to continue Bolivarian social justice popularly supported for good reason.
It lifted millions of Venezuelans out of poverty, provides benefits never before offered, established model democracy, and constitutionally mandates equity and justice for all.
Chavismo lives. Bolivarianism is institutionalized. It’s vital to preserve. It’s polar opposite neoliberal harshness.
America and Venezuela are constitutional world’s apart – freedom v. fascism, an easy choice to make.
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.”
“Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.” — Anonymous
In 2010 the pro-corporate Roberts’ 5/4 Supreme Court decided, in the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling that favored right-wing multimillionaire businessmen and amoral multinational corporations by making it easier for them to steal US elections by allowing unlimited, anonymous monetary contributions to political campaigns, political action groups and politicians.
This ruling, called by many fair-minded observers to be the worst Supreme Court decision of the past century, has emboldened the already powerful and corruptible corporations (that already have dominion over the economy) to now also be able to thoroughly bribe any number of favored pro-corporate politicians to do their will but also to more effectively brain-wash voters through multi-million dollar ad campaigns (that can’t be effectively countered by small contributions from average voters).
The US Supreme Court has thus made legal the absurd notion that inanimate paper corporations like PolyMet and Glencore should have the same privileges (but not the same responsibilities) as living humans. Both of those out-or-state companies are potential despoilers of northern Minnesota’s irreplaceable wetlands, rivers, aquifers and aboriginal land and water rights.
After the ruling came down, there was only a brief bit of outrage from the so-called national and state leadership of our essentially “one-party system” (one-party, that is, when it comes to the Republican and Democratic Party’s corporate and militarist agendas).
What Should be the Punishment for Corporate Entities That Plunder and Pillage?
But if corporate America has new privileges, shouldn’t it be honoring the responsibilities of personhood as well?
Any thinking person would agree that if any entity enjoys the privileges of a human, it should also bear the same responsibilities as humans. Thus it should incur the same punishments as individuals do when it hurts people, commit crimes, poisons the water, fouls the air or rapes the land?
One of the rare victories against corporate giants occurred at Shapleigh, Maine, when that town managed to protect their water rights from the insatiable water-extracting corporate giant Nestle. (See video and more information on this episode at:
Nestle, one of many multinational corporate exploiters around the world, has no allegiance to any state or municipality or any location where it tries to extract water or minerals that never were theirs to begin with. But when the minerals are gone and the water has been used up or polluted, Nestle, PolyMet, Glencore, et al will be long gone, which has always been the case of giant resource-extractors and polluters like Exxon/Mobil, Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum, Halliburton, Deep Water Horizon, Coca-Cola, Perrier or whatever other corporate intruder that covets the people’s resources.
And who benefits? Why, of course, the major benefactors will be faceless, out-or-state investors, corporate shareholders and CEOs living and doing business at some luxurious corporate headquarters, none of whom will have to live with the poisoned environment that they will be leaving behind.
Move to Amend: Overturning Citizens United
Shapleigh, Maine’s small victory against injustice should inspire the rest of us to do what must be done if America’s fragile democracy is ever to thrive again. The outrageous Citizens United decision must be overturned with a constitutional amendment. (See www.movetoamend.org for more.) The future of the nation, our children, the planet, our drinking water, natural habitat and aboriginal rights are all at stake.
Exploitive corporations don’t really seem to care. They are mainly interested in next quarter’s profits, the outlook for future share prices and who or what might be their next victim They have lots of laws on their side and a surplus of legislators and corporate lawyers to defend their unethical activities.
It should be emphasized that the allegiance of big corporations is to its fellow co-investors, its private or mutual fund shareholders, and its executives and management teams. Their responsibilities are not to the people whose lives and health depend on the usability or sustainability of the land, water, air and food supplies that they will be inevitably depleting or poisoning.
Corporate shareholders and executives from the trans-national corporations that make up Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Agribusiness, Big Oil, Big Finance, etc are selfishly motivated by profits and not the common good, and therefore they are not really concerned about the struggling, degraded communities that are left behind to fend for themselves.
”Trust us, We’re the Experts”; “Toxic Sludge is Good for You”; “We’ll Clean up After Ourselves” — and Other Corporate Lies
Conscienceless mega-corporations that swoop down on naïve and unsuspecting people and local governmental bodies, usually ask them to “trust us, we’re the experts” and that — at some time in the uncertain future – they will un-poison the usually permanently-toxified environment that they secretly intend to leave behind. Under-employed or laid off workers, understandably desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, are easily fooled into believing the well-crafted disinformation – until it is too late and the mess is no longer the corporation’s problem. It’s an old con.
Promises made during the courtship phase are likely to be broken with impunity when these foreign corporations pull out, merge with other entities or file for bankruptcy. Silver-tongued CEOs and their shyster lawyers are very good at getting us rubes up north all starry-eyed over a relatively small number of temporary jobs while (that will last until the inevitable bust) discounting the huge risks of permanent dead zones that will be created from the poisonous chemicals.
The Crimes of WalMart, Coca-Cola and Union Carbide/Dow Chemical and Henry Kissinger
A good example of the many tax-avoiding mega-corporations is WalMart. Most of its profits go to a handful of Walton family multi-billionaires in Arkansas. WalMart successfully – and legally – avoids paying for healthcare insurance and other benefits for most of their exploited, underpaid, part-time employees, who are also victims of the corporation’s notorious union-busting policies that conservative politicians are always pushing for (ask any Wisconsinite about the success that Scott Walker and his paymasters, the Koch Brothers have had in destroying Wisconsin’s unions)..
US taxpayers are left holding the bag while WalMart legally avoids what should be their corporate responsibility: to be fair to their employees and the region in which they are doing business. WalMart’s (and McDonald’s, and every other fast food chain) notorious below-subsistence level wages forces many of their workers to work a second or third job and also seek welfare benefits from the local government entity – a cunning cost-shifting tactic that places unfair economic burdens on tax-payers.
Another example is Coca-Cola. Coke depends on water that it extracts from any and every publically-owned water source from which the corporation can extract it, including, as a particularly egregious example, the aquifers that are situated beneath thirsty, struggling, impoverished, starving (and then suicidal) Indian farmers who are losing their farms in newly drought-stricken India.
Millions of gallons of water from aquifers that have traditionally been used for farmland irrigation are being depleted by Coca-Cola in order to meet the artificial demand that has been created for the sweet, sugary (or chemically sweetened), caffeinated (and therefore addictive), nutritionally useless, obesity-inducing and diabetes-producing soft drink that contains a few pennies worth of ingredients and then is sold to poor people everywhere for as much as the market will bear.
Coke’s predation of poor people in India and elsewhere brings to mind another bunch of corporate criminals who have never been brought to justice. The infamous 1984 Union Carbide cyanide catastrophe in Bhopal, India that killed 25,000 slum-dwellers left 100,000 permanently poisoned – and often blinded – impoverished, sometimes homeless victims whose lives were ruined, with uncounted thousands of others living on poisoned soil, drinking poisoned water and breathing poisoned air.
Every Bhopal victim that was exposed to the Union Carbide cyanide plant environs is chronically ill, with women – 30 years later – still delivering malformed babies and dead fetuses because of the pesticide residues that cannot be detoxified. Union Carbide, the American corporation responsible for the disaster, has consistently shirked, as criminal entities typically do, its moral responsibilities to their suffering victims. Carbide eventually sold itself to the equally infamous Dow Chemical, the company that brought us Agent Orange, napalm, immune-destroying silicone breast implants, polyvinyl chloride, and plutonium contamination from the Rocky Flats, Colorado plant that manufactured the plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs.
Carbide’s corporate executives have been indicted for their crimes and have been repeatedly subpoenaed to appear in Indian courts. But the US has not honored the extradition treaties it has with India. These amoral executives have refused to appear and are therefore in contempt of court. There are warrants out for their arrests in India, just as there are warrants out for the arrest of Citizen Henry Kissinger for his part in the international war crimes and crimes against humanity that he was a part of in Chile, East Timor, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. All of these accused criminals remain at large, and America’s Big Business-friendly, corporate-controlled nation has been proudly harboring them.
The Common Denominator Linking Human and Corporate Criminals
There are a number of common denominators that link human criminals and the multinational corporations that populate the Fortune 500 and the Dow-Jones 30 Industrial Average lists (like WalMart, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Chevron, Exxon/Mobil, du Pont, British Petroleum, Halliburton Monsanto, Merck, Pfizer, Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Perrier, Nike, Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan Chase, etc, etc). For one, the corporations, are just as afraid of facing the music as were Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Kissinger, Mr Ponzi, and the other multibillionaires of their ilk (that are rich enough to employ rafts of cunning defense lawyers). Be certain that they will use any means necessary to evade or delay justice. Similarly, none of them can be expected to show any genuine remorse for the human suffering that their actions have caused.
There are checklist diagnoses for various supposed personality disorders in the billing bible and diagnostic manual for psychiatrists (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel [DSM] which, by the way, contains no statistics). One of the 374 disorders that are listed in the 4th edition of the DSM is antisocial personality disorder (code number 301.7), which identifies pathological liars, chronic cheaters, abusers, thieves and killers whose cunning and lack of morals, ethics or consciences commonly enable them to avoid being caught or punished for their crimes and misdeeds.
These “sociopaths” (aka psychopaths) typically refuse to accept blame or responsibility for their actions and typically run away to avoid prosecution (as per the recent Whitey Bolger case). In the case of sociopathic mega-corporations that are occasionally successfully sued in court, business-friendly judges will often impose a “gag rule” for the successful human plaintiff and a slap on the wrist and a plea bargain for the guilty “non-human” corporation. On top of that, corporate-friendly judges often allow the corporation to officially deny any wrong-doing as it accepts the penalty!
Those corporate entities have always met the definition of antisocial personality disorder. They are famously incapable of showing genuine remorse if or when they are caught and/or convicted for their crimes. (Learn more about corporate sociopathy at http://www.thecorporation.com/, especially by watching the 2003 Canadian documentary titled The Corporation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrhqtY2khc.)
Below are seven diagnostic criteria that are used to diagnose antisocial (aka, sociopathic or psychopathic) personality disorder in humans (in the DSM, it only takes three of the seven to make the diagnosis):
1) callous disregard for the feelings of other people
2) incapacity to maintain human relationships
3) reckless disregard for the safety of others
4) aggressiveness
5) deceitfulness (repeated lying and conning others for profit)
6) incapacity to experience guilt and
7) failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.
Other common traits manifested by sociopaths include:
Lack of conscience
Lack of remorse for evils done to others
Indifference to the suffering of its victims
Rationalizes (makes excuses for) having hurt, mistreated or stolen from others
Willingness to exploit, seduce or manipulate others
No sign of delusional or irrational thinking
Cunning, clever
Usually above average intelligence
Always looking for ways to make money or achieve fame or notoriety
Willing to cause or contribute to the financial ruin of others
Untrustworthy
Cannot be trusted to adhere to conventional standards of morality.
Sociopaths do not have delusional thinking and are not considered mentally ill. Sociopaths are, for all intents and purposes, totally sane but are also incurable of their personality disorder. These individuals make up at least 4% of the US population, although certain professions tend to attract larger percentages of them (read The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, by Martha Stout, PhD – buy it at: https://www.google.com/#q=The+Sociopath+next+door).
Actually the exact number of sociopaths – humans or their corporate counterparts – is not precisely known, but, lacking empathy or a conscience, neither truly feels guilty about their frequent misdeeds. Believing that there is nothing wrong with them, human sociopaths rarely ask for help (and corporations are no different) especially when the law (and the markets, in the case of corporate sociopaths) is on their side. And therefore they never truly try to change.
If and when human sociopaths are court-ordered to submit to evaluation and “treatment”, they may acquiesce but only pretend to change until the pressure is off and their unethical or criminal activities look doable again. Academic psychologists tell us that attempts to rehabilitate full-fledged sociopaths are useless, but nonetheless, the often charming, charismatic, silver-tongued sociopath is often able to fool the treatment team into thinking progress is being made.
Likewise, sociopathic corporations don’t have much trouble seducing regulatory agencies, local governmental entities, the public and desperate underemployed workers by promising jobs and a secret un-tested plan to prevent environmental catastrophes. Only when it’s too late and the corporation has skipped the country with the loot will all the painful realities be revealed.
What Should be the Punishment for Sociopathic Corporations Who Poison the Environment?
Experienced psychologists tell us that sociopathic individuals that have committed crimes have to be locked away to protect society from them.
So a number of questions need to be asked. Given the fact that human sociopaths need to be avoided, marginalized or locked up, we need to ask what needs to be done with the corporate entities that meet the criteria above. What needs to be done with corporations that have a history of false advertising, deceiving the public, lying, cheating, poisoning the water, fouling the air, raping the land or otherwise acting unethically?
Given the anti-constitutional 2010 Citizen’s United ruling granting personhood to corporations for political bribery purposes, shouldn’t sociopathic corporations be dealt with just like their human counterparts when they act criminally? Shouldn’t long prison sentences be given to the CEOs, Boards of Directors and management teams? Shouldn’t there be confiscation of property or even capital punishment in the case of egregious cases involving mass deaths as in the cases of Union Carbide, Coca-Cola and Merck (over the Vioxx and Gardisil deaths and disabilities)?
I hasten to add that I am against capital punishment for humans, but any person with a conscience and more than a double digit IQ knows that corporations are not really human. Corporations don’t bleed and don’t cry out in pain during the execution process, although their executives may plead for mercy while shedding insincere crocodile tears. Capital punishment for corporations, contrary to the data on capital punishment for humans, would prevent a lot of future sociopathic behaviors.
What Should be Done
Corporations that plunder, pollute or poison Mother Earth or ruthlessly execute hostile mergers and acquisitions of weaker companies meet some of the above definitions for rape. Most of us would agree that our society should punish corporate rapists as severely as it punishes the human kind.
What about the known lethal poisons that thousands of unregulated chemical corporations knowingly discharge into the water, air, soil of Mother Earth? Shouldn’t their acts of desecration be regarded as rape, assault and battery, reckless endangerment or premeditated ecocide?
Their poisonous actions that threaten the survival of portions of the planet have already caused a multitude of die-offs of thousands of species of animals in the increasing numbers of dead and dying zones in aquifers, wetlands, rivers, lakes, rivers and oceans all around the planet. What about the dead zones in human brains from neurotoxic pharmaceuticals (like the mercury and aluminum in childhood vaccines), drugs that were allowed on the market before being tested for either short- or long-term safety?
What about the extractive mining companies that, with their poisonous explosives, blow the tops off mountains in Appalachia or the Philippines (and were planned by GTac for the Penokee Mountain range of northern Wisconsin) in order to extract and export the non-renewable mineral resources beneath? Does it make any sense to believe the foreign mining officials and their cunning lobbyists who claim innocence when living things downwind and downstream are sickened or die off? Who should be responsible for the toxins that contaminate the previously pristine streams and aquifers that once provided safe drinking water and a healthy natural environment for fish, wildlife, wild rice and humans (especially the aboriginal First Nation brothers and sisters that had their lands and livelihoods stolen from them a century or more ago)?
Zero Tolerance for Corporate Predators; Stop Them Before They do it Again!
How many strikes should any out-of-state extractive industries be allowed before they are called out for the predators that they are and thrown out? Shouldn’t corporate intruders be stopped before they despoil even one more aquifer, one more stream, one more lake, one more mountain or our only planet? Shouldn’t politically-connected corporate exploiters be banned, arrested, tried and punished just like human predators that relentlessly stalk their sexual prey? And shouldn’t there be generous monetary restitution to the victims of past corporate criminality?
Shouldn’t industrial thieves, liars, rapists and killers be treated the same as human thieves, liars, rapists and killers, especially since they received the privileges of personhood in 2010? Shouldn’t we be suspicious of untrustworthy corporations that have lied to us – even once – even after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on multicolored Power Point presentations, feel-good commercials, “green-washed” billboards or highly-paid lobbyists that are on the make bribing politicians and paying off the media so they will not oppose or expose their agendas?
What about those despised sociopathic executives that are addicted to their wealth, profits, prestige, corporate jets, vacation homes and quarterly bonuses?
We regularly intervene for society’s human addicts who need help overcoming their gambling or drug addictions and are thus a danger to themselves or others. Shouldn’t there be interventions planned for these power addicts before they do any more damage to us, the planet or our (or their) progeny?
The answer, in a fair society, should be yes to all these questions, no matter how often the smiley-faced, well-dressed corporate spokespersons – in their most cunning damage-control mode – try to convince us that their companies are “responsible citizens”. We star-struck celebrity-worshippers of high profile corporations and well-coiffed CEOs seem to sucker for that line again and again. But the stakes are higher this time. The survival of the planet and its creatures is at stake.
Should Multinational Corporations be Judged Guilty Until Proven Innocent?
One wonders what should be the best approach for dealing with cold-blooded, non-human corporate entities. Rather than applying the standard American constitutional guarantee for human citizens (to be judged innocent until proven guilty), shouldn’t we be judging dangerous non-human entities as guilty until proven innocent?
I like that notion. I have often advised my psychologically traumatized patients (falsely diagnosed, by the way, of having mental illnesses of unknown etiology) who were victims of physical, sexual, emotional or spiritual abuse in childhood to not give respect and forgiveness to their abusers unless they have truly earned it, have sincerely and contritely asked to be forgiven and therefore deserve to be respected, forgiven or obeyed.
Psychologically speaking, not obeying – and also not respecting – one’s victimizers (even if they were parent-figures) should be the norm in interpersonal relationships. Psychologically speaking, the existence of significant parental neglect or abuse in a family should be one of the exceptions to the 4th commandment rule (that commands children to honor their father and their mother). Likewise, we should only do business with companies that have earned and truly deserve our trust and respect.
Being suspicious of sociopathic entities is an important strategy to follow if one is to protect oneself from being cheated, used or abused. Staying out of a sociopath’s grasp is the proper thing to do, even if the person or corporation appears on the surface to be charming or honorable, for both traits can be easily faked. Staying clear of vipers, hungry alligators, hungry grizzly bears or anybody or anything that one suspects has no conscience makes good sense, since conscienceless entities are also likely to be liars and thieves and are thus fully capable of rape, pillage and even murder if they can get away with it.
Staying away from (including advocating the boycotting of) corporations that have behaved unethically in the past is a simple thing that a person can do to combat corporate criminals, but in our largely brainwashed, advertised-into-submission culture, only small minorities of people recognize – until it is too late – that they are being chumped.
Has the Corporate Coup d’etat Been Completed?
The concept of corporate power and privilege has massively benefited Big Businesses at the expense of the “consuming” public, but the reality is that it has been going on for generations. Multinational corporations and multibillionaires are increasingly in control of the White House, the US Congress and the court system, especially since Citizens United. Both political parties have been seduced by corporate campaign “contributions”/bribes.
And now, sadly, it appears that the judicial branch of the federal government is being bought off – and it appears that they are staying bought. It is not just the politicians that are controlled by corporate money anymore.
Actually, the mythical “unbiased”, “non-politicized” US Supreme Court has always been heavily influenced by corporate power and money. Throughout US history, it has always been wealthy corporations, wealthy businessmen, wealthy politicians, wealthy judges and wealthy attorneys that have been installed in federal judgeships by equally wealthy presidents – many of whom have been members of the same bipartisan “old boy’s clubs” such as Yale University’s elite, secretive Skull and Bones. America’s courts have always had judges that were in bed with capitalist, racist and union-busting elites that have never held the common good as a priority.
Say Hello to Friendly American Fascism
The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is said to have proclaimed that “fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power:” He should know, he invented the term and the concept. Italy’s right-wing, anti-worker, union-busting corporations loved and supported him as much as most 1930s German corporations loved and supported Hitler and that fascist dictator’s anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-union agendas.
Fascism is a right-wing, nationalistic, authoritarian political ideology that rules with military discipline and police state power, backed up by a secretive national security apparatus, aggressive propaganda, control of the media and suppression of trade unions. Therefore Big Businesses, notably the weapons industries and other war-related or police state industries thrive in fascist nations that suppress workers and keeps workers’ wages low.
Fascist nations commonly violate the human rights of their own citizens as well as the rights of the nations that they invade and occupy). Fascist leaders try to unify the people by creating enemies, scapegoating them and then, usually via false flag operations, going to war against them. Dissent is not tolerated in fascist nations and often elections are fraudulent. Oftentimes there is some sort of a merger of church and state and the fostering of anti-intellectual/anti-scientific attitudes, thus appealing to the ignorant or uneducated. And there is always an obsession with law and order.
Who can deny that there has been a slow, rolling corporate, quasi-fascist coup d’etat that has gradually been overturning America’s one person/one vote democracy? America has all the marks of a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy privileged class) that prefers fascist rule and favors corporatism.
Who can deny that wealthy corporations and their plutocratic billionaires have inordinate control over the economy, foreign and domestic policy and both major political parties? And now these inhuman entities have their privatizing eyes on our water, our land, our breathable air, our Social Security, our Medicare and even our food (as Bob Dylan sang in Union Sundown, “I can see the day comin’ when even your home garden is gonna be against the law”.).
Elections will continue, although the choice of candidates, the so-called “debates” (that exclude minor party candidates) and the value of small monetary donations will be increasingly meaningless. There will be fewer viable anti-establishment candidates like Paul Wellstone (or a Green Party candidate like Jill Stein or a Democratic Socialist Party candidate like Bernie Sanders) for whom to cast votes. The American dream (that “you have to be asleep to believe in”, as George Carlin put it) appears to have vanished. And we sheep were asleep at the wheel when it disappeared and became a nightmare for the under-privileged.
Corporate Rights vs. Corporate Responsibilities
It is the greedy, conscienceless, under-regulated multinationals (and NOT “man”) that are poisoning the planet’s ecosystems. It has been nonhuman corporations that have been causing the economic and environmental crises – including global climate changes and wars. And, because they rarely get indicted, much less punished, for their crimes corporations are continuing to get away with planetary rape, pillage and murder – and they don’t seem to care. Their motto seems to be: “grab everything you can steal by any means necessary; enrich and privilege your CEOs, your boards of directors, your shareholders, spokespersons, lawyers, lobbyists, legislators, judges, and military and law enforcement officials so they are on your side; don’t get caught; hunker down in your gated communities with your chauffeurs and your bodyguards while the revolutionary riots are raging outside; and let the devil take the hindmost.”
Wrist slaps seem to be the norm for corporate sociopaths and the superrich if and when they are “brought to justice” for their crimes. If there are any consequences for reckless or destructive business practices at all, the corporation usually gets assessed a relatively small and very affordable fine. For large corporations, punitive fines for criminality are just a part of doing business. (The $2.2 billion fine against Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals for illegally marketing the antipsychotic drug Risperdal didn’t much affect its share price nor did it seem to stir up its shareholders.)
Sometimes though, a corporation about to be brought to justice will threaten to move its headquarters or its operations to another state or nation, leaving their smelly and toxic messes to be cleaned up by somebody else, just as one would expect of a conscienceless sociopath.
The brazen action of the Roberts’ court in Citizens United might be one of the final nails in the coffin of America’s mortally wounded democracy. Given the fact that the myth of corporate personhood is now the law, it is past time that the 99% and its representatives in Congress insist that the 1% be punished at least as severely as are human criminals. The 99% needs to exercise its duty to preserve and defend the constitution (and the planet) from all enemies, foreign or domestic, human or corporate, even if the corporate criminals are hiding behind boardroom walls during the day or living the celebrity high life at night.
We must identify and courageously name America’s domestic enemies even if they are corporations or members of the executive, legislative or judicial branches of our federal and state governments. Naming the evil-doers (and naming the evil that they do) must be done in order to effectively confront them.
Simultaneously, we need to demand that our basic human right to have access to healthy, uncontaminated water, food, soil and air (and access to affordable education, health care and dental care as well), be safe-guarded from the greedy exploiters and predators in the plutocratic classes who extract the wealth and resources wherever and from whomever they can. The fate of our children, grandchildren and planet Earth depends on those safe-guards.
Among the first of the many steps that must be taken if we are to reverse the multinational corporate takeover/privatization of the planet is to demand that our local, state and federal legislators reverse the Citizens United ruling and correct the damage done. (See www.movetoamend.org and http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed for more information.)
Dr. Kohls is involved in peace, nonviolence and justice issues and therefore writes about fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, imperialism, totalitarianism, economic oppression, anti-environmentalism and other violent, unsustainable, anti-democratic movements. Most of his Duty to Warn columns have been archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn.
Longstanding Times editorial policy one-sidedly supports Israel’s worst crimes
Previous articles discussed hunger striker Muhammad Allan – a heroic young Palestinian lawyer extrajudicially imprisoned indefinitely uncharged and untried because he committed no crimes.
The Times mocked him saying his “refusal to eat puts Israel in a bind.” It ignored his outrageous mistreatment and plight of an entire persecuted population.
Thousands of other Palestinian political prisoners languish in Israel’s gulag unjustly under hellish conditions. New victims join them daily.
Militarized Israeli occupation controls virtually all aspects of Palestinians’ lives – systematically denying them fundamental human and civil rights mandated under international law, incarcerating, brutalizing and murdering them unaccountably.
Allen’s hunger strike exceeding two months made him a worldwide iconic figure – a symbol of an entire population struggling to live free on their own land in their own country, what everyone deserves everywhere with universal support.
On Friday, he lapsed into coma. Yesterday he regained consciousness – vowing to continue hunger striking for justice until death if not achieved.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society said he “declared in front of his doctors that if there is not any solution to his case within 24 hours, he will ask for all (intravenous) treatment to stop and will stop drinking water.”
His heroic struggle for justice is in its 65th day. Through his lawyer, Jamil al-Khatib, he categorically refused Israel’s offer to release him on condition of accepting four years of forced exile – an outrageous proposal demanding rejection.
On Monday, Israel’s Supreme Court heard a petition on his behalf. They delayed ruling until Wednesday to get more information on his medical status. Al-Khatib explained Allan is determined to refuse food and water until death if not freed. He has worldwide support.
Hundreds of other Palestinian political prisoners began hunger striking for justice, including 250 held at a Negev prison camp. Allan’s mother began abstaining from food in solidarity with her son. She’s holding a vigil outside Barzilai hospital where he’s held.
Prison authorities may begin force feeding him imminently – perhaps pending on how Israel’s High Court rules on his case.
On August 17, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and Prisoners’ Committee of Islamic and national Factions held a seminar titled “Force-Feeding is a War Crime.”
Palestinian political prisoners refuse food as their only way to resist injustice – hoping to bring attention to their abusive treatment.
PCHR Director Raji Sourani said the seminar and other supportive activities are a way to show Palestinian detainees aren’t abandoned.
Allan’s father expressed thanks for the solidarity campaign on behalf of his son and other persecuted Palestinian prisoners.
Last summer, The Times irresponsibly blamed Hamas for 51 days of premeditated Israeli aggression on Gaza, its criminal campaign to inflict mass casualties mainly against civilians, as well as destroy vital Gaza infrastructure – horrific war crimes by any standard demanding accountability.
Now they mocked Allan’s heroic struggle for justice – his willingness to die if not freed. He “flummox(ed) Israel’s legal, medical, political and security systems,” said The Times.
Not a word about decades of racist persecution, mass imprisoning thousands of Palestinians for political reasons, many uncharged and untried like Allan, torturing and otherwise abusing them, stealing Palestinian land for exclusive Jewish development, and waging genocidal wars like Protective Edge.
Nothing about a ruthless rogue state guilty of every high crime imaginable – waging slow-motion genocide against an entire population.
Allan’s struggle didn’t get worldwide attention because of Israel’s new force-feeding law, as the Times suggests. It’s because of his courageous resistance against Israeli viciousness – a ruthless, Arab-hating apartheid rogue state, persecuting Palestinians for not being Jewish.
Don’t expect Times reports to explain. One-sided support for Israel’s worst crimes is longstanding editorial policy.
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.”
There is a profound shift going on in British politics that mirrors the wider collapse of legitimacy suffered by political elites in the West. But whereas Occupy fizzled out without an organizational structure and the political revolt in Greece has been ruthlessly suppressed by the EU, the economic size of Britain and the strength of its social democratic tradition means this insurgency may have greater potential.
The occasion of this latest democratic revolt is the election for next leader of the Labour Party, the traditionally social democratic party that after 1997 lurched towards full-blown neoliberalism. As ground zero for neoliberalism’s social democratic putsch, “New Labour” led the way for former social democratic parties across Europe with its polished PR, scripted sound bites, and a breathtaking political cynicism that would justify wars of aggression abroad and corporate handouts at home in the language of “responsibility,” “humanity,” and “fairness.” It is to everyone’s surprise, then, that the frontrunner in the current leadership race is Jeremy Corbyn, a softly spoken, socialist, and antiwar backbench MP who is known for his political integrity and personal decency. Not only does Corbyn reject the trappings of office by traveling on mass transit and making his own sandwiches, but it’s said he prepares a couple extra in case any of his companions are without lunch.
Initially patronized and dismissed by party bigwigs and media opinion formers, Corbyn’s leadership campaign has sparked a national movement that is in a number of ways reminiscent of Occupy. The rise of Corbyn’s campaign has been both unexpected and meteoric because it draws support from those excluded from the political calculus of the elites. Some of that support hails from traditional constituencies that have been taken for granted by “New Labour”: trade unionists and public sector workers, those opposed to war and neo-imperialism, and those concerned with the moral decay of British society and the neoliberal evacuation of any social and collective ethos beyond xenophobia and the new culturalist racism. But Corbyn’s campaign also speaks to young people excluded from housing and job opportunities, students saddled with unsupportable debt, and the “precariat” more widely: those working on short-term or zero-hour contracts often in the newly privatized social services, the former local government sector, or in low paid and insecure jobs in the service industries.
Corbyn’s policies have been relentlessly attacked by mainstream politicians and media pundits, not only from the right but even more vociferously from the self-proclaimed “center left.” Time and again the charge is that Corbyn’s ideas are dangerously extreme and unworkable, out of kilter with public opinion, and hopelessly behind the times. However, it looks like the scare tactics that were employed to such effect only recently in the Scottish independence referendum may not work this time.
In fact, far from being “extreme” or unworkable, Corbyn’s policy proposals are moderate, commonsense measures that would mitigate some of the economic damage done since the 2008 crash, rebalance social provision away from corporate welfare, and restore an element of security for many of those marginalized by a neoliberal project that has been running at full throttle since the rise of Thatcherism in 1979. Corbyn’s economic program is comparable to Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, while his commitment to raise taxes on corporations and high-income earners is basic math for anyone really interested in reducing budget deficits rather than just “starving the beast.” His proposals for rent controls (once standard in England and Wales, and still in force to some degree in Scotland) have a huge resonance in the UK, where a super-inflated property market makes livable rent a necessary complement for a living wage. Renationalization of the railways would end the disastrous financial drain and byzantine bureaucracy of rail privatization, while investment in public education and free university tuition would bring enormous social benefits, not least economically.
Nor are Corbyn’s policies unpopular or out of step with public opinion. Indeed, his anti-austerity message reflects majority social attitudes: 71% of voters see economic inequality as a major social ill, 62% prioritize social justice, and 85% believe corporate greed is a significant problem. A recent poll by Survation found that Corbyn is not only the choice of Labour activists but is popular with the general public.
Why then the panic on the “center left”? What accounts for the hysterical attacks, name-calling, vilification, and smear tactics that have been unleashed against Corbyn and those likely to vote for him?
There are two answers to this question which taken together also give a broader insight into the value and meaning of social democracy within the contemporary moment.
The first answer relates to the very popularity of Corbyn’s platform: like the extraordinary popular mobilization for Scottish independence last year (which in certain ways stands behind current events), Corbyn’s leadership bid appeals to the wrong kind of voters. That is, it appeals to those who have already been excluded from the political calculus of the elites, which in the UK is rigidly focused on what’s called “middle England,” a notional population of “centrist” floating voters who are securely employed, can comfortably pay the mortgage, and who are said to dislike foreigners and the “work shy.”
The irony of the so-called “big tent” politics of New Labour is that in reality it works by drastically reducing the population addressed by party politics since its concentration on the “center ground” disenfranchises whole social strata, and indeed entire national populations (its holy grail is “middle England” after all, not middle Scotland or middle Wales). Labour’s abandonment of social democracy means that a series of nearly identical political parties—all closely aligned with the corporate agenda—are offered to the electorate, and those who can’t find their vision or concerns reflected there are simply excluded. Or in the case of Labour Party supporters, told to keep voting for policies that actively privilege corporate profit over human development, debilitate working class communities, increase social inequality, undermine civil liberties and human rights, and weaken the democratic process.
The second answer relates to the practicality of Corbyn’s proposals. The neoliberal project weathered the massive global recession it created in 2008 because it has managed to convince not only elites but large sections of the population in the US and Europe that there is no alternative, a dictum promulgated so successively in Britain by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Corbyn’s modest proposals to boost economic activity and raise living standards by curbing austerity are deeply practical and pragmatic: it is austerity itself that has prolonged the recession, providing a cover for the dismantling of social provision and the rerouting of taxpayer funding to subsidize corporate profits.
Just as in Greece, the prospect of a return to a workable and broadly beneficial social democratic program is not simply a local issue but has global implications. Which is why Greece has been so brutally punished for Syriza’s temerity in suggesting that democratic politics might have a role in the economy. And it is why British political elites—inside the Labour Party as well as outside it—and the corporate media to which they are aligned will not stop fighting Jeremy Corbyn or the popular social democratic politics he represents.
This hostility to popular participation and political plurality tells us something very important about the social democracy that developed in Europe in the postwar period. European social democracy was by no means perfect: it was built on the privileged position in the global economy bequeathed by empire, and was conceived geopolitically as a Cold War strategy to inoculate Western Europe from calls for more radical social and political change in the wake of the devastation of World War II. But as it’s now possible to see, it allowed for a level of autonomous politics and democratic participation that far exceeds the pseudo-democratic rhetoric of the current neoliberal world order.
While Max Weber famously characterized the modern state as holding a monopoly of lethal violence within society, what’s often forgotten is that there is no such monopoly of social coercion in the nonlethal, more diffuse sense.1 For example, employers can pressurize their workforce by worsening conditions, reducing wages, or by withdrawing employment altogether; or they can exert broader political influence by relocating their operations or withholding investment—or indeed, simply by threatening to do so. Popular groups—whether trade unions or other political associations—have developed alternative modes of coercion, such as strikes, pickets, boycotts, secondary industrial action, etc., to counter such extra-political social power. The political impact of social democracy’s economic compromise was a rebalancing of the ratio of social coercion between corporations and populations, a renegotiation that accorded a historically unprecedented legitimacy to popular modes.
This rebalancing of legitimate social coercion enabled the revitalization of public spaces and social institutions by shielding them from direct subordination to corporate power—universities and adult education programs, public broadcast media, and cultural institutions at the macro level, but just as importantly more informal and micro-level networks, such as tenants’ associations, community organizations, and campaign groups. The economic architecture of social democracy was thus able to scaffold a political space that could sustain popular democratic participation relatively free from corporate social coercion. The political sphere engendered by social democracy therefore had a potential that reached beyond its economic limits; but this insight has been obscured by the reductive opposition of “reform or revolution” long common on the left, and more recently by undifferentiated accounts of “governmentality” and blanket ascriptions of the ubiquity of power so widely favored by contemporary intellectuals.
Faced with the insurgency of the excluded, the Labour party hierarchy may well intervene, either by suspending the election altogether or by disallowing sufficient pro-Corbyn votes to hand the leadership to one of the other candidates. But however Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the Labour leadership turns out, the popular optimism and elite hostility it has engendered points to the political potential of social democracy and thereby also the stakes involved.
Corporate media and establishment politicians are playing a reckless and dangerous game in seeking to suppress political plurality and set in stone parameters of exclusion that deny popular democratic participation. For if the excluded are not granted political participation through social democracy, they will turn to other political forms and movements to overcome their exclusion. In England, the beneficiaries will be the xenophobic and pro-corporate UK Independence Party (UKIP) and other ultra-nationalist currents; while in Greece it will be the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.
Note.
1. Strictly speaking such coercion is by no means “nonlethal”; it is rather that its lethal impacts tend to take effect over longer periods and through diffuse and indirect mechanisms, such as poverty, lack of resources, diminished opportunities, and social disintegration. This terminological difficulty points to major problems in the modern political lexicon of violence.
Image: Photo: Israeli President Shimon Peres (R) shakes hand with Tony Blair
Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation received money from a financial fraudster linked with illegal Israeli settlements and an American Islamophobic network.
Tony Blair is again in the headlines, this time after Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn publicly voiced the opinion of millions of British citizens: that the former prime minister should stand trial on charges of war crimes if the evidence suggests that he broke international law during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Blair’s conduct since leaving office has received less scrutiny, however. Our investigations show that while Blair was serving as the special Middle East peace envoy of the Quartet, representing the UN, US, EU and Russia, the American fundraising arm of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation accepted money from a family that finances illegal Israeli settlements via the earnings of a convicted felon.
While conducting research on the transatlantic funders of the occupation in Palestine, to be published by Public Interest Investigations later this year, we uncovered tax documents revealing that the California-based Milken Family Foundation donated $1 million to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in 2013. The Milken Family Foundation’s director is Michael Milken and its president is his younger brother Lowell, who is also president of another family foundation, the Lowell Milken Family Foundation, registered at the same address.
Milken the ‘Junk Bond King’
Michael Milken, with the legal assistance of his brother Lowell, is known for having developed the market for high-yield and high-risk bonds in the 1980s, earning him both billions of dollars and the nickname of “Junk Bond King”. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to six felonies and agreed to pay $600 million, including $200 million in fines, to settle what The New York Times had called “the biggest fraud case in the history of the securities industry”. Milken was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but served only 22 months.
According to Mother Jones magazine, Lowell was also indicted on federal racketeering and fraud charges connected to insider-trading violations at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the now-defunct Wall Street investment bank where both brothers worked. However, in order to get Michael to accept a plea deal, the charges against Lowell were dropped.
The magazine further notes that the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert and a number of other savings and loan partnerships (many of them affiliated with the Milken brothers) fuelled the larger savings and loan crisis between 1986 and 1995, creating an economic recession and costing American taxpayers about $500 billion.
But despite his criminal record and legacy, Forbes magazine estimates that Michael is currently worth $2.5 billion, making him the 737th richest person in the world. Lowell’s real estate investments helped to make him worth $1 billion in 2008. Back in 1984, he even paid $975,000 in cash for a two-story beach house in Malibu with five bedrooms and four baths.
From fraud charges to illegal settler funding
In recent years, the Milken brothers have focused their attention on philanthropy, working on a wide range of causes, several linked to pro-settler and Islamophobic groups. For example, between 2009 and 2013, the Lowell Milken Family Foundation funnelled $607,000 to the Ariel settlement in the central occupied West Bank, either through the tax-exempt charity American Friends of Ariel or directly to the Ariel University Center of Samaria.
Indeed, Lowell Milken’s contributions to the illegal settlement are so important that the Friends of Ariel website has dubbed him ‘Ariel’s Celebrity’.
Also between 2009-2013, the Milken family foundations donated $555,000 to Aish HaTorah, an international Jewish Orthodox organisation that staunchly defends Israeli policies and features pro-settlement articles on its website. Ronn Torossian, a spokesperson for Aish HaTorah in New York, once told writer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine, “I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill,” adding that: “If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he’s from, kill them all.”
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Aish HaTorah has close ties to the virulently anti-Muslim Clarion Fund, which is behind the notorious anti-Islam film Obsession: Clarion’s address, according to Manhattan directory assistance, is the same address as Aish HaTorah International, the group’s fundraising arm.
Funding Islamophobia
This is not the Milken family’s only link to the “Islamophobia network”. Another anti-Muslim cause funded by it is CAMERA, an organisation based in Boston that claims to monitor American media coverage of Israel, but which according to a 2015 report published by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network in reality “is an Islamophobic watchdog organisation that bullies media outlets into producing pro-Israel coverage”.
The Milken family foundations have also given a substantial amount of money to MEMRI, founded by Yigal Carmon, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, and Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-born American political scientist, to provide free English language translations of Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Turkish media reports.
The Center for American Progress has called MEMRI “the Islamophobia network’s go-to place for selective translations of Islamist rhetoric abroad”. One of its directors is Steve Emerson, a media “terrorism expert” who in January 2015 falsely told Fox News that Birmingham is a “Muslim-only city” where non-Muslims “don’t go”. The subsequent public outcry forced him to apologise.
Of course, these financial connections are not the first controversy surrounding Blair’s faith foundation. Last year, Martin Bright, a former website editor for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, complained that “Blair continues to use a ministerial-style ‘red box’ for his urgent correspondence and was a strong presence at the charity,” leading the UK Charity Commission to examine the allegations. Bright also criticised the foundation’s decision to accept funds from an organisation linked to Saudi Arabia’s repressive regime.
Blair’s role in the illegal war in Iraq may yet be uncovered; however, the full range of his current international networks needs much fuller investigation.
Sarah Marusek is a freelance researcher and writer for Public Interest Investigations/Spinwatch. She holds a PhD in social science from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.
David Miller is co-founder of Public Interest Investigations/Spinwatch and Editor of Powerbase, a wiki that monitors power networks. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath and co-author of A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power. 2008, Pluto and The Cold War on British Muslims: An Examination of the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. 2011, Public Interest Investigations.
The Butterfly Prison begins slowly, combining seemingly disconnected stories that are taking place in poor neighborhoods of Australia. The stories are like tiny vignettes; shy, modest, minimalistic but always significant and beautifully told. A fear here, a bitter humiliation there, a dream of a child interrupted by a police officer.
Then suddenly, the stories begin to interconnect, intertwine, and the novel gains speed. Real pain – deep and overwhelming – emerges. Profound hurts, bitterness and injuries are slapping the faces of the characters, and somehow, we are drawn in and begin suffering with them.
It is Australia that we don’t know; that we are not supposed to see. After some 40 pages I thought, “it feels little bit like Carpentaria”, but then, just a few pages later, it did not feel like anything else, it only felt and read like the “Butterfly Prison”.
Then they dreamed the same dream. The whole world had been stolen, and people tumbled about on it like hungry and lost refugees in a foreign land. All spaces seemed to be owned by private companies. And the world had fences in strange places. And many long walls.
Paz couldn’t move, and his real leg jerked as though he had fallen down stairs. Mella murmured. In the stolen world they walked carefully, trying not to upset anything, like visitors. Because it wasn’t their home. Barbed wire between their toes. They bumped into another wall and got a new bruise, and it seemed that there were bluebruised people everywhere discovering new walls.
A queue then to buy back a bit of the world: a little bit of space for $2.5 million, so they could have somewhere to sit down. But they had no money, so they walked and walked and bumped into walls.
“A stolen world”! That could easily be the second title of the novel.
*
Tamara Pearsen is my friend, and my comrade; she is a true revolutionary.
She is a person who spent several years fighting for the Latin American revolutions, for “the process”, first in Venezuela and then in Ecuador. She gave everything to the revolution, never looked for privileges, and never demanded special treatment. She is pure and she is really strong. She saw it all, from the bottom, from the angle of real people.
When she told me that she wrote a novel, I was almost certain that it would be about South America, based in Venezuela, Ecuador or Bolivia.
But Tamara decided to write about Australia, about her complex homeland.
We sat in a Vietnamese restaurant in Quito, Ecuador, when she said, simply:
“After all these years, it is time to go back; to visit Australia… I am scared.”
But she already went back. Butterfly Prison is her great return home. Instead of explaining Latin American revolutions to Australian people, she depicted an Australian reality through the eyes of a Latin American revolutionary.
An oppressed and humiliated woman, a child living in hopelessness, adults with no future, a chocking and merciless consumerism, a country that already reached its zenith but without managing to bring zeal, enthusiasm and happiness to its people: those are some of many images of Australia that will stay in our sub-consciousness after reading the “Butterfly Prison”.
Australia – the land where native people were robbed of everything and where they are, until now, living in appalling destitute. Australia, which belongs to the elites; Australia where one has to comply with the ruling-class narrative, or to be crushed and humiliated.
Tamara told me why she wrote the novel,
“The Butterfly Prison is life and soul wrenched out and turned into a tale, as a way of saying some things that need to be said – of screaming them in fact. It is unravelling dominant ideas so that beauty, for example, can be what it really is, and we can get some hope from that. Its my grain of sand of solidarity with so many others who have been made invisible in different ways, and I hope that it can reach some of those people and connect with them in that magical way that stories do, and even inspire them.”
In this, she definitely succeeded.
The Butterfly Prison is filled with compassion and solidarity. It is also full of beauty: not that cheap sentimental beauty of the popular literature of the 21st Century, but of profound, lasting beauty found only in life itself, and in the great works of art.
Two lives of Tamara Pearsen have merged in one powerful novel: one of her childhood and sadness of her native land, Australia, and the other, that of her epic battle for better world which she has been fighting for many years in Latin America.
As the novel progresses, it becomes fully international, with many stages built into its pages: those in India, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina… The battles rage… But at closer look, there is really only one battle: that for our humanity, for human dignity, and for human kindness.
Life, as temporary as a kiss on a cheek: already gone, but a little tingle that lingered behind. Mella thought of the things people of her generation had grown up to believe would last forever: countries, poverty, and capitalism. Yet all those things were gone now. Nothing was forever, nothing was so powerful, except for change.
Now a Latin American writer, or more precisely “an internationalist” writer, a socialist realist, a revolutionary, Tamara Pearsen, returned home, on the wings of imagination, through her powerful novel “Butterfly Prison”, uniting several realities into one. She demands change and she does it determinedly but affectionately. And the result is stunning.
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with Noam Chomsky:On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.
August 19th, 2015 by Syrian Arab Republic - Minister of Culture
The archaeology researcher Khalid Al Asaad
It is with great sorrow we announce the passing of our colleague, The archaeology researcher Khalidal-Asaad, former Director of Palmyra Antiquities, who was beheaded by TERROR group ISIS today, Thursday 18th of August 2015.
According to reporter his body was suspended at the palmyrene columns area (that once restored by him) in the middle of Palmyra after they cut his head at the museum courtyard.
Mr. Khalid started his career at DGAM since 1963 as a Director of Palmyra Antiquities, he was an inspirational and dedicated professional who was committed to DGAM even after his retired.
In addition to his generous character with great respect and admiration, he was known as one of the country’s top archaeologist and also recognized as an expert in the Palmyerian history, his name was connected with many Syrian remarkable archaeologist such as Adnan Al Boni and had several publications known at the international level.
The DGAM strongly condemns this cowardly and criminal act of appalling brutality .
However, it is his family who will feel his loss the greatest and our thoughts and prayers go out to them all.
In the name of the “war on terror,” the French state is dramatically accelerating its use of clandestine operations to extra-judicially murder targeted individuals. French President François Hollande reportedly possesses a “kill list” of potential targets and constantly reviews the assassination programme with high-ranking military and intelligence officers.
This programme of state murder, violating basic constitutional rights in a country where the death penalty is illegal, underscores the profound decay of French bourgeois democracy. Amid escalating imperialist wars in France’s former colonial empire and deepening political crisis at home, the state is moving towards levels of criminality associated with the war against Algerian independence and the Vichy regime of Occupied France.
Press reports have revealed the French state’s assassination programme—carried out particularly in the regions where France has launched military interventions supposedly to fight terrorism, in Africa and the Middle East—and applauded it.
In an article on August 8 titled “War on Terror, Licence to Kill,” news magazineLe Point asserted that the French president has the right to kill an individual who has not even been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. It wrote,
“The rule of law has its dark side. The president of the republic has the right to kill, despite the abolition of the death penalty. A republican monarch, the head of the army can give the thumbs-down, deciding alone and in cold blood to make a man leave the land of the living.”
Le Point added, “This right is unchallenged, as it is written nowhere. And because it is exercised without discussion, oversight, or control.”
Regarding the French president’s “kill list,” online magazine Slate wrote:
“This list includes the names of terrorists and other stated enemies whose elimination without trial the president of the Republic has authorised. This means their execution without warning, anytime, as soon as the secret services or military intelligence can locate them.”
This state of affairs points to the complicity of the entire political establishment in the establishment and the promotion of an apparatus of political killing in France. Le Point reported the existence of a special death squad belonging to France’s external intelligence agency, the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE).
It wrote,
“The human resources to launch such operations exist, with an identified and well-trained chain of command, overseeing either discreet forces like the Special Operations Command (COS), or clandestine units of the Action Service of the DGSE. Inside the latter entity, there is an even more mysterious and better-hidden unit than the others.”
This unit, known as “Alpha agents,” was created in the 1980s by General Jean Heinrich, then the DGSE’s director of operations, “to bury potential operations in the dark folds of the world of shadows,” Le Point stated.
In his recent investigative account, The Killers of the Republic, journalist Vincent Nouzille exposes the assassination programme of successive French governments. To assert its imperialist interests in Africa and the Middle East, the Elysée presidential palace secretly leads a campaign of state murder. Nouzille reveals the existence of a clandestine cell within the DGSE, whose agents and commandos are trained to carry out targeted killings or “Homo [homicide] operations,” often in or near conflict zones.
In an April interview to Sud-Ouest, he explained:
“In the mid-1980s, a mini-cell was formed inside the Action Service: the Alpha cell, with a dozen members. They were killers, the ‘killers of the Republic.’ They operate in such a way that their actions cannot be traced back to the French services. There is concurrently a rise of the special forces, who operate in conflict zones such as Mali.… Inside these forces, there have emerged mini-groups of elite gunmen who can identify and kill an individual in a few hours.”
During the NATO-led war in Libya to topple the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, these special commando forces helped Al Qaeda-linked Islamists forces capture, torture, and summarily execute Gaddafi. “This was the case in Libya, the special forces acted in civilian clothing. They played a key role in toppling the Gaddafi regime,” Nouzille said.
It is under Hollande’s Socialist Party (PS) that the assassination programme has been intensified to a level unprecedented since the Algerian war of 1954-1962. During that war, French death squads summarily murdered hundreds of fighters of the National Liberation Front (FLN).
Under Hollande, more than a dozen “homo operations” were launched between 2012 and 2014. Nouzille said, “Never have the special forces and the Action service been used as much as today. This is because of the context, of course. Starting in 2012, there was a much more aggressive policy….”
In May, France assassinated Abdelkrim al-Targui, a Tuareg and a leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Mali, who was allegedly involved in the killing of two French journalists in Northern Mali in November 2013. An officer told Le Point: “We had to develop forces in the heart of the Tuareg units of AQMI. To understand them, find the right tracks, and wait for the favourable moment, we needed five months.”
Hollande’s assassination programme underscores the PS’s reactionary role and exposes the bankruptcy of pseudo-left organisations like the NPA, which called for voting for Hollande in the second round of the 2012 presidential elections. Having backed the war in Libya, they are totally silent on the French state’s assassination programme.
The significance of large-scale secret state murder in France can only be understood in the context of the escalating imperialist interventions of the NATO powers in Africa and the Middle East, and rising social tensions in France itself. As it seeks to recolonise its former colonial empire through naked terror, the French ruling class also fears rising discontent with the austerity policies of the European Union in the working class. The Hollande administration is the most unpopular in France’s post-World War II history.
In these conditions, there is a massive bureaucracy of murderous repression. Its targets will not only be drawn from Islamist forces, many of which have close ties to Western intelligence services, including the DGSE—as the Libyan war made clear. They also include the French people, and above all opposition in the working class.
The reports on Hollande’s “kill list” coincide with the imposition of sweeping police state measures inside France itself, including a surveillance law giving intelligence and police vast powers to spy on the entire population.
70,000 and counting! Petition to arrest Netanyahu if he visits UK, likely to increase to over 100,000
The issue is: what action will the British government of David Cameron take against the leader of a foreign state alleged by many to be guilty of war crimes?
Will it bring justice as in the case of Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein or will it continue to collaborate and collude in injustice for reasons of political and economic expediency?
The world watches as international opinion hardens.
“A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”
Justice John Paul Stevens, Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, 558 US 310 (2010).
There have been stranger suggestions, though this one does come close. Last Tuesday, the known authority on campaign finance reform Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University launched a committee to explore the options for commencing a campaign for a “referendum president” of which Jimmy Wales is its president.
The vast majority of Americans believe their government has been captured. If there was a referendum to end that corruption, it’s clear that America would vote overwhelmingly to support it. But the American constitution doesn’t give the people the power of a referendum. So Lessig has a plan to hack one instead. [1]
The target is the raising of sufficient funds by Labor Day (September 7) to enable Lessig to run in the 2016 Democratic Primaries. If the money is not raised, the charged committee will return it except in cases when the contribution is non-contingent. In any case, even if Lessig is elected, he promises to quit. Take the crown, in short, and discard it. An interesting development indeed.
As Lessig explained in the Daily Beast,
“My candidacy would be a referendum. Elected with a single mandate to end this corrupt system, I would serve as long as it takes to pass fundamental reform. I would then resign and the vice president would become president.”[2]
The structural nature of the campaign is what stands out. This is largely because the US electoral system, sluiced with cash, mediates and determines candidates in advance, weaning the less-moneyed while privileging plutocrats. The system thereby acts as its own, self-sorting sieve, replete with calculating lobbies and vested interests.
Lessig’s hobby horse remains campaign finance reform, something made seemingly impossible after the Supreme Court upended matters in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission 558 US 310 (2010). The First Amendment was cited, in rather novel fashion, to bar government regulations prohibiting independent expenditures by corporations and unions. Associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers were also held to be covered by the amendment.
Free speech and the imperative of the wallet became indivisible – to disseminate speech, one needs to expend money. A disgruntled Justice Stevens, in dissent, would warn that the decision “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation.” It rejected “the common sense of the American people, who have recognised a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”
In Lessig’s political vision, there are no suppurating super PACs with engorged wallets, of which the 2016 campaign is already rife with. But more to the point, Lessig’s argument is that such contrarians as Bernie Sanders, while they speak against the corrupting hue of money in politics, do not necessarily have a line of attack on that influence. “You’re talking about a string of reforms that simply cannot happen in the Washington of today. The ‘system is rigged’.”
Change cannot be a matter of simply influencing a few individuals on the Hill, and tidying a few corners in the Capitol. If one does not un-rig the system, “collective amnesia” will take its usual quarry. Reform will simply be another empty word among an entire collection of vacuous phrases.What of a Citizen’s Equality Act limiting donations from billionaires? That could be something else, though it has been deemed “in the modern money-flush electoral landscape… the equivalent of political suicide.”[3] As Lessig’s site outlining the Act explains, reform is to happen in three seminal areas.[4] The first is the equal right to vote, a “meaningfully equal freedom to vote”. This would entail the enactment of the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015 and the Voter Empowerment Act of 2015.
Then comes the hallowed principle of equal representation. Lessig takes the lead on this from the FairVote plan as the most “comprehensive”, entailing the drawing up of districts and structuring of election systems that would “give each citizen as close to equal political influence as possible.” The object here is ending rampant gerrymandering with a Ranked Choice Voting system.
The last of the three principles centres on ending one of the core causes of corruption in the US political system, notably “the concentration of funders of political campaigns.” At the lowest threshold, there should be a hybrid of John Sarbanes’ Government by the People Act and Represent.US’s “American Anti-Corruption Act.” This would incorporate a voucher system, allowing each voter the means to contribute to congressional and presidential campaigns. Matching funds would be provided for small-dollar contributions. And limits would be introduced on breaking the links between those in government employ and the lobby sector.
All of these proposals would only seem obscene to those who have deemed the condition of US congressional and presidential elections inalienably linked to capital. Those with capital magnify their influence via their political servants. The business civilization has its own rankings, its own sense of whether to allocate preferences, or withdraw them. There is no market place for ideas, so much as a market place for politicians.
Lessig will have none of that, and nor should citizens. As with so many seemingly radical projects, Lessig’s near religious mania harks back to a certain purity of voting equality, an attempt to cleanse a corrupt, pockmarked body. Those happy with the muddied state of things will be ganging up to stop him, and remind him of a previous effort when he vainly attempted to form his own super PAC and lost $10 million.
This is something of a different order, reminding the electorate, as Justice Stevens did in Nixon v Shrink Missouri Government PAC (2000), that, while money is property, speech is not. Ideas, rather than the secondary means of implementing them, are what counts in terms of protection.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email:[email protected]
Officials in Jerusalem have approved a massive construction project, including plans for housing, shops and a hotel, on one of the largest and most historically important Islamic cemeteries in the Middle East.
A previous project to build a courthouse at the site, part of Mamilla Cemetery, was scrapped two years ago after it provoked a storm of protest.
The graveyard, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls, is said to be the final resting place of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions as well as thousands of Saladin’s warriors who helped expel the Crusaders from the Holy Land nearly 1,000 years ago.
A partial view of Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem (Yoninah/Wikimedia Commons) – See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/outrage-israeli-plan-build-historic-muslim-cemetery-18396073#sthash.wO87BCxN.dpuf
It also served as a cemetery for leading Palestinian families in Jerusalem until the city’s division in 1948, when Mamilla fell just within the borders of the newly established state of Israel.
Jerusalem City Hall triggered huge controversy seven years ago when it approved a Museum of Tolerance over another section of the cemetery, requiring the hurried disinterment of as many as 1,500 remains.
Zaki Aghbaria, a spokesman for the northern Islamic Movement in Israel, said the new project was effectively an extension of the Museum of Tolerance development and would lead to further “desecration” of the site.
“Israel is determined to intensify its Judaisation of this area and of the whole of Jerusalem. It has given no thought to how important the cemetery is not only to Palestinians but to the whole Muslim world,” he told Middle East Eye.
He added that the project should be seen in the context of Israel’s “continuing efforts to seize control of Jerusalem’s Islamic holy sites”, including the highly sensitive Al-Aqsa Mosque compound close by.
Dangerous developments
The plan to develop the Mamilla Cemetery comes as the Arab League announced that it would hold an emergency meeting next week to discuss what Palestinian officials have called “dangerous developments” at the mosque site.
Some 19 Palestinians were reported to have been injured in the Al-Aqsa compound last Sunday after Israeli police stormed the area to allow Jewish worshippers, including an Israeli government minister, to enter.
The new construction plan, approved this month by Jerusalem’s local planning committee, requires building nearly 200 houses, as well as a 480-room hotel, shops and parking over the graveyard.
Gideon Suleimani, an Israeli archeologist who worked on the Museum of Tolerance excavations but has since become a critic of the work, said the new plan continued a long-term process.
“The policy is to dismantle what is left of Islamic heritage in Jerusalem piece by piece to clear the area and make it Jewish,” he said.
Meir Margalit, a researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and a former city councillor, said the next and final stage of approval – by the regional planning committee – was all but a foregone conclusion.
“There seems to be nothing now to stop the project going ahead,” he told MEE. “Building work is almost certain to begin next year.”
He added that the city council had been seeking ways to develop the site after its original plan, for a courthouse, was overruled by the then-president of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinisch.
Margalit said that behind the scenes she had come under great pressure from European jurists, who wrote to her to protest against building on such a sensitive site.
The switch to a commercial project at the same spot, he added, meant it would be much harder to pressure developers to withdraw.
Part of the development site is currently occupied by a school built in the 1970s. Much of the rest of the cemetery now lies under Independence Park, established to celebrate Israel’s victory in the 1948 war.
Work on the Museum of Tolerance began in 2011, despite vocal opposition from Islamic groups, dissident Israeli archeologists and Palestinian families.
‘Erasure of Muslim past’
When the courthouse project was proposed five years ago, the Antiquities Authority – Israel’s national archeological body – conducted six preliminary excavations in the school grounds to determine whether there were graves.
In five of the six digs, graves and bones were identified. Margalit said archeologists and the municipality had tried to hush up the findings at the time.
In the earlier work on the Museum of Tolerance, the Supreme Court approved the construction after officials promised that only “a few dozen graves” would be found at the entire site.
However, an investigation by the daily Haaretz newspaper revealed that, amid great secrecy, some 1,500 graves were disinterred with little proper oversight. Workers told the paper that the dig was done so quickly that skulls and bones disintegrated and other remains were stuffed into cardboard boxes.
Rafi Greenberg, a professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, said time pressures meant it was likely the new excavations at the school site would be conducted in a similar manner and almost certainly lead to hundreds more graves being destroyed.
“The problem here is that no one in an official position appears concerned about the rights and dignity of the dead,” he told MEE.
The Jerusalem municipality knows it is easier to get past religious objections when it affects a Muslim graveyard because the Muslim population [in Jerusalem] hold a far weaker political position.
If this was being done properly, all the stakeholders would have a say in what happens. Can we imagine a Jewish graveyard being dug up in Europe without there first being a very serious discussion with the local Jewish community?
The Jerusalem municipality told MEE that, if the development went ahead, “the private contractor who wins the bid to develop the site will be obliged to take any sensitivities into account”.
False claims
Fears have nonetheless been heightened by a report published this month by Israel’s National Academy of Sciences that accuses Israeli officials of making false claims about archeological sites. It suggests that Israeli archeologists have conspired to advance political agendas, especially in Jerusalem where they have worked closely with settler organisations.
The report, written by one of Israel’s leading archeologists, Yoram Tsafrir, also highlights Israel’s double standards in archeology. There are severe restrictions on carrying out excavations if they threaten to unearth Jewish remains.
Aghbaria said there were few hopes of challenging the new plan after the northern Islamic Movement and others failed to persuade the Supreme Court to block the construction of the Museum of Tolerance in 2008.
“Now our only hope is by protesting and trying to bring international pressure to bear on Israel,” he said.
He added that the Islamic Movement was currently considering its response.
Efforts to stop development at the Mamilla Cemetery have largely fallen to the Islamic Movement, because since 2000 Israel has cracked down on most organised political activity in the city by Palestinian organisations.
Israel has expelled Hamas leaders from the city and barred any activities connected to the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, a report by the Washington-based think-tank the International Crisis Group noted.
However, the Islamic Movement too has struggled to maintain a presence in Jerusalem, with restrictions placed on many of its top officials.
The movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has been repeatedly banned from the city, and jailed for his activities there. In March he was sentenced to 11 months for incitement over a sermon he delivered in Jerusalem.
According to Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, many Islamic sites in Jerusalem have over the years been “turned into garbage dumps, parking lots, roads and construction sites”.
Rami Nasrallah, head of the International Peace and Cooperation Centre, a Palestinian organisation in Jerusalem, said the city suffered from “extreme partisan planning”.
“The policy for 48 years now has been designed to erase Jerusalem’s Palestinian identity and replace it with a Jewish identity,” he said. “The challenge for us is how to stop such a policy when it is enforced by the state and endorsed by the courts.”
The past year or so has been a time of particularly vigorous volcanic activity in Japan, or at least activity that has intruded into public awareness. Perhaps most dramatic was the deadly eruption of Mt. Ontake on September 27, 2014, whose 57 fatalities were the first volcano-related deaths in Japan since 1991. On May 29, 2015, Mt. Shindake, off the southern tip of Kyushu, erupted violently, forcing the evacuation of the island of Kuchinoerabu.
That same day, Sakurajima, located just north in Kagoshima Bay, erupted more forcefully than usual. Sakurajima has been erupting in some fashion almost continuously since 1955, but since 2006, its activity has become relatively more vigorous. Indeed, a May 30 Asahi shinbun article characterized these eruptions as “the latest ominous sign that the Earth’s crust around the archipelago is getting restless.” The article argued that the twentieth century was an anomaly in that volcanic activity throughout Japan was relatively subdued, whereas the more vigorous activity of recent years is closer to the long-term normal pattern.1
Warnings of an impending eruption of the long-dormant Mt. Fuji have been common throughout the years of the twenty-first century. After the March 11, 2011 disaster (hereafter “3/11”), the frequency of hypothesized imminent eruptions of Mt. Fuji increased. For example, retired professor Kimura Masaaki, known for making grandiose predictions about earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, published books on Mt. Fuji’s eruption (already underway according to Kimura’s claims) in 2011 and 2112.2 Especially influential was a short July 2014 article in the journal Science. This study of perturbations of the earth’s crust suggested Mt. Fuji is more likely to erupt owing to effects from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake.3 Well publicized by a press release on the eve of its publication, mass media around the world have reported this finding, along with speculation regarding possible connections between earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
As of June 30, 2015, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) designated ten volcanoes in or near the main Japanese islands as warranting levels of warning ranging from Mt. Shindake’s Level 5 (“Evacuate”), to Level 2 (“Do not approach the crater”) in seven cases. Sakurajima is at Level 3 (“Do not approach the volcano”), as is Hakoneyama, located near Mt. Fuji. Despite often-sensational reports about Mt. Fuji, it is not currently on the JMA volcanic warning list.4
The aftermath of 3/11 awakened many in Japan and around the world to the dangers of seismicity and nuclear power. Even if the magma beneath the Japanese islands had not been so active in recent months and years, it is inevitable that volcanic hazards would also enter the public discourse on nuclear power and natural disaster preparedness. Nuclear power, of course, generates an ideological opposition that runs deeper than any specific safety claims. Paul Lorenzini, argues that this ideological opposition to nuclear power is a manifestation of mistrust of modern institutions and mistrust of “the values of modern Western society that these institutions embody, particularly their capitalist economics and their reliance on science and technology.”5 In this view, failures by relevant state institutions to predict and substantially mitigate deadly or destructive natural hazards can serve as evidence that the state cannot be trusted to safeguard nuclear power. Because they are serious natural hazards, it is possible to link events like the unpredicted eruption of Mt. Ontake and anticipated events like the eruption of Mt. Fuji to the Fukushima disaster and to nuclear power.6
A 2013 Mainichi shinbun survey of volcanologists regarding volcanic hazards and nuclear power plants asked which plants are at risk. The experts mentioned the Sendai plant in Kagoshima Prefecture most often. Of the 50 survey respondents, 29 specified that the Sendai plant was at risk and 19 were opposed to its restarting. By contrast, six respondents mentioned Hamaoka in Shizuoka Prefecture, the closest plant to Mt. Fuji (and to Hakoneyama), as being at volcanic risk and two opposed its reopening. One other significant point about this survey of experts is that 12 of the 50 did not list any plants, and nine specifically stated that no plants were at risk. Based on this survey, a majority of expert opinion puts volcanism in southern Kyushu high on the list of risk to nuclear plants, but a significant number of experts do not regard volcanic hazards as a serious threat to nuclear power plants at all.7 English-language media widely reported select results of the survey.8
According to another recent assessment (circa 2009),
“virtually all operating nuclear power plants in Japan are potentially threatened by the possible harmful impacts of tephra fallout, channelized distal lava or mudflows, or tsunami. The phenomena may easily impact sites tens of kilometers or even hundreds of kilometers from the erupting volcano.”9
In addition to manifesting itself as a range of physical hazards and possibly disrupting electrical and cooling systems, volcanic ash “might transport radionuclides, either as particles incorporated into tephra fragments or as compounds absorbed into the surfaces of ash.”10 I explain these volcanic hazards in a later section.
For many, the simple fact that Japan is vulnerable to a range of natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and typhoons is sufficient to argue against nuclear power. However, looking at the matter in a more focused manner, linking the hypothesized near-term eruption of Mt. Fuji with a nuclear disaster requires a considerable stretch of the imagination. To be sure, a major eruption of Mt. Fuji would probably cause considerable social and economic dislocation, and it might be deadly. Moreover, the Hamaoka nuclear plant is at great risk for seismic and tsunami damage, particularly if the great Tōkai earthquake and tsunami, which many Japanese have feared as imminent since the 1970s, does in fact happen more or less as imagined. Mt. Fuji, however, is less likely to pose a serious nuclear risk. In Kyushu, on the other hand, the proximity of Kagoshima’s Sendai Nuclear Power Plant to Sakurajima and other active volcanoes that are part of the Aira Caldera (a vast pool of magma) almost certainly does constitute a major nuclear risk as well as a risk for other forms of damage to the entire region of southern Kyushu. Indeed, most of the articles in the scientific or popular press linking volcanism in Japan to nuclear hazards sensibly focus on Sakurajima and the Aira Caldera.11
While acknowledging the importance of volcanism as a hazard to nuclear power, it is not the aim of this article to discuss this topic in detail. Similarly, it is not my goal here to make predictions or to assess risk. Instead, I advance the argument that volcanic hazards interacting with human societies results in a complex system. Here I use “complex” system in a technical sense, which I explain in the final section. If indeed, volcanic hazards interacting with society constitute a complex system, then the only way to mitigate these hazards effectively is to use complex systems theory. In short, I introduce complex systems theory in the context of volcanic hazards in Japan.
With this argument in mind, this article has two main goals. First, rather conventionally, I explain the basics of volcanism and survey the range of typical volcanic hazards. In addition simply to conveying information, this survey of volcanoes is intended to suggest the wide range of variables at play in the realm of geology alone. With that background in place, I make the case that volcanic hazards are part of a complex system. Finally, I briefly explain complex systems theory, and I propose a general approach to modeling the volcanic hazard-plus-society system. One point of the whole discussion is to introduce a way of thinking about volcanic hazards that is likely to be unfamiliar to many readers. The geographical focus is Japan and the particular natural hazard is volcanism, but many of the points here are applicable to other societies and to other types of natural hazards.
Volcanoes and Volcanism
Beneath its usually calm surface, the earth is a living planet. It consists of several distinct layers defined by their composition. From the innermost layer of the earth moving outward is the inner core, the outer core, the mantle, and finally, the crust. Although the entire mantle is similar in composition, it is subdivided into two zones based on its physical properties. The upper part of the mantle is rigid, like the crust, and the upper mantle and crust together constitute the lithosphere. The interior part of the mantle, although not liquid, is softer and ductile (flexible). This ductile zone is the asthenosphere. The earth’s surface consists of a patchwork of tectonic plates. Except in certain zones where plate collisions peel away the crust from the upper mantle, tectonic plates consist of rigid crust attached to the rigid outer layer of the mantle.
The living earth moves in a variety of ways, and this movement requires heat. According to recent studies, approximately half of the earth’s heat comes from nuclear fission from radioactive elements within the asthenosphere and deeper.12 In the future, we might develop better ways of exploiting this natural nuclear energy.
Figure 1. Structure of the earth. (“Earth poster” by Kelvinsong – Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons).
In addition to heat from radioactivity, heat from the molten iron outer core of the earth helps warm the mantle. The heat from the core passes through the mantle, which effectively transfers this heat toward the surface via convection currents in the asthenosphere. These convection currents probably contribute to tectonic plate movement, although details of the mechanism remain speculative. Combined with plate movements, mantle convection enables the surface of the earth to radiate approximately as much heat as it receives from the nuclear reactions within it. Moreover, convection also moderates temperatures in the mantle, keeping them low enough to prevent widespread melting. However, localized melting does occur. This localized melting produces the molten rock—called magma when it is below the surface and lava when it is above—which sometimes erupts through openings in the surface known as volcanoes.
The basic definition of a volcano is simply any place where magma has reached the surface of the earth at any point in the past. It is important to bear in mind, therefore, that volcanoes occur in a wide range of types and geologic circumstances.
It is worth noting that the geothermal heat that creates volcanoes also constitutes a vast, and largely untapped, source of energy. Iceland produces approximately 30% of its electricity from geothermal energy (Japan, less than 1%).
Lava, gas, and other products of volcanic eruptions have created approximately 80% of the earth’s surface and much of its atmosphere. Today there are over 1500 active volcanoes around the world. There are several ways of classifying volcanoes, but even volcanoes in the same category vary widely regarding the details of their activity and their potential to create natural hazards. Most active volcanoes are located at the boundaries of tectonic plates. However, approximately 100 “hot spots,” roughly 15 of which are active, exist in apparently random locations, often in the stable interior of plates. For reasons not entirely understood, hot plumes of molten rock rise through the mantle to create most of these hot spots. In many cases, the molten rock does not quite reach the surface, resulting in undersea volcanic islands known as seamounts. Sometimes hot spots produce volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. The string of Hawaiian Islands and seamounts traces the movement of the Pacific Plate across a hot spot over the course of roughly 70 million years.
Volcanoes in the Hawaiian Islands are typical of those created by hot spots. The magma is relatively basaltic, which for our purposes means that it is of low viscosity. The low viscosity enables dissolved gas to escape ahead of the magma. Therefore, eruptions of Hawaiian volcanoes and most others formed by basaltic magma are rarely explosive, except when magma meets groundwater. Two well-known hot spots are exceptions to the general rule of gentle eruptions. The magma under Yellowstone National Park in the United States is a silica-rich granitic magma called rhyolite, with the potential for causing an explosive eruption that would be a worldwide catastrophe. The hot spot under Iceland exists near plate margins, and the eruptions of its volcanoes tend to be relatively explosive.
Volcanoes formed at the edges of subduction zones, however, are usually the creations of relatively andesitic magmas. Andesitic magma is more viscous (thicker) than basaltic magma and usually contains a relatively high volume of gas. Most volcanoes in Japan ore of this type. Eruptions of these volcanoes tend to be infrequent and explosive, emitting large quantities of volcanic ash when they do erupt. The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens and the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo are examples of explosive volcanic eruptions. Sakurajima is a complex case because it is apparently fed by two magma chambers, one basaltic and one andesitic. Owing to changes in the underlying geology, Sakurajima’s magma mixture is becoming more andesitic.13
Even setting aside the human built environment, there is wide variability in the real or potential degree of hazard volcanoes pose. Dissolved gas is perhaps the most important variable. Water vapor is the most common gas associated with magma, with carbon dioxide, sulfur, chlorine, fluorine making up most of the rest. Taken together, these gasses are called “volatiles.” An eruption will generally be more explosive and hazardous when the viscosity of the lava is too high to allow volatiles to escape gently or if the volume of dissolved gas is extremely high. The gas tends to propel lava into the air in the form of small to medium pieces of rock commonly called “bombs” and, especially, as volcanic ash.
Strictly speaking, volcanic “ash” is not really ash because it is not the product of combustion. Volcanic ash is fine shards of magma ejected into the air, and its physical characteristics are quite different from the ordinary ash produced by fire. If, for example, you happen to be driving an automobile through the aftermath of an eruption and the windshield becomes covered with volcanic ash, do not turn on the wipers. Doing so would be like scraping abrasive sandpaper across the windshield. Volcanic ash in various manifestations constitutes a major natural hazard, as I will explain in detail.
We have seen that volcanoes occur most commonly at or near the boundaries of tectonic plates. Generally, volcanoes at the boundaries of diverging plates—undersea volcanoes at ocean ridges, for example—produce basaltic magmas, low in volatiles, that erupt effusively, not explosively. Our concern is not with volcanoes at diverging plate boundaries but with volcanoes in subduction zones.
A subduction zone is the area near the boundaries of converging tectonic plates. Oceanic crust is thinner and denser than continental crust. Therefore, plates whose leading edge is oceanic crust will subduct (push underneath) the edge of a plate consisting of continental crust. Japan is at the junction of four tectonic plates, and nearly the entire Pacific side of the country is subject to the geological processes and hazards associated with subduction zones. Earthquakes and tsunamis caused by sudden slippage of the subducting plate are the most common such hazard, and explosive volcanic eruptions are another.
Figure 2. Plate tectonics and volcanism. (“Tectonic plate boundaries” by Jose F. Vigil. USGS – [1]. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
The source of magma in subduction zones is the edge of the downward-moving oceanic plate that eventually melts into the mantle as it descends. Friction from moving rocks can generate heat sufficient to liquefy them. The subduction process drives trapped seawater out of the sinking edge of the plate, and this hot steam can produce magma through a process known as hydration melting. Moreover, the composition of the crust is such that it melts at a lower temperature than the mantle of the asthenosphere, and melted crust is another source of magma in subduction zones. The result on the surface of the earth is a line of volcanoes near the coast on the overriding continental plate, parallel to the ocean trench marking the point at which the subducting plate meets the continental plate. Another common result of this process is the introduction of large quantities of volatiles into the magma, thus increasing the hazard potential.
In the case of Japan, the Nankai Trough extends offshore from Kyushu northward to near the Bōsō Peninsula. This trough is the result of the Philippine Sea Plate pushing under the Eurasian Plate. The Pacific Plate pushing under the North American Plate creates the Japan Trench, whose movement caused the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. Although particularly known for their ability to generate megathrust earthquakes and destructive tsunamis, these subduction zones have also created Japan’s many volcanoes.
Seismicity and Volcanism
Volcanic activity coincides with earthquakes in many parts of the earth, including Japan. Moreover, the same basic geologic activity, subduction of tectonic plates, is the source of both seismicity and the volcanism in the relevant regions. It is common to assume, therefore, that some causal relationship must obtain between seismicity and volcanism. Indeed, most of the discourse since 2011 on Mt. Fuji’s impending eruption hypothesizes that the Tōhoku earthquake has played a role in making the volcano more dangerous. Nevertheless, as of now there is no widely accepted, comprehensive theory of the relationship between seismicity and volcanism.
One basic classification of earthquake types is tectonic versus non-tectonic earthquakes. Tectonic earthquakes are the result of accumulated strain in crustal rock causing a fault plane to fracture. In rare cases in which the fault surface contains no irregularities, thus keeping friction low and allowing smooth sliding, the movement of the earth is aseismic. The vast majority of fault plane ruptures, however, are seismic. In other words, accumulated strain overcomes friction, sending shock waves (seismic waves) through the earth. Tectonic, seismic earthquakes are what we typically call “earthquakes.” They range from events so minor as to be imperceptible except by the most sensitive instruments to magnitude 9 class events such as the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, so powerful that it slightly shifted the earth’s axis.
Non-tectonic earthquakes also occur. Examples include shock waves from an underground nuclear blast or shock waves created when rock shifts because of changes in the subterranean environment. Fracking (hydraulic fracturing)-induced earthquakes are one example, as is shaking of the ground caused by the movement of magma. We can call the latter volcanogenic earthquakes. As a whole, volcanogenic earthquakes (and other non-tectonic earthquakes) tend to be less powerful than tectonic earthquakes and do not constitute a major natural hazard. As we will see, however, volcanogenic tsunamis can be a major natural hazard.
The dominant theory of earthquakes in Japan from approximately the seventeenth century into the modern era was that accumulations of warm or hot (yang) energy within the earth caused shaking by exerting upward pressure. This view easily linked both seismicity and volcanism via a single causal mechanism, a link reinforced by the proximity of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. This understanding of earthquakes as explosive events caused by accumulated pressure within the earth persisted well into the twentieth century. One effect was to perpetuate the belief that seismicity and volcanism must be closely connected.
A typical example is a 1915 article that appeared in the Yomiuri shinbun. The article’s content derived from a presentation by the seismologist Imamura Akitsune (1870-1948). It affirmed the popular lore claiming major earthquakes occur in approximate 60-year intervals, based on the old zodiac cycle. A statistical analysis of past earthquakes, Imamura pointed out, indicates that there was some basis to the idea. Moreover, major volcanic eruptions tend also to follow a sixty-year cycle. As was common at the time, the article posited a direct link between the two geological processes. It claimed that insofar as each phenomenon releases energy, volcanic activity keeps earthquakes mild and vice-versa. The relative prominence of each type of geological activity alternates, thus producing something more like a 120-year cycle.14
Similarly, observers of Japanese earthquakes often reported balls of fire or other forms of fire, heat, or light emerging from the earth either just before or during an earthquake. For example, in an official report on the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, meteorologist Fujiwara [Fujiwhara] Sakuhei (1884-1950) reported at length on a great ball of fire rising into the air at a 15-degree angle from the Nikolai (Holy Resurrection) Church in Surugadai.15 The details need not concern us, but such sightings were conceptually possible in part because of the assumption of a close link between seismicity and volcanism. As knowledge of both phenomena increased dramatically during the 1960s, many specialists no longer regarded volcanism and seismicity as directly linked to each other, but rather as the results of a geology based on tectonic plates and their movements.
In a book for general audiences, seismologist Shimamura Hideki titled one short chapter with the question, “Is there a connection between the activity of volcanoes and earthquakes?” His reply begins, “Earthquakes and volcanoes are both phenomena originating under the earth’s surface, so there must be some kind of connection between them, but unfortunately contemporary science is not able to say what that is.” He then discusses several examples of eruptions occurring soon after earthquakes. In 1707, Mt. Fuji erupted 49 days after the massive (estimated M8.4) Hōei earthquake. Nine months after the 1604 Keichō earthquake, Hachijōjima erupted. Shimamura concludes that it is “not strange” that earthquakes might trigger eruptions and vice versa.16
In a textbook, volcanologist David Rothery explains similarly, distinguishing between tectonic and volcanogenic earthquakes:
Apart from occasionally, triggering an eruption there is no straightforward link between [tectonic earthquakes] and volcanism. A tectonic earthquake may set off an eruption that would have happened eventually anyway, but is not going to create a new volcano or produce a magma supply where none previously existed. In marked contrast, volcanogenic earthquakes are consequences, rather than causes, of eruptions and of the magma movements leading up to eruptions. They are not so powerful as tectonic earthquakes and can usually only be felt (if at all) only close to the volcano.17
The assessments of Shimamura and Rothery agree that there is no known mechanism directly linking seismicity and volcanism.
Magma can rise to the surface only if it is less dense than the surrounding solid rock, and density is therefore the most important factor in the buoyancy of magma. Other conditions that control the flow of magma include the precise composition, which often changes as magma moves, viscosity, and the physical structure and characteristics of the rocky conduits through which magma moves or in which it collects. Whether, when, and in which manner a volcano erupts is a function of the local details of each volcano. Often chambers of magma exist in a delicate balance such that a small change in relevant parameters might allow magma to come to the surface or prevent it from doing so. It is with respect to his point that the seismic waves of tectonic earthquakes might alter significantly the local details of a particular volcano, typically by changing the physical conditions of a volcano’s internal “plumbing.” Currently, it is not possible to make general statements about the effects of seismic waves on volcanic structures, nor is it possible in individual cases to predict changes in future volcanic activity owing to the possible influence of seismic waves. The key point for our purposes is that although both the seismicity and the volcanism affecting Japan are byproducts of plate tectonics, they are best regarded as separate phenomena.
VEI and other Volcanic Metrics
As with earthquakes, specialists have developed metrics for some of the major characteristics of volcanic eruptions. To some degree, these metrics are related to the potential destructiveness of an eruption, that is, of its severity as a natural hazard. The extent to which this potential will actually manifest itself as a natural disaster, however, is an emergent phenomenon not directly predictable from the simple behavior of individual elements in the natural-social matrix. In other words, the process whereby a natural hazard intersects with human society, especially, but not limited to the built environment, constitutes a complex system in the technical sense (as opposed simply to being complicated). I will return to this point in the final section.
In the case of volcanoes, explosive eruptions are particularly hazardous. The Volcanic Exclusivity Index (VEI) ranges from 0 to 8. It is a function of two variables. The first is the volume of fragmented material erupted (in cubic meters), and the second is the height of the eruption column (in kilometers). Most Japanese volcanic eruptions fall within the VEI 2-4 range, releasing between 106-109 cubic meters of fragments, with eruption columns ranging from 1 kilometer to 25 kilometers in height.
The 1598 and 1783 eruptions of Mt. Asama are estimated at VEI 3 and 4 respectively, and the estimate of Mt. Fuji’s 1707 eruption is VEI 5. The 1914 eruption of Sakurajima in Kagoshima was VEI 4. The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 was VEI 5, and that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 was VEI 6. In 1815, a VEI 7 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia resulted in roughly 60,000 fatalities and altered worldwide climate for years. Indeed, 1816 became the “year without a summer.” There have been no VEI 8 eruptions during the past 11,700 years (the Holocene epoch), but there is strong evidence for several such eruptions during a period ranging from roughly 25 thousand-27 million years ago. Several of these VEI 8 eruptions took place in the region of today’s Yellowstone National Park. What would be the consequences of a future VEI8 eruption in Japan? It is not too much to imagine a re-boot for the whole enterprise of human and animal life on earth.
The geological history of the Japanese islands includes several VEI 7 eruptions. Volcanoes capable of producing VEI 7 or VEI 8 eruptions are commonly called “supervolcanoes.” Japan is home to three VEI 7 class supervolcanoes or volcanic calderas. One is the Kikai Caldera under the Ryukyu Islands, one is Mt. Aso in Kyushu’s Kumamoto prefecture (which erupted in late November 2014), and the third is the Aira Caldera, of which Sakurajima is a part.
It is important to emphasize that the VEI scale does not say anything about the actual deadliness of an eruption. For example, there were no known fatalities resulting from Mt. Fuji’s 1707 VEI 5 eruption. By contrast, the VEI 0 lava dome collapse of Mt. Unzen in 1792 resulted in approximately 14,300 fatalities. As with earthquakes, the deadliness of volcanic eruptions depends on the interaction of a complex array of variables.
The magnitude of a volcanic eruption is a measure of the total mass of ejected material, and the known range is from 0 to 8. In the case of explosive eruptions, eruption magnitude and VEI are similar. A third measure of eruptions is intensity, which is the peak rate at which material erupts. The highest known rating is 12, corresponding to one billion kg/second of erupted material. These measurements can be useful for certain types of classification. However, in assessing the degree of danger a particular volcano may pose, it is necessary to consider a range of possible volcanic hazards as they are likely to play out in local conditions. The following section is a survey of the most common types of volcanic hazards relevant to Japan and many other subduction zone areas such as the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
The first volcanic hazard that probably comes to mind for many is lava flows. Lava usually flows so slowly, however, that it is the least deadly of the volcanic hazards. Moreover, flowing lava is more typical of the basaltic lavas of Hawaiian-style eruptions, not the explosive eruptions common in Japan and other subduction zones.
Explosive eruptions can produce pyroclastic flows. Sometimes called an ash flow, a pyroclastic flow consists of a mass of various ejected debris that behaves like a liquid moving rapidly. Often a rapidly moving cloud of gas and debris (called nuée artente) accompanies a pyroclastic flow. These flows can be extremely lethal. In 1902, for example, Mt. Pelée on the French Caribbean island of Martinique erupted. On the morning of May 8, a pyroclastic flow traveled the 6 kilometers from the volcano to the town of St. Pierre, and wiped it out, killing all but one of its 28,000 residents and even capsizing or de-masting ships in the harbor. Pyroclastic flows have accompanied many eruptions of Japanese volcanoes such as Mt. Fuji in 1707, Mt. Asama in 1783, and Mt. Unzen between 1990 and 1996. The collapse of a magma dome is a common cause of pyroclastic flows. Some pyroclastic flows (pyroclastic density currents) contain sufficient energy to flow over topographic barriers that might be expected to contain or stop most currents of material.
In 1792, Mt. Unzen killed over 14,000 people, but not because it erupted. Instead, the collapse of an old lava dome generated a debris avalanche, and this cascade of falling debris accounted for most of the fatalities. A debris avalanche also killed about 400 in connection with the 1888 eruption of Mt. Bandai in Fukushima Prefecture. Large quantities of debris often accumulate on the sides of volcanoes, and they constitute a potentially severe hazard when populated areas are within range of a possible avalanche. Heavy rain or other non-eruption events can trigger debris avalanches, and it is possible in some cases that the disruptions caused by an avalanche could trigger an eruption.
A third type of dangerous flow is a lahar, a volcanic mudflow, which usually follows topographic channels. The mud in this case is mainly ash mixed with water, but other materials can contribute to the slurry. A common scenario is that the eruption melts a volcano’s ice cap. Lahars are deadly. They travel fast and far, and require as little as 10% water to remain mobile. As a lahar travels through a valley or other channel, it picks up additional material. In this way, some lahars have the potential to do great damage a long distance from the site of an eruption, particularly if they burst out of the confines of a valley. In 1985, for example, a lahar in Colombia from the Nevado Del Ruiz volcano wiped out the town of Armero, which was 65 kilometers distant. Over 23,000 of Armero’s residents perished. Another key feature of this tragedy was that the eruption itself was not particularly large or severe. The presence of a large ice cap on the volcano and the location of Armero in a river valley that passed near the volcano were the main factors in this case. Lahars entering rivers can cause massive flooding and thus potentially endanger facilities located near rivers, even when far from an active volcano.
Changes in the built environment can also be significant insofar as they change topography. For example, the City of Seattle website points out that there is no evidence of a lahar from Mt. Rainier reaching the present location of the city during the past 10,000 years. Nevertheless, in light of modern development of the region, it is impossible to say that Seattle is now out of range.18 Because any type of volcanic flow plays out according to local topography, historical data can only serve as a rough guide for future possibilities in developed countries.
Heavy rain can liquefy deposits of unconsolidated volcanic ash and cause a lahar. In some circumstances, these rain-induced lahars can persist for years. In 1998, a hurricane-induced lahar in Nicaragua entirely wiped out two small towns. Japanese volcanoes are subject to Lahars. One relatively recent example is Mt. Unzen. This video shows footage from three different lahars in Japan, beginning with Mt. Unzen in 1993:
Notice that volcanic ash (often called tephra) plays a major role in the volcanic hazards described thus far. Insofar as it enriches soil, volcanic ash can be beneficial. In many other respects, however, volcanic ash is a serious hazard. Depending on circumstances, ash can travel far from its point of origin. Precipitating onto the ground, ash can damage plant and animal life and thereby alter the natural or agricultural environment. Suspended in the air, ash can effect climate. More acutely, clouds of volcanic ash are a threat to aviation. The ash clouds look like ordinary atmospheric vapor clouds and are difficult to detect. The abrasive ash damages turbine engines, often turning to glass inside them and shutting them down. Over 100 encounters between aircraft and volcanic ash have taken place, some of which resulted in the shutdown of all engines. Despite some very narrow escapes, all such flights ended with successful emergency landings after some of the engines were re-started. When pilots realize they are in a volcanic ash cloud, the basic procedure is to cut back on the engines and glide out of the cloud. The rush of cold air makes the ash-turned-to-glass become brittle and shatter, thus allowing the engines to re-start. The spring 2010 eruption of the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull disrupted air traffic for months.
Figure 3. Diagram of a Vulcanian eruption. Key: 1. Ash plume 2. Lapilli 3. Lava fountain 4. Volcanic ash rain 5. Volcanic bomb 6. Lava flow 7. Layers of lava and ash 8. Stratum 9. Sill 10. Magma conduit 11. Magma chamber 12. Dike.
(“Vulcanian Eruption-numbers” by Sémhur (talk) – Own work, from the document about volcanism on the Portail sur la prévention des risques majeurs (web portal about the prevention of the major risks) of the Ministère français de l’Ecologie, du Développement et de l’Aménagement durables (French Minister of the Ecology, Environment and Sustainable Development). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Volcanoes can erupt underwater. Moreover, volcanically induced debris avalanches, landslides, or pyroclastic flows have the potential, in some circumstances, to displace enough water to generate tsunamis as destructive as those generated by megathrust (subduction zone) earthquakes. The 1883 VEI 6 eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia generated tsunami waves that killed over 30,000 along the coasts of Indonesia and Sumatra. Volcanoes and the areas around them are often unstable, as we have seen in the example of rain-induced lahars. Therefore, an eruption is not necessary. The 1792 collapse of the old lava dome in Mt. Unzen generated a tsunami that killed nearly 15,000.
Volcanic Hazards as Part of a Complex System
Throughout the current century, Mt. Fuji has been on the verge of erupting, according to mass media articles, some scientific papers, and the blogosphere. Particularly in light of Japan’s recent experiences with natural disasters, such reports about Mt. Fuji often feature a sensational tone.19 Although some types of volcanic eruptions can be predicted fairly well in the short term, after classic signs of magma movement begin, there is no way to know when Mt. Fuji will begin to manifest measurable signs of an eruption. The event could begin tomorrow, or it could happen centuries from now. In this sense, volcanic eruptions are as unpredictable as earthquakes.20 Similarly, given the vast differences in the physical and social topography compared with 1707, the historical record of that earlier eruption is of little use in planning for the present and future. That past event does underscore the near certainty of large quantities of volcanic ash blanketing the Tokyo metropolitan area. Although unlikely to be a direct cause of many fatalities, a major eruption of Mt. Fuji would likely be severely disruptive. Major transportation hubs would likely shut down, and large portions of modern infrastructure would be subject to damage or destruction from ashfall.
Is Japan as a whole and the Tokyo region in particular ready and able significantly to mitigate the damaging effects of a major eruption of Mt. Fuji were it to happen tomorrow? I am not in a position to say with any certainty. Most likely, variables such as warning period (if any) preceding the eruption, size, duration, and other parameters of the eruption, wind patterns, the robustness of key elements of infrastructure, the nature of political and administrative responses, and many other factors will interact to produce an outcome that is nearly impossible to predict. This outcome will emerge from the interaction of these many parameters, variables and social and natural agents. In other words, an event such as a major eruption of Mt. Fuji within the broader context contemporary Japanese society, unfolding over time, constitutes a complex system. Complex systems theory, a rapidly developing field, seeks to understand—and possibly to influence—such systems.
The roots of complex systems theory extend to a seminal 1948 paper by Warren Weaver, who wrote of a “middle region” of “organized complexity” in between the simple two-variable problems common before 1900 and the unlimited-variable probability based problems of the early twentieth century such as thermodynamic laws, actuarial tables, or anticipating traffic along phone networks.21 Warren’s paper laid out the general intellectual agenda, and advances in computing power provided the means for the emergence and development of the interdisciplinary field of complex systems theory in the 1970s.
There are several different categories of complex systems. Because the field of complex systems theory is so new, there tends to be some overlap between these categories. Natural hazards interacting with human societies constitute a multi-agent system (MAS). Numerous interacting elements, usually called “agents,” comprise such a system. Some agents are passive (no goals, no volition), others are active in a simple manner (e.g., an instinct in an animal), and others are active in a complex manner (e.g., human motives). The interaction of any subset of agents typically affects the system as a whole in ways that are often difficult to predict. In this sense, phenomena “emerge” from such systems. Emergent phenomena are a classic indicator of complex systems. It may also be possible to classify complex systems created by the interaction of natural hazards and human societies as complex adaptive systems (CAS), examples of which include, the immune system, and ecosystems. The key point for our purposes is that whether regarded as an MAS or CAS, an important tool for comprehending the behavior of natural hazards interacting with societies is agent-based modeling.
Simply stated, agent-based modeling attempts to gain insights into the behavior of complex systems, especially the impact of specific agents (or variables such as population density) on the system as a whole. Such modeling seeks to identify the relevant agents and assign behavior rules to them. Agent-based modeling typically takes into consideration the broader environment, issues of scale (often called “granularity”), adaptation or learning rules, and, in the case of active agents, decision-making heuristics. Such modeling seeks to understand the big picture, as opposed to solving narrowly focused pragmatic problems common in fields such as engineering. A better (though typically never complete) understanding of the big picture can be useful in allocating resources, creating contingency plans, and formulating policy. In the case of volcanism and other natural hazards, effective modeling might permit better insight into how the behavior of key agents would play out in different scenarios. After a model is created, it can be run on computers repeatedly. Such repetition can permit the application of the usual statistical metrics. Moreover, once the model is set up in software, it becomes possible easily to modify the behavior of any key agent or variable and re-run the simulation. New experimental or observational data can be used to tune the model.
There are many shortcomings of agent-based modeling, and I do not intend to present it as a panacea. Even the most sophisticated models fall short, often far short, of simulating the complexities of the real world. Not only is it often impossible to include all the relevant agents in a model, but the behavior rules assigned to agents are typically very simple. Moreover, creating truly useful models would require considerable time, resources, and, mostly likely, extensive collaboration between academic, industry, and government entities. Any insights tentatively gained from sophisticated modeling efforts would need to be compared with real-world data in an effort better to tune the models. In short, a serious effort to construct useful agent-based modeling for natural disaster scenarios would be a large-scale endeavor, it would likely take years to come to any fruition, its results would be imperfect, and insights gained from modeling would require careful translation into plain language and key points for use in most political and administrative settings.
I should also point out that government agencies and industries frequently employ other kinds of models to deal with smaller sets of variables and to solve specific problems.22 Modeling is hardly new, but agent-based modeling of natural hazards and disasters has been minimal. Although not exhaustive, my own searches have turned up only a few narrowly focused models. The demands of academic publishing tend to mitigate against bold, big-picture projects, and what I have proposed here is certainly ambitious for many reasons. Despite the imperfect nature of even the most sophisticated models, they are the only tool we presently have to understand complex systems and thus develop better strategies for dealing with them.
To illustrate this modeling process, let us return to Mt. Fuji. Suppose we were to create an agent-based model for a major eruption in 2015. To keep this illustration manageable, let us focus only on one hazard: volcanic ash. Moreover, as this hazard plays out over time, my illustration includes only a subset of the possible agent interactions. For the purposes of modeling, we would need to identify the relevant variables, agents, and impacts. It would be necessary to assign initial values and to specify rules of interaction among the agents. How would we even begin? Fortunately, the scientific and engineering literature provides good starting points with respect to interactions between any two agents. For our example of volcanic ash, the article “Volcanic ash impacts on critical infrastructure” by Thomas M. Wilson and colleagues is especially helpful.23 My illustration here focusses on a subset of those hazards.
Shown here is a portion of a possible agent-based model for an eruption of Mt. Fuji. Bear in mind that the processes illustrated here would play out over time, and the model would produce different results for different time intervals. Let us begin with the blue boxes to the left. They indicate the major variables that constitute the quantity, quality, and distribution of ash. Wind speed and direction, other weather conditions, the quantity of ash erupted, the length of time of the eruption, distance from the cone, and other variables (e.g., height of the ejected ash) create what I call an “ashfall topography.” Initial values for these variables might be those of the 1707 eruption, insofar as they are known, supplemented with data from other eruptions of similar volcanoes elsewhere. Consider the “Other weather” variable briefly. Volcanic ash has a different effect on components of the electric power grid depending on whether it is dry or damp. A light rain, for example, might create a paste that causes a phenomenon known as flashover (see the Wilson article for details), but a heavy rain might wash ash out of places where it might otherwise cause problems. Notice that differences in random variables and starting conditions can result in significantly different impacts, a classic sign of a complex system.
Ashfall topography is an emergent phenomenon that derives from the interaction of a cluster of variables. Consider next the first round of impacts in the center, only a few of which are listed here. Most of Japan’s rivers are dammed, and ashfall might affect dams in various ways (e.g., altering water flow, water levels, interfering with the physical operation of dams), some of which might lead to flooding or adversely affect the power grid. Similarly, large quantities of volcanic ash often forms rock-like clogs in ware runoff and storm drain systems, thus resulting in flooding. Parts of the electric power grid are susceptible to ash damage, and power outages, or a complete shutdown, might exacerbate flooding, cause other infrastructure problems such as shutting down fueling systems, and directly interfering with emergency response. Ashfall itself contributes to physical obstruction of roadways, bridges, and airspace. Flooding, too, would likely contribute to land obstructions and alter the ash topography (and vice versa). Volcanic ash damages auto and aircraft engines. All of these impacts would adversely affect emergency responses such as firefighting or the distribution of essential food and medicine. Other impacts might include a deterioration of sanitary conditions, leading to the spread of disease, strains on medical infrastructure, and more.
Not fully shown in the diagram are the feedback loops and interactions between these various agents whereby both adapt to each other, thus altering the system as a whole, which in terns cases more of its agents to adapt. On other words, the complex system would not play out in a linear, additive manner, but in a way such that the whole would be more than the sum of its parts and would change over time.
It should be clear from this brief illustration that creating a robust, sophisticated model for an eruption of Mt. Fuji or other natural hazards would require carefully coordinated teams of experts. Most likely, the model would need to be created in modules. After completion, such a model would need frequent tuning. After the model is reasonably well tuned, exploiting it, that is running simulations with under different sets of conditions, would likely take years. Serious resources and work on such a project might require a decade or more produce something useful. Such a model would not be able to predict the onset of volcanic eruptions or earthquakes, in part because the basic physical mechanisms for the causes of these phenomena (especially earthquakes) are not yet known with sufficient precision to create viable rules for agents. The promise of agent-based models would be the ability better to understand the interaction of volcanic or other hazards with society and to identify especially important variables or agents. Could such a model tell us how many people would likely die in an eruption of Mt. Fuji? Possibly. Perhaps more important than estimating an absolute number of fatalities, a well-designed model would likely identify currently unsuspected agents or conditions that would contribute to a relatively higher or lower incidence of fatalities. In some cases (e.g., wind direction), these agents may be entirely beyond human control, but in some cases it may be possible to alter the conditions. In any case, such knowledge would be valuable.
What about the short term? One insight from complex systems theory is a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Because optimal points in complex systems are rarely clear and rarely stable, additional exploration (more data collection, creating better models, running more simulations, etc.), if well done, is likely to produce useful knowledge. The opportunity cost for such exploration, however, is fewer resources devoted to exploiting whatever knowledge we currently have. Major volcanic eruptions are rare events compared with natural hazards such as typhoons, flooding, or even earthquakes. Our big picture knowledge of the way volcanic hazards are likely to play out in the complex system that is Japanese society tends to be narrowly focused. Nevertheless, there is little choice but to devote some resources to exploiting that meager knowledge—that is, to allocate resources and devise plans to mitigate likely volcanic hazards based on best estimates without the aid of powerful models. The historical record, too, if used with caution, can inform this exploitation process. My larger point, however, is to argue for—or at least suggest the possibility of—the need for more and better exploration (modeling) to set the stage for effective mitigation of volcanic and other natural hazards in the future.
Volcanic hazards are clearly a danger to many parts of Japan and elsewhere. The existence of nuclear power plants exacerbates the risks for Japan and the region. Indeed, more so than seismic hazards, volcanic hazards have the potential, in the most extreme cases, to disrupt the ecosystem of the entire earth. It makes sense, therefore, to take obvious short-term steps to prepare for likely volcanic hazards. Although these points should be obvious, the devil is in the details with respect to resource allocation and social priorities. Moreover, the complexity of contemporary society contributes to a lack of knowledge about what will actually happen in the case of a major eruption. My proposal here for a sustained effort at more sophisticated modeling offers no panacea, but it is one suggestion for dealing more effectively with this problem in the future.
6 See, for example, Nassrine Azimi, “Japan’s Natural Perils, and Promises, in the Wake of Fukushima,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 43, No. 1, October 27, 2014, especially the first several paragraphs. For a specific linking of Mt. Fuji and the plant at Hamaoka, see Akio Matsumura, “Japan’s Fault: The Risks of Mt. Fuji’s Eruption and Nuclear Power.” July 31, 2013.
7 The original reporting includes “Genpatsu: Kazangakusha ‘kyodai funka, risuku’ Hokkaidō・Tomari nado eikyōdai—Mainichi shinbun ankeeto,” Mainichi Shinbun, December 23, 2013, Tokyo edition and “Kurōzuappu 2013: Kyodai funka, genpatsu no rinku hassei hindo hikuku, yosoku konnan okoseba ‘higai jindai,’ Mainichi Shinbun, Decenber 23, 2013, Tokyo edition.
9 C. B Connor, R. S. J. Sparks, M. Díez, A. C. M. Volentik and S. C. P. Pearson, “The Nature of Volcanism,” in Charles. B. Connor, Neil A. Chapman, and Laura J. Connor, eds., Volcanic and Tectonic Hazard Assessment for Nuclear Facilities(Cambridge University Press, 2009), 94-95.
16 Shimamura Hideki. Nihonjin ga shiritai jishin no gimon rokujūroku: jishin ga ōi Nihon dakara koso chishiki no sonae mo wasurezu ni (Soft Bank Creative, 2008), 90-92.
17 David Rothery, Volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis (McGraw-Hill, 2007), 60.
20 Major earthquakes usually happen without any warning. The earth suddenly shakes. Even in cases where there are foreshocks in the weeks, days, or hours before a main shock, there is no way to know at the time whether a relatively small earthquake is the main shock of its own event, an aftershock of some past event, or a foreshock of a future event. By contrast, a well-known set of changes usually, but not always, takes place over the course of days, weeks, or (often) months prior to the occurrence of a large eruption. Traditional monitoring methods include strategically positioned seismometers, measurements of ground deformation, and the monitoring the quantity and qualities of certain volatiles. Increases in the frequency of small earthquakes around the magma chamber(s), increased ground swelling, and increased quantity of gas emitted (as well as changes in the qualities of the gas) are all classic signs that magma is expanding. Typically, this expansion plays out over enough time for people nearby to evacuate safely.
21 Several of the many examples of middle region problems Warren proposed are: “How can one explain the behavior pattern of an organized group of persons such as a labor union, or a group of manufacturers, or a racial minority? There are clearly many factors involved here, but it is equally obvious that here also something more is needed than the mathematics of averages. With a given total of national resources that can be brought to bear, what tactics and strategy will most promptly win a war, or, better: what sacrifices of present selfish interest will most effectively contribute to a stable, decent, and peaceful world?” Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist, 36: 536-544, 1948. (reprint edition, p. 5).
22 For many examples, some specific to Japan, see Charles. B. Connor, Neil A. Chapman, and Laura J. Connor, eds., Volcanic and Tectonic Hazard Assessment for Nuclear Facilities (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
The Obama U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has quietly issued its important Law of War Manual, and, unlike its predecessor, the 1956 U.S. Army Field Manual, which was not designed to approve of the worst practices by both the United States and its enemies in World War II, or after 9/11, this new document has been alleged specifically to do just that: to allow such attacks as the United States did on Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and in Iraq, and elsewhere.
First here will be a summary of previous news reports about this historically important document; then, extensive quotations from the actual document itself will be provided, relating to the allegations in those previous news reports. Finally will be conclusions regarding whether, or the extent to which, those earlier news reports about it were true.
EARLIER REPORTS ABOUT THE MANUAL:
The document was first reported by DoD in a curt press release on June 12th, with a short-lived link to the source-document, and headlined, “DoD Announces New Law of War Manual.” This press release was published and discussed only in a few military newsmedia, not in the general press.
The document was then anonymously reported on June 25th, at the non-military site,
under the headline, “The USA writes their own version of ‘International Law’: Pentagon Rewrites ‘Law of War’ Declaring ‘Belligerent’ Journalists as Legitimate Targets.”
That news article attracted some attention from journalists, but no link was provided to the actual document, which the U.S. DoD removed promptly after issuing it.
A professor of journalism was quoted there as being opposed to the document’s allegedly allowing America’s embedded war journalists to kill the other side’s journalists. He said: “It gives them license to attack or even murder journalists that they don’t particularly like but aren’t on the other side.”
Patrick Martin at the World Socialist Web Site, then headlined on August 11th,“Pentagon manual justifies war crimes and press censorship,” and he reported that the Committee to Protect Journalists was obsessed with the document’s implications regarding journalists. A link was provided to the document, but the link is dead.
Then, Sherwood Ross headlined at opednews on August 13th, “Boyle: New Pentagon War Manual Reduces Us to ‘Level of Nazis’,” and he interviewed the famous expert on international law, Francis Boyle, about it, who had read the report. Ross opened: “The Pentagon’s new Law of War Manual(LOWM) sanctioning nuclear attacks and the killing of civilians, ‘reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War,’ says international law authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.” Ross continued: “Boyle points out the new manual is designed to supplant the 1956 U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 written by Richard Baxter, the world’s leading authority on the Laws of War. Baxter was the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Judge on the International Court of Justice. Boyle was his top student.”
Ross did not link to the actual document. The only new information he provided about it consisted of Boyle’s opinions about it.
Though the DoD removed the document, someone had fortunately already copied it into the Web Archive, and I have linked to it there, at the top of the present article, to make the source-document easily accessible to the general public. The document is 1,204 pages. So, finally, the general public can see the document and make their own judgments about it. What follows will concern specifically the claims about it that were made in those prior news articles, and will compare those claims with the relevant actual statements in the document itself. Reading what the document says is worthwhile, because its predecessor, the Army Field Manual, became central in the news coverage about torture and other Bush Administration war-crimes.
THE DOCUMENT:
First of all, regarding “journalists,” the document, in Chapter 4, says: “4.24.2 Journalists and other media representatives are regarded as civilians;471 i.e., journalism does not constitute taking a direct part in hostilities such that such a person would be deprived of protection from being made the object of attack.472.” Consequently, the journalism professor’s remark is dubious, at best, but probably can be considered to be outright false.
The charge by the international lawyer, Professor Boyle, is a different matter altogether.
This document says, in Chapter 5:
“5.3.1 Responsibility of the Party Controlling Civilian 5.3.1 Persons and Objects. The party controlling civilians and civilian objects has the primary responsibility for the protection of civilians and civilian objects.13[13 See J. Fred Buzhardt, DoD General Counsel, Letter to Senator Edward Kennedy, Sept. 22, 1972. …] The party controlling the civilian population generally has the greater opportunity to minimize risk to civilians. 14[14 FINAL REPORT ON THE PERSIAN GULF WAR 614. …] Civilians also may share in the responsibility to take precautions for their own protection.15[15 U.S. Comments on the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Memorandum on the Applicability of International Humanitarian Law in the Gulf Region, Jan. 11, 1991. …]”
This is directly counter to what Professor Boyle was alleged to have charged about the document.
The document continues: “5.3.2 Essentially Negative Duties to Respect Civilians and to Refrain From Directing Military Operations Against Them. In general, military operations must not be directed against enemy civilians.16 In particular:
• Civilians must not be made the object of attack;17
• Military objectives may not be attacked when the expected incidental loss of life and injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained;18
• Civilians must not be used as shields or as hostages;19 and
• Measures of intimidation or terrorism against the civilian population are prohibited, including acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population.20″
Furthermore: “5.3.3 Affirmative Duties to Take Feasible Precautions for the Protection of Civilians and Other Protected Persons and Objects. Parties to a conflict must take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to the civilian population and other protected persons and objects.27 Feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian objects must be taken when planning and conducting attacks.28”
Moreover: “5.5.2 Parties to a conflict must conduct attacks in accordance with the principles of distinction and proportionality. In particular, the following rules must be observed:
Combatants may make military objectives the object of attack, but may not direct attacks against civilians, civilian objects, or other protected persons and objects.66
Combatants must refrain from attacks in which the expected loss of life or injury to civilians, and damage to civilian objects incidental to the attack, would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.67
Combatants must take feasible precautions in conducting attacks to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and other protected persons and objects.68
In conducting attacks, combatants must assess in good faith the information that is available to them.69
Combatants may not kill or wound the enemy by resort to perfidy.70
Specific rules apply to the use of certain types of weapons.71”
In addition: “5.5.3.2 AP I Presumptions in Favor of Civilian Status in Conducting Attacks. In the context of conducting attacks, certain provisions of AP I reflect a presumption in favor of civilian status in cases of doubt. Article 52(3) of AP I provides that ‘[i]n case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military actions, it shall be presumed not to be so used.’76 Article 50(1) of AP I provides that ‘[i]n case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.’”
Then, there is this: “5.15 UNDEFENDED CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES. Attack, by whatever means, of a village, town, or city that is undefended is prohibited.360 Undefended villages, towns, or cities may, however, be captured.”
Furthermore: “5.17 SEIZURE AND DESTRUCTION OF ENEMY PROPERTY. Outside the context of attacks, certain rules apply to the seizure and destruction of enemy property:
Enemy property may not be seized or destroyed unless imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.”
These features too are not in accord with the phrase ‘reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War.’
However, then, there is also this in Chapter 6, under “6.5 Lawful Weapons”:
“6.5.1 Certain types of weapons, however, are subject to specific rules that apply to their use by the U.S. armed forces. These rules may reflect U.S. obligations under international law or national policy. These weapons include:
mines, booby-traps, and other devices (except certain specific classes of prohibited mines, booby-traps, and other devices);38
cluster munitions;39
incendiary weapons;40
laser weapons (except blinding lasers);41
riot control agents;42
herbicides;43
nuclear weapons; 44 and
explosive ordnance.45
6.5.2 Other Examples of Lawful Weapons. In particular, aside from the rules prohibiting weapons calculated to cause superfluous injury and inherently indiscriminate weapons,46 there are no law of war rules specifically prohibiting or restricting the following types of weapons by the U.S. armed forces: …
depleted uranium munitions;51”
Mines, cluster munitions, incendiary weapons, herbicides, nuclear weapons, and depleted uranium munitions, are all almost uncontrollably violative of the restrictions that were set forth in Chapter 5, preceding.
There are also passages like this:
6.5.4.4 Expanding Bullets. The law of war does not prohibit the use of bullets that expand or flatten easily in the human body. Like other weapons, such bullets are only prohibited if they are calculated to cause superfluous injury.74 The U.S. armed forces have used expanding bullets in various counterterrorism and hostage rescue operations, some of which have been conducted in the context of armed conflict.
The 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets prohibits the use of expanding bullets in armed conflicts in which all States that are parties to the conflict are also Party to the 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets.75 The United States is not a Party to the 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets, in part because evidence was not presented at the diplomatic conference that expanding bullets produced unnecessarily severe or cruel wounds.76”
The United States still has not gone as far as the 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets. The U.S. presumption is instead that expanding bullets have not “produced unnecessarily severe or cruel wounds.” This is like George W. Bush saying that waterboarding, etc., aren’t “torture.” The document goes on to explain that, “expanding bullets are widely used by law enforcement agencies today, which also supports the conclusion that States do not regard such bullets are inherently inhumane or needlessly cruel.81” And, of course, the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court do not think that the death penalty is either “cruel” or “unusual” punishment. Perhaps Obama is a closeted Republican himself.
The use of depleted uranium was justified by an American Ambassador’s statement asserting that, “The environmental and long-term health effects of the use of depleted uranium munitions have been thoroughly investigated by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Environmental Program, the International Atomic Energy Agency, NATO, the Centres for Disease Control, the European Commission, and others. None of these inquiries has documented long-term environmental or health effects attributable to use of these munitions.
“Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing. As shocking as these statistics are, due to a lack of adequate documentation, research, and reporting of cases, the actual rate of cancer and other diseases is likely to be much higher than even these figures suggest.”
If those figures are accurate, then the reasonable presumption would be that depleted uranium should have been banned long ago. Continuing to assert that it’s not as dangerous a material as people think it is, seems likely to be based on cover-up, rather than on science. Until there is proof that it’s not that toxic, the presumption should be that it must be outlawed.
Finally, though the press reports on this document have not generally focused on the issue of torture, it’s worth pointing out what the document does say, about that:
5.26.2 Information Gathering. The employment of measures necessary for obtaining information about the enemy and their country is considered permissible.727
Information gathering measures, however, may not violate specific law of war rules.728
For example, it would be unlawful, of course, to use torture or abuse to interrogate detainees for purposes of gathering information.”
And: “9.8.1 Humane Treatment During Interrogation. Interrogation must be carried out in a manner consistent with the requirements for humane treatment, including the prohibition against acts of violence or intimidation, and insults.153
No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on POWs to secure from them information of any kind whatever.154 POWs who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.155
Prohibited means include imposing inhumane conditions,156 denial of medical treatment, or the use of mind-altering chemicals.157”
Those provisions would eliminate George W. Bush’s ‘justification’ for the use of tortures such as waterboarding, and humiliation.
Furthermore: “8.2.1 Protection Against Violence, Torture, and Cruel Treatment. Detainees must be protected against violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and any form of corporal punishment.29
Therefore, even if Bush’s approved forms of torture were otherwise allowable under Obama’s new legal regime, some of those forms, such as waterboarding, and even “insults,” would be excluded by this provision.
Moreover:
“8.2.4 Threats to Commit Inhumane Treatment. Threats to commit the unlawful acts described above (i.e., violence against detainees, or humiliating or degrading treatment, or biological or medical experiments) are also prohibited.37”
And:
“8.14.4.1 U.S. Policy Prohibiting Transfers in Cases in Which Detainees Would Likely Be Tortured. U.S. policy provides that no person shall be transferred to another State if it is more likely than not that the person would be tortured in the receiving country.”
Therefore, specifically as regards torture, the Obama system emphatically and clearly excludes what the Bush interpretation of the U.S. Army Field Manual allowed.
CONCLUSIONS:
What seems undeniable about the Law of War Manual, is that there are self-contradictions within it. To assert that it “reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War,” is going too far. But, to say that it’s hypocritical (except, perhaps, on torture, where it’s clearly a repudiation of GWB’s practices), seems safely true.
This being so, Obama’s Law of War Manual should ultimately be judged by Obama’s actions as the U.S. Commander in Chief, and not merely by the document’s words. Actions speak truer than words, even if they don’t speak louder than words (and plenty of people still think that Obama isn’t a Republican in ‘Democratic’ verbal garb: they’re not tone-deaf, but they surely are action-deaf; lots of people judge by words not actions). For example: it was Obama himself who arranged the bloody coup in Ukraine and the resulting necessaryethnic cleansing there in order to exterminate or else drive out the residents inthe area of Ukraine that had voted 90+% for the Ukrainian President whom Obama’s people (via their Ukrainian agents) had overthrown.
Cluster bombs,firebombs, and other such munitions have been used by their stooges for this purpose, that ethnic cleansing: against the residents there. Obama has spoken publicly many times defending what they are doing, but using euphemisms to refer to it. He is certainly behind the coup and its follow-through in the ethnic cleansing, and none of it would be happening if he did not approve of it. Judging the mere words of Obama’s Law of War Manual by Obama’s actions (such as in Ukraine, but also Syria, and Libya) is judging it by how he actually interprets it, and this technique of interpreting the document provides the answer to the document’s real meaning. It answers the question whenever there are contradictions within the document (as there indeed are).
Consequently, what Francis Boyle was reported to have said is, in the final analysis, true, at least in practical terms — which is all that really counts — except on torture, where his allegation is simply false.
Obama’s intent, like that of anyone, must be drawn from his actions, his decisons, not from his words, whenever the words and the actions don’t jibe, don’t match. When his Administration produced its Law of War Manual, it should be interpreted to mean what his Administration has done and is doing, not by its words, wherever there is a contradiction between those two.
This also means that no matter how much one reads the document itself, some of what one is reading is deception if it’s not being interpreted by, and in the light of, an even more careful reading of Obama’s relevant actions regarding the matters to which the document pertains.
Otherwise, the document is being read in a way that confuses its policy statements with its propaganda statements.
Parts of the document are propaganda. The purpose isn’t to fool the public, who won’t read the document (and Obama apparently doesn’t want them to). The purpose of the propaganda is to enable future presidents to say, “But if you will look at this part of the Manual, you will see that what we are doing is perfectly legal.” Those mutually contradictory passages are there in order to provide answers which will satisfy both the ‘hawks’ and the ‘doves.’
New evidence from Fukushima shows that as many as 2,000 people have died from necessary evacuations, writes Ian Fairlie, while another 5,000 will die from cancer. Future assessments of fatalities from nuclear disasters must include deaths from displacement-induced ill-heath and suicide in addition to those from direct radiation impacts.
“The Fukushima accident is still not over and its ill-effects will linger for a long time into the future … 2,000 Japanese people have already died from the evacuations and another 5,000 are expected to die from future cancers.”
Official data from Fukushima show that nearly 2,000 people died from the effects of evacuations necessary to avoid high radiation exposures from the disaster.
The valley of the shadow of death: near Fukushima Daichi, March 2015. Photo: Lucas Wirl via Flickr (CC BY-NC).
The uprooting to unfamiliar areas, cutting of family ties, loss of social support networks, disruption, exhaustion, poor physical conditions and disorientation can and do result in many people, in particular older people, dying.
Increased suicide has occurred among younger and older people following the Fukushima evacuations, but the trends are unclear.
A Japanese Cabinet Office report stated that, between March 2011 and July 2014,56 suicides in Fukushima Prefecture were linked to the nuclear accident. This should be taken as a minimum, rather than a maximum, figure.
Mental health consequences
It is necessary to include the mental health consequences of radiation exposures and evacuations. For example, Becky Martin has stated her PhD research at Southampton University in the UK shows that “the most significant impacts of radiation emergencies are often in our minds.”
She adds:
Imagine that you’ve been informed that your land, your water, the air that you have breathed may have been polluted by a deadly and invisible contaminant. Something with the capacity to take away your fertility, or affect your unborn children.
Even the most resilient of us would be concerned … many thousands of radiation emergency survivors have subsequently gone on to develop Post-Trauma Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders as a result of their experiences and the uncertainty surrounding their health.
It is likely that these fears, anxieties, and stresses will act to magnify the effects of evacuations, resulting in even more old people dying or people committing suicide.
Such considerations should not be taken as arguments against evacuations, however. They are an important, life-saving strategy. But, as argued by Becky Martin,
We need to provide greatly improved social support following resettlement and extensive long-term psychological care to all radiation emergency survivors, to improve their health outcomes and preserve their futures.
Untoward pregnancy outcomes
Dr Alfred Körblein from Nuremburg in Germany recently noticed and reported on a 15% drop (statistically speaking, highly significant) in the numbers of live births in Fukushima Prefecture in December 2011, nine months after the accident.
This might point to higher rates of early spontaneous abortions. He also observed a (statistically significant) 20% increase in the infant mortality rate in 2012, relative to the long-term trend in Fukushima Prefecture plus six surrounding prefectures, which he attributes to the consumption of radioactive food:
The fact that infant mortality peaks in May 2012, more than one year after the Fukushima accident, suggests that the increase is an effect of internal rather than external radiation exposure.
In Germany [after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster] perinatal mortality peaks followed peaks of cesium burden in pregnant women with a time-lag of seven months. May 2012 minus seven months is October 2011, the end of the harvesting season. Thus, consumption of contaminated foodstuff during autumn 2011 could be an explanation for the excess of infant mortality in the Fukushima region in 2012.
These are indicative rather than definitive findings and need to be verified by further studies. Unfortunately, such studies are notable by their absence.
Cancer and other late effects from radioactive fallout
Finally, we have to consider the longer term health effects of the radiation exposures from the radioactive fallouts after the four explosions and three meltdowns at Fukushima in March 2011. Large differences of view exist on this issue in Japan. These make it difficult for lay people and journalists to understand what the real situation is.
The Japanese Government, its advisors, and most radiation scientists in Japan (with some honourable exceptions) minimise the risks of radiation. The official widely-observed policy is that small amounts of radiation are harmless: scientifically speaking this is untenable.
For example, the Japanese Government is attempting to increase the public limit for radiation in Japan from 1 mSv to 20 mSv per year. Its scientists are trying to force the ICRP to accept this large increase. This is not only unscientific, it is also unconscionable.
Part of the reason for this policy is that radiation scientists in Japan (in the US, as well) appear unable or unwilling to accept the stochastic nature of low-level radiation effects. ‘Stochastic’ means an all-or-nothing response: you either get cancer etc or you don’t.
As you decrease the dose, the effects become less likely: your chance of cancer declines all the way down to zero dose. The corollary is that tiny doses, even well below background, still carry a small chance of cancer: there is never a safe dose, except zero dose.
But, as observed by Spycher et al (2015), some scientists “a priori exclude the possibility that low dose radiation could increase the risk of cancer. They will therefore not accept studies that challenge their foregone conclusion.”
One reason why such scientists refuse to accept radiation’s stochastic effects (cancers, strokes, CVS diseases, hereditary effects, etc) is that they only appear after long latency periods – often decades for solid cancers. For the Japanese Government and its radiation advisors, it seems out-of-sight means out-of-mind.
This conveniently allows the Japanese Government to ignore radiogenic late effects. But the evidence for them is absolutely rock solid. Ironically, it comes primarily from the world’s largest on-going epidemiology study, the Life Span Study of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors by the RERF Foundation which is based in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The lessons of Chernobyl
The mass of epidemiological evidence from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 clearly indicates that cancer etc increases will very likely also occur at Fukushima, but many Japanese (and US) scientists deny this evidence.
For example, much debate currently exists over the existence and interpretation of increased thyroid cancers, cysts, and nodules in Fukushima Prefecture resulting from the disaster. From the findings after Chernobyl, thyroid cancers are expected to start increasing 4 to 5 years after 2011.
It’s best to withhold comment until clearer results become available in 2016, but early indications are not reassuring for the Japanese Government. After then, other solid cancers are expected to increase as well, but it will take a while for these to become manifest.
The best way of forecasting the numbers of late effects (ie cancers etc) is by estimating the collective dose to Japan from the Fukushima fall out. We do this by envisaging that everyone in Japan exposed to the radioactive fallout from Fukushima has thereby received lottery tickets: but they are negative tickets. That is, if your lottery number comes up, you get cancer [1].
If you live far away from Fukushima Daiichi NPP, you get few tickets and the chance is low: if you live close, you get more tickets and the chance is higher. You can’t tell who will be unlucky, but you can estimate the total number by using collective doses.
The 2013 UNSCEAR Report has estimated that the collective dose to the Japanese population from Fukushima is 48,000 person Sv: this is a very large dose: see below.
Unfortunately, pro-nuclear Japanese scientists also criticise the concept of collective dose as it relies on the stochastic nature of radiation’s effects and on the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model of radiation’s effects which they also refute. But almost all official regulatory bodies throughout the world recognise the stochastic nature of radiation’s effects, the LNT, and collective doses.
Summing up Fukushima
About 60 people died immediately during the actual evacuations in Fukushima Prefecture in March 2011. Between 2011 and 2015, an additional 1,867 people[2] in Fukushima Prefecture died as a result of the evacuations following the nuclear disaster [3]. These deaths were from ill health and suicides.
From the UNSCEAR estimate of 48,000 person Sv, it can be reliably estimated (using a fatal cancer risk factor of 10% per Sv) that about 5,000 fatal cancers will occur in Japan in future from Fukushima’s fallout. This estimate from official data agrees with my own personal estimate using a different methodology.
In sum, the health toll from the Fukushima nuclear disaster is horrendous. At the minimum
Over 160,000 people were evacuated most of them permanently.
Many cases of post-trauma stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders arising from the evacuations.
About 12,000 workers exposed to high levels of radiation, some up to 250 mSv
An estimated 5,000 fatal cancers from radiation exposures in future.
Plus similar (unquantified) numbers of radiogenic strokes, CVS diseases and hereditary diseases.
Between 2011 and 2015, about 2,000 deaths from radiation-related evacuations due to ill-health and suicides.
An as yet unquantified number of thyroid cancers.
An increased infant mortality rate in 2012 and a decreased number of live births in December 2011.
Non-health effects include
8% of Japan (30,000 sq.km), including parts of Tokyo, contaminated by radioactivity.
Economic losses estimated between $300 and $500 billion.
Catastrophes that must never be repeated
The Fukushima accident is still not over and its ill-effects will linger for a long time into the future. However we can say now that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima delivered a huge blow to Japan and its people.
2,000 Japanese people have already died from the evacuations and another 5,000 are expected to die from future cancers.
It is impossible not to be moved by the scale of Fukushima’s toll in terms of deaths, suicides, mental ill-health and human suffering. Fukushima’s effect on Japan is similar to Chernobyl’s massive blow against the former Soviet Union in 1986.
Indeed, several writers have expressed the view that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was a major factor in the subsequent collapse of the USSR during 1989-1990.
Has the Japanese Government, and indeed other governments (including the UK and US), learned from these nuclear disasters? The US philosopher George Santayana (1863-1962) once stated that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Dr Ian Fairlie is an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment. He has a degree in radiation biology from Bart’s Hospital in London and his doctoral studies at Imperial College in London and Princeton University in the US concerned the radiological hazards of nuclear fuel reprocessing.
Ian was formerly a DEFRA civil servant on radiation risks from nuclear power stations. From 2000 to 2004, he was head of the Secretariat to the UK Government’s CERRIE Committee on internal radiation risks. Since retiring from Government service, he has acted as consultant to the European Parliament, local and regional governments, environmental NGOs, and private individuals.
See alsoIan Fairlie’s blog, where this article was originally published.
Thanks to Azby Brown, Yuri Hiranuma, Dr Tadahiro Katsuta, Dr Alfred Körblein, Becky Martin, and Mycle Schneider for comments on early drafts. Any errors are mine.
Notes
1 Credit to Jan Beyea in the US for the negative lottery idea.
2 Correct as of March 2015.
3 In addition, 1,603 people were killed directly by the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima Prefecture, and approximately 1,350 tsunami evacuee deaths occurred in Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures: in the latter cases, the evacuations were not radiation-related.
“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” – Sun Tzu
Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Chinese military strategist realized that indirect warfare is one of the most efficient ways of fighting an enemy. It allows an opponent to defeat their adversary without directly engaging them, thereby saving themselves the resources that would have to be expended in a direct confrontation. Attacking an enemy indirectly can also bog them down and put them on the defensive, thereby making them vulnerable to other forms of attack. It also carries with it a certain opportunity cost for the defending side, since the time and resources that they spend in dealing with the indirect attack could potentially have been put to better use elsewhere. Besides the tactical advantages, there are also strategic ones as well. There may be certain constraints (e.g. alliances, military parity, etc.) that prevent one entity from directly launching hostilities against another. In this case, indirect warfare is the only option to destabilize the other.
In the current day, weapons of mass destruction and the emerging multipolar world place limits on direct confrontation between Great Powers. Even though the US still retains the world’s strongest conventional military, the nuclear parity it shares with Russia serves as a reminder that unipolarity has its limits. Additionally, the international system is morphing in such a way that the political and physical costs of waging a conventional war against certain countries (i.e. China, Iran) are becoming too much of a burden for US decision makers, thereby making this military option less attractive. Under such circumstances, indirect warfare acquires a heightened value in strategic planning and its application can take on a variety of forms.
Direct warfare in the past may have been marked by bombers and tanks, but if the pattern that the US has presently applied in Syria and Ukraine is any indication, then indirect warfare in the future will be marked by “protesters” and insurgents. Fifth columns will be formed less by secret agents and covert saboteurs and more by non-state actors that publicly behave as civilians. Social media and similar technologies will come to replace precision-guided munitions as the “surgical strike” capability of the aggressive party, and chat rooms and Facebook pages will become the new “militants’ den”. Instead of directly confronting the targets on their home turf, proxy conflicts will be waged in their near vicinity in order to destabilize their periphery. Traditional occupations may give way to coups and indirect regime change operations that are more cost effective and less politically sensitive.
Focus should be placed on the new strategy of indirect warfare that the US has demonstrated during the Syrian and Ukrainian Crises. Both situations left many wondering whether they were observing the export of Color Revolutions to the Mideast, the arrival of the Arab Spring to Europe, or perhaps some kind of Frankenstein hybrid. It is asserted that when the US’ actions in both countries are objectively compared, one can discern a new patterned approach towards regime change. This model begins by deploying a Color Revolution as a soft coup attempt, only to be followed up by a hard coup Unconventional War if the first plan fails.
Unconventional Warfare is defined in this book as any type of nonconventional (i.e. non-official military) force engaged in largely asymmetrical combat against a traditional adversary. Taken together in a two-pronged approach, Color Revolutions and Unconventional Warfare represent the two components that form the theory of Hybrid War, the new method of indirect warfare being waged by the US.
It is difficult to forecast the exact direction of Hybrid War into the future, owing to the fact that it is such a recent phenomenon and is still being constructed. Notwithstanding that, a few vague forecasts can still be made as to its worldwide implementation.
As it currently stands, the US is the only country currently engaging in Hybrid War. Russia has only tangentially recognized this new development in May 2014 at the Moscow Conference on International Security. It still does not understand what it is witnessing and is struggling to make sense of it all. The Chinese and Iranians have not officially responded to the findings of Conference, but as with Russia, they too are existentially affected by its findings. It may thus take at least half a decade for any other country to adequately understand Hybrid War to the point of being able to defend against it, let alone practice it on its own.
Hybrid War is such that it is counterproductive for any of the Eurasian Powers to attempt it in their region. This is because the creation of Black Holes of instability and chaos near their borders, no matter what the intent, would inadvertently be fulfilling the US’ grand strategic objectives. Rather, it may be that if a Eurasian Power can garner the necessary soft power and social networking ability to penetrate the societies of the Western Hemisphere, Europe, or Africa (which may likely take years to do in each case), then they could theoretically safely attempt Hybrid War without fear of any negative blowback to their interests. Nonetheless, it still remains to be seen whether these necessary intangible preconditions can be created outside of the civilizational space of each Eurasian Power, thereby strongly decreasing the likelihood that they will practice Hybrid War within the next decade or two, if at all.
The aim of the book is to prove the existence of Hybrid War, the indirect adaptive approach to regime change that combines Color Revolutions and Unconventional Warfare into a unified strategy. Geopolitics dictates US strategy in this regard and identifies future targets, while Hybrid War tactically carries out the plans and unleashes weaponized chaos. It abides by several primary military theories in order to result in the dominance of chaotic dynamics. Effective information outreach campaigns and the construction of social networks over a period of time can lead to the development of a hive mind of anti-government activists. These individuals can then be guided via the teachings of Gene Sharp into strategic swarms that work to overwhelm the authorities and initiate a soft coup. Should the Color Revolution fail in overthrowing the government, then the transition to Unconventional Warfare occurs, whereby the social infrastructure of the Color Revolution becomes the foundation of the violent campaign being waged by the anti-government movement. It is at this point that the hard coup commences and all elements of the state are thrown into strategically engineered chaos.
As has been argued, Hybrid War is the new horizon of US regime change strategy. It incubates the US from the political and military risks associated with direct intervention and it is much more cost-efficient. It indirectly uses a hodgepodge of proxy groups to accomplish for Washington what half a million US soldiers may not be able to directly do. It is thus extremely attractive to American decision makers as their country reluctantly lurches towards multipolarity, and the successful multi-theater implementation of Hybrid War could actually reverse this process and refresh the unipolar moment for an undetermined amount of time. Therefore, it is conclusively in the interests of multipolar-oriented states to master their understanding of Hybrid War in order to effectively craft strategies to neutralize its successful application across the Eurasian supercontinent and prevent the return of unipolarity.
“HYBRID WARS” PRESS RELEASE FROM SPUTNIK INTERNATIONAL’S ANDREW KORYBKO
Sputnik International’s political analyst and journalist, Andrew Korybko, just published his first book on “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”. It was reviewed by the Diplomatic Academy of Russia and released with the assistance of the People’s Friendship University of Russia, where Andrew is a member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Research and Predictions. His detailed work proves that Color Revolutions are a new form of warfare engineered by the US, with everything from their organizational makeup to geopolitical application being guided by American strategists. But unlike earlier researchers who have touched upon the topic, Andrew takes his work even further and uses the latest examples of the War on Syria and EuroMaidan to argue that the US has deployed a second, more dangerous step to its regime change toolkit.
Hybrid Wars, as he labels them, are when the US meshes its Color Revolution and Unconventional Warfare strategies together to create a unified toolkit for carrying out regime change in targeted states. When a Color Revolution attempt fails, as it miserably did in Syria in 2011, the backup plan is to roll out an Unconventional War that builds directly upon the former’s social infrastructure and organizing methods. In the case of EuroMaidan, Andrew cites Western news sources such as Newsweek magazine, the Guardian, and Reuters in reminding everyone that in the days immediately prior to the coup’s successful completion, Western Ukraine was in full-scale rebellion against the central government and the stage was set for an Unconventional Syrian-esque War in the heart of Eastern Europe. Had it not been for the sudden overthrow of President Yanukovich, the US was prepared to take the country down the path of the Syrian scenario, which would have been its second full-fledged application of Hybrid War.
Andrew’s revolutionary research ultimately shows that it was the US, not Russia, which spearheaded the use of Hybrid Wars, and that given his proven findings, it’s irresponsible to even call Russia’s alleged involvement in the Ukrainian Crisis a ‘hybrid war’. In fact, the US is far ahead of any other country in practicing this new method of warfare, as no other state has attempted a Color Revolution thus far, let alone transitioned it into an Unconventional War when their initial regime change plans failed. While some many think that such occurrences are spontaneous and happenstance, Andrew documents how Hybrid Wars are not only created from the ground-up by the US, but how they’re specifically deployed in areas where they’d be most geostrategically advantageous for the promotion of its unipolar policies.
Thus, not only does Andrew describe the very essence of Hybrid Wars, but the final part of his book forecasts where he believes they may happen next. He introduces the groundbreaking concept of the Color Arc, a contiguous line of states stretching from Hungary to Kyrgyzstan and where the waging of Hybrid Wars would most seriously damage Russia’s national interests. This is the first time that Color Revolutions have ever been analyzed through a geopolitical prism, and it brings forth a completely different way of looking at this weapon’s utilization. This new paradigm is absolutely essential for understanding the US’ new approach to regime change and the form, both physical and geopolitical, it’s expected to take in the forthcoming years.
will be available on 17 August for free PDF download at Fort Russ (fortruss.blogspot.com), Center for Research on Globalization (globalresearch.org), Oriental Review (orientalreview.org), and Center for Syncretic Studies (syncreticstudies.com), and can be picked up in soft cover form at the People’s Friendship University in Moscow.
As he’s offering his work for free, Andrew kindly asks that readers who are pleased with it to consider donating to charity and individual efforts that directly assist the victims of the US’ Hybrid Wars on Syria and Ukraine.
He hopes that your generous donation can help make their American-inflicted suffering more manageable.
El más prestigioso diario del mundo lanza un llamado al Congreso estadounidense para que ponga término al estado de sitio que asfixia al pueblo cubano.[1]
1. La administración Kennedy impuso sanciones económicas totales en 1962 con el objetivo de derrocar al Gobierno revolucionario de Fidel Castro. Esta política hostil, que los distintos gobiernos estadounidenses han reforzado, salvo algunas excepciones, es un fracaso total.2. Una gran mayoría de los ciudadanos y la inmensa mayoría de los cubanos desean un levantamiento de las sanciones económicas anacrónicas, crueles e ineficientes. “Un número creciente de parlamentarios de ambos partidos han emprendido pasos alentadores en ese sentido estos últimos tiempos”, con la introducción de diferentes proyectos de ley destinados a poner término al estado de sitio económico.3. Los ciudadanos estadounidenses pueden visitar cualquier país del mundo, incluso China, Vietnam y Corea del Norte, pero no están autorizados a viajar a Cuba como turistas ordinarios.
4. “El embargo […] ha hecho daño al pueblo cubano”.
5. “El embargo perjudica de modo sustancial a las empresas estadounidenses. Los capitales extranjeros invierten en Cuba para conseguir cuotas de mercado, dejando lo menos posible para las empresas estadounidenses cuando se levanten las sanciones”.
6. Sin un cambio rápido de la política exterior hacia Cuba y la eliminación de las sanciones, los intereses estadounidenses se verán inevitablemente afectados. “Lo que va a pasar es que cuando los americanos estén autorizados a viajar a Cuba, se hospedarán en hoteles españoles, comerán comida alemana y usarán ordenadores chinos”.7. Durante años los legisladores de origen cubano “han controlado la política hacia Cuba” y “han favorecido el embargo”. Los políticos estadounidenses han seguido esa vía temiendo perder al electorado cubanoamericano.8. Los tiempos han cambiado. Según un sondeo del 21 de julio de 2015, el 72% de los estadounidenses es favorable a un levantamiento de las sanciones económicas. “El 55% de los republicanos apoya el fin del embargo”.
9. Pronunciarse ahora a favor del mantenimiento de las sanciones contra Cuba, como es el caso de Marco Rubio y Jeb Bush, dos de los candidatos republicanos a las elecciones presidenciales de 2016, es un hándicap. Entre los cubanoamericanos, el 40% declara que brindaría su apoyo a un candidato que siguiera la política de acercamiento con La Habana que ha emprendido Barack Obama. Sólo el 26% afirma que no votaría a favor de semejante política. Entre la comunidad latina de Estados Unidos, el 34% está a favor del diálogo con Cuba y sólo el 14% ha expresado su desacuerdo al respecto.
10. Hillary Clinton, candidata demócrata a la presidencia en 2016, ha entendido muy bien este cambio de época y ha lanzado un llamado para levantar las sanciones económicas contra Cuba durante un discurso en Miami, bastión de la comunidad cubana, en julio de 2015.
Salim Lamrani
Doctor en Estudios Ibéricos y Latinoamericanos de la Universidad Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, Salim Lamrani es profesor titular de la Universidad de La Reunión y periodista, especialista de las relaciones entre Cuba y Estados Unidos. Su último libro se titula Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2014, con un prólogo de Eduardo [email protected] ; [email protected][1] The New York Times, «Growing Momentum to Repeal Cuban Embargo», 3 de Agosto de 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/opinion/growing-momentum-to-repeal-cuban-embargo.html?_r=0 (sitio consultado el 7 de agosto de 2015).
«È una bomba atomica, la forza da cui il Sole trae la sua energia»: così il presidente Harry Truman descrive la terrificante arma che, il 6 agosto 1945, gli Usa sganciano su Hiroshima, seguita due giorni dopo da una bomba al plutonio su Nagasaki. La principale ragione dell’impiego dell’arma nucleare non è costringere alla resa il Giappone, ormai allo stremo, «senza perdita di vite americane», ma impedire che l’Urss partecipi all’invasione del Giappone ed estenda la sua influenza alla regione del Pacifico.
Gli Stati uniti cercano di trarre il massimo vantaggio dal fatto che, in quel momento, sono gli unici a possedere l’arma atomica. Appena un mese dopo il bombardamento nucleare di Hiroshima e Nagasaki, al Pentagono già calcolano che occorrerebbero oltre 200 bombe nucleari contro un nemico come l’Urss. Gli Usa hanno già 11 bombe quando, il 5 marzo 1946, il discorso di Winston Churchill sulla «cortina di ferro» apre ufficialmente la guerra fredda. Nel 1949 gli Stati uniti hanno abbastanza atomiche (oltre 200) da attaccare l’Unione sovietica che però, nello stesso anno, effettua la sua prima esplosione sperimentale.
Comincia la corsa agli armamenti nucleari. Il vantaggio a favore dell’Occidente cresce quando, nel 1952, la Gran Bretagna effettua la sua prima esplosione nucleare. Nel 1960 la Francia fa esplodere la sua prima bomba al plutonio. Inizia in questo periodo lo schieramento dei più micidiali vettori nucleari: i missili balistici intercontinentali. Negli anni Sessanta, i paesi dotati di armi nucleari passano da quattro a sei: la Cina fa esplodere la sua prima bomba nel 1964; Israele comincia a produrre segretamente armi nucleari probabilmente nel 1966. Negli anni Settanta, i paesi in possesso di armi nucleari aumentano da sei a otto: l’India effettua il suo primo test nel 1974; il Sudafrica effettua segretamente un test congiunto con Israele nel 1979. Inoltre, nel 1998, il Pakistan ammetterà di possedere armi nucleari, precedentemente costruite.
Dal 1945 al 1991, l’anno in cui la disgregazione dell’Urss segna la fine della guerra fredda, vengono fabbricate circa 130mila testate nucleari: 70mila dagli Stati uniti, 55mila dall’Unione sovietica. Altre 5mila vengono fabbricate da Gran Bretagna, Francia, Cina, Israele, India, Pakistan e Sudafrica. Successivamente, dal «club nucleare» esce il Sudafrica, ma vi entra la Corea del Nord.
Mentre il clima della guerra fredda comincia a cambiare, Usa e Urss firmano nel 1987 il Trattato sulle forze nucleari intermedie, che elimina i Pershing 2 e i Cruise statunitensi schierati in Europa occidentale, anche a Comiso, e gli SS-20 schierati sul territorio sovietico. Questo importante risultato è dovuto principalmente all’«offensiva del disarmo» lanciata dall’Unione sovietica di Gorbaciov: il 15 gennaio 1986, essa propone di attuare un programma complessivo per la messa al bando delle armi nucleari entro il 2000. Se gli Stati uniti accettassero tale proposta, si avvierebbe un reale processo di disarmo. A Washington approfittano invece della disgregazione dell’Urss e della conseguente crisi russa per acquisire nei confronti di Mosca un crescente vantaggio anche nel campo delle forze nucleari. Trattati come lo Start I, firmato nel 1991, stabiliscono delle riduzioni quantitative degli arsenali nucleari, ma rendono possibile il loro ammodernamento. Campo in cui gli Usa pensano di poter prevalere, mentre a un certo punto si trovano di fronte una Russia che ha di nuovo la capacità di ammodernare il proprio arsenale. Washington rilancia così il programma nucleare militare, investendovi miliardi di dollari.
Si arriva così alla situazione odierna. Secondo la Federazione degli scienziati americani, gli Usa mantengono 1.920 testate nucleari strategiche pronte al lancio (su un totale di 7.300), in confronto alle 1.600 russe (su 8.000). Comprese quelle francesi e britanniche, le forze nucleari Nato dispongono di circa 8.000 testate nucleari, di cui 2.370 pronte al lancio. Aggiungendo quelle cinesi, pachistane, indiane, israeliane e nordcoreane, il numero totale delle testate nucleari viene stimato in 16300, di cui 4.350 pronte al lancio. Sono stime approssimative per difetto, in quanto nessuno sa esattamente quante testate nucleari vi siano in ciascun arsenale. E la corsa agli armamenti nucleari prosegue con la continua modernizzazione degli arsenali e la possibilità che altri paesi, anche firmatari del Tnp, li costruiscano. Per questo la lancetta dell’«Orologio dell’apocalisse», il segnatempo simbolico che sul Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists indica a quanti minuti siamo dalla mezzanotte della guerra nucleare, è stata spostata da 5 a mezzanotte nel 2012 a 3 a mezzanotte nel 2015, lo stesso livello del 1984 in piena guerra fredda. Quello che scientificamente si sa è che, se la lancetta arrivasse a mezzanotte, suonerebbe l’ora della fine dell’umanità.
Dopo essere stato dal 2009 al 2014 segretario generale della Nato (sotto comando Usa), Anders Fogh Rasmussen è stato assunto come consulente internazionale dalla Goldman Sachs, la più potente banca d’affari statunitense. Il curriculum di Rasmussen è prestigioso. Come primo ministro danese (2001-2009), si è adoperato per «l’allargamento della Ue e della Nato contribuendo alla pace e prosperità in Europa». Come segretario generale, ha rappresentato la Nato nel suo «picco operativo con sei operazioni in tre continenti», tra cui le guerre in Afghanistan e Libia, e, «in risposta all’aggressione russa all’Ucraina, ha rafforzato la difesa collettiva a un livello senza precedenti dalla fine della guerra fredda».
Ha sostenuto il «Partenariato transatlantico su commercio e investimenti (Ttip)» tra Stati uniti e Ue, base economica di «una comunità transatlantica integrata». Competenze preziose per la Goldman Sachs, la cui strategia è allo stesso tempo finanziaria, politica e militare. Suoi dirigenti e consulenti, dopo anni di lavoro alla grande banca, sono stati messi in posti chiave nel governo Usa e in altri: tra questi Mario Draghi (governatore della Banca d’Italia, poi presidente della Bce) e Mario Monti (nominato capo del governo dal presidente Napolitano nel 2011). Non c’è quindi da stupirsi che la Goldman Sachs abbia le mani in pasta nelle guerre condotte dalla Nato.
Ad esempio, in quella contro la Libia: si è prima impadronita (adducendo perdite del 98%) di fondi statali per 1,3 miliardi di dollari, che Tripoli le aveva affidato nel 2008; ha quindi partecipato nel 2011 alla grande rapina dei fondi sovrani libici (stimati in circa 150 miliardi di dollari) che Usa e Ue hanno «congelato» al momento della guerra. E, per gestire attraverso il controllo della «Central Bank of Libya» i nuovi fondi ricavati dall’export petrolifero, la Goldman Sachs si appresta a sbarcare in Libia con la progettata operazione Usa/Nato sotto bandiera Ue e «guida italiana». In base a una lucida «teoria del caos», si sfrutta la caotica situazione provocata dalle guerre contro Libia e Siria, strumentalizzando e incanalando verso Italia e Grecia (tra i paesi più deboli della Ue) il tragico esodo dei migranti conseguente a tali guerre.
Esso serve come arma di guerra psicologica e pressione economica per dimostrare la necessità di una «operazione umanitaria di pace», mirante in realtà all’occupazione militare delle zone strategicamente ed economicamente più importanti della Libia. Come la Nato, la Goldman Sachs è funzionale alla strategia di Washington che vuole una Europa assoggettata agli Stati uniti. Dopo aver contribuito con la truffa dei mutui subprime a provocare la crisi finanziaria, che dagli Stati uniti ha investito l’Europa, la Goldman Sachs ha speculato sulla crisi europea, consigliando «gli investitori a trarre vantaggio dalla crisi finanziaria in Europa» (v. rapporto riservato reso noto dal Wall Street Journal nel 2011). E, secondo documentate inchieste effettuate nel 2010-2012 da Der Spiegel, New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg News, la Goldman Sachs ha camuffato, con complesse operazioni finanziarie («prestiti nascosti» a condizioni capestro e spaccio di «titoli tossici» Usa), il vero ammontare del debito greco. In tale faccenda, la Goldman Sachs si è mossa più abilmente di Germania, Bce e Fmi, il cui cappio messo al collo della Grecia è evidente. Reclutando Rasmussen, con la rete internazionale di rapporti politici e militari da lui tessuta nei cinque anni alla Nato, la Goldman Sachs potenzia la sua capacità di influenza e penetrazione.
On Sunday, a senior adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Yasin Aktay, said that there will be a truce between The Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the Israeli occupation authorities, regarding lifting the blockade on Gaza.
“Gaza is heading towards a comprehensive agreement on the issue of lifting the blockade and opening the [border] crossings in a long-term ceasefire deal with Israel,” Aktay said.
“The issue was discussed during [Hamas chief] Khaled Meshaal’s visit to Ankara last week,” he added, noting that Meshaal discussed the detail of an agreement mediated by former British prime minister and Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair.
AFP said that Hamas representatives also gave details of the meeting between Blair and Meshaal in Doha, which was reported by Palestinian and Arab media on Thursday.
According to reports, Blair met Meshaal for the second time in a month and a half and the two discussed the implementation of the ceasefire with Israel in exchange for lifting the blockade on Gaza.
On a related note, Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas movement in Gaza, and his delegation are set to meet with the head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service to discuss the truce. The delegation will also be visiting Qatar and Turkey, said i24.
In late July, Palestinian news site Al Quds al Arabi reported Hamas’s representative in Lebanon Ali Baraka as saying that there were improvements in the group’s relationship with Egypt, i24 added.
“Egypt’s security is a Palestinian interest,” Baraka said.
Hamas recently held meetings with representatives from the Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip during which it updated them with the details of talks with European and American officials about a ceasefire with Israel.
A spokesperson for Hamas said that any proposal offered regarding a ceasefire will be presented to the Palestinian factions.
i24 said that according to London-based Arabic-language daily al-Hayat, Israel agreed to lift the blockade on the Gaza Strip, imposed in 2007, “entirely” as well as establish a naval passageway between the strip and Cyprus. In exchange, Hamas would agree to a long-term ceasefire which would last between seven to 10 years.
Both Israeli and Palestinian officials for Hamas have confirmed indirect talks have been occurring through European mediators, and similar reports in March of a a long-term ceasefire by Hamas in exchange for the lifting of the blockade were strongly denied by the group.
The reports of the meeting between Blair and Meshaal come after a top-level delegation led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s special envoy, Isaac Molho, held talks in Cairo on Tuesday with Egyptian military representatives.
The visit by the five-person delegation reflects the greatly improved ties between Israel and Egypt since Sisi came to power two years ago. No details of the talks were divulged.
In May, ahead of Egypt’s presidential election, Sisi declared that his country’s peace pact with Israel was stable and offered to mediate talks between Israel and the Palestinians aimed at reaching a negotiated agreement.
The US might carry out air strikes again in Libya, but it won’t improve the conditions on the ground, says Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire and Global Research author. The US would rather allow Egypt and the UAE to carry out certain aspects of this foreign policy in Libya, he adds.
Battles between Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants and local militia are raging in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte. Fighting over the past week has left up to 200 people dead. The spike in violence comes after Libya’s rival government in Tripoli launched an operation to retake the area from Islamic State.
Now Libya’s imperialist recognized authority is asking Arab states to help them bomb the jihadists.
Watch this interview with Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, over RT worldwide satellite news network.
RT: The US is stepping up its fight against IS in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile the group has established a new capital in North Africa. Why does IS influence continue to grow and spread in the region and in Libya in particular?
Abayomi Azikiwe: In Libya there is clearly a vacuum politically from the stand point that the country has never recovered from the war of regime change in 2011. So consequently with the current regime split into at least two factions, and of course there are other interests in various regions of the country that do not cooperate. This makes it almost impossible for them to establish any type of stability inside the country.
RT: NATO bombing of Libya back in August 2011 was hailed as a model of successful intervention. We’re now seeing the country in chaos with no effective government. How did NATO intervention contribute to the rise of extremism in Libya?
AA: The Pentagon as well as NATO armed extremist organizations that served as a surrogate ground force during the war beginning in February of 2011 and extending to October of the same year, they didn’t take into consideration that these are the same interests, the same social elements, they had described as terrorist prior to the war of regime change in Libya. So by empowering extremist organizations you will only come up with a result which you have now. The Jamahiriya system under Gaddafi was destroyed as a result of the massive bombing campaign that took place between March and October of 2011 and at the same time the CIA and NATO funded, armed and coordinated the armed groups that fought against the Gaddafi government.
RT: The internationally recognized government has called on Arab League states to bomb IS positions in Sirte. How likely do you think that this request would be met?
AA: There have already been airstrikes carried out against various Islamist groups inside of Libya. They have been carried out by the Egyptian air force as well as the United Arab Emirates (UAE). So this will not be a new situation. Also Khalifa Haftar who had resided in the US for almost three decades who had been an asset of the CIA was sent back to Libya during the war of regime change in 2011 and he has of course commandeered aircraft that has also been involved in carrying out airstrikes against their political enemies. So you have Egypt, UAE as well as internal elements that are carrying out airstrikes inside the country. So this complicates the political situation in Libya. The UN recently attempted to broker a peace deal between the government recognized by the West and the other regime in Tripoli, but obviously this is proved to be too little too late.
RT: What are the chances the US will spread its fight against IS to Libya as well?
AA: This is a very interesting question because it is US foreign policy that is responsible for the instability in Libya. The probability of the US carrying out air strikes again in Libya is always there, but at the same time even if they do make this decision it will not in fact improve the conditions on the ground inside this North African state. I believe the US would rather at this point allow Egypt as well as the UAE, who have weapons and aircraft that are manufactured in the US and supplied by Washington, to carry out certain aspects of this foreign policy in Libya and throughout North Africa.
RT: Libya is one of the major oil producers in the region. Should jihadists get their hands on its oil refineries how will this affect the whole situation?
AA: I think the impact will be limited for the simple reason that oil production is way down in Libya because of the internecine conflict that’s been going there now all of this year. At the same time there is an international glut in the world petroleum market. If there is a stall in the production of Libyan oil it will have more of an impact domestically than internationally.
Have the Japanese learned their lesson? Are they decommissioning nuclear plants which are built in dangerous environments?
Of course not!
Instead, they’re re-starting a nuclear plant near a volcano which is about to blow …
A month ago, there was an eruption at Mt. Ontake:
Screenshot from Youtube Video shot on September 29th of Mount erupting. 57 hikers were killed by the explosion
But – as Newsweek reports – a nuclear plant only 40 miles away will be re-started anyway:
Local officials have voted to reopen a nuclear plant in Japan, despite warnings of increased volcanic activity in the region from scientists.
The decision comes despite a warning on Friday that Japan’s Seismological Agency had documented an increase of activity in the Ioyama volcano, located 40 miles away from the power station.
***
Sendai will become the first Japanese nuclear plant to reopen in since 2011.
However the decision comes as scientific authorities warned of increased seismic activity on the island. Volcanologists have warned that the 2011 earthquake, which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale, may have increased the likelihood of volcanic activity throughout the region. [Background.]
***
The Sendai plant is also situated only 31 miles from Mount Sakurajima, anextremely active volcano which erupts on a regular basis.
The documentation of new activity comes barely a month after the eruption of Mount Ontake, when 57 hikers were killed on its slopes. There were no accompanying signs of seismic activity prior to the eruption which might have alerted Japanese authorities to the impending disaster.
The vote has been seen as an attempt to resurrect the country’s nuclear industry, which the Japanese government hopes to restart despite public opposition to nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
***
Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) approved Sendai’s safety features in September, but the plant must still pass operational safety checks before it will be able to reopen.
A cauldron eruption at one of several volcanoes surrounding the Sendai nuclear power plant could hit the reactors and cause a nationwide disaster, said Toshitsugu Fujii, head of a government-commissioned panel on volcanic eruption prediction.
Wall St Journal, Oct. 23, 2014 (emphasis added): One major volcaniceruption could make Japan “extinct,” a study by experts at Kobe University warns… “We should be aware… It wouldn’t be a surprise if such gigantic eruption were to take place at any moment.”
Japan Times, Oct. 24, 2014: Colossal volcanic eruption could destroy Japan at any time: study — Japan could be nearly destroyed by a volcanic eruption over the next century that would put nearly all of its population of 127 million people at risk… “It is not an overstatement to say that a colossal volcanic eruption would leave Japan extinct as a country,” Kobe University earth sciences professor Yoshiyuki Tatsumi and associate professor Keiko Suzuki said… A disaster on Kyushu… would seean area with 7 million people buried by flows of lava and molten rockin just two hours [and] making nearly the entire country “unlivable”… It would be “hopeless” trying to save about 120 million…
Japan Times, Oct. 24, 2014: Volcano near Sendai nuclear plant is shaking and may erupt… Authorities warned on Friday that a volcano a few dozen kilometers from the Sendai nuclear plant…may erupt. It warned people to stay away… Ioyama [shows] signs of rising volcanic activity recently, including a tremor lasting as long asseven minutes… the Meteorological Agency’s volcano division said… [T]hearea around the crater is dangerous, he added… On Friday, the warning level for the Sakurajima volcano was at 3, which means people should not approach the peak… Experts warn [the] earthquake in March 2011 may have increased the risk of volcanic activity throughout the nation…
Japan Times, Oct 18, 2014: Sendai reactors vulnerable to eruptions[and] could cause a nationwide disaster, said Toshitsugu Fujii, University of Tokyo professor emeritus who heads a government-commissioned panel… [R]egulators ruled out a major eruption… [Fujii] said at best an eruption can be predicted only a matter of hours or days. Studies have shown that pyroclastic flow… at one of the volcanos near the Sendai plant… reached as far as 145 kilometers away, Fujii said. He said apyroclastic flow from Mount Sakurajima… could easily hit the nuclear plant, which is only 40 kilometers away. Heavy ash falling from an eruption would make it impossible to reach the plant… he said. Many nuclear power plants could be affected…
Asahi Shimbun, May 12, 2014: Now is the time to rethink the risk of operating nuclear power plants… it is the first time that Japan has seriously evaluated… the danger posed by volcanoes… Nuclear power plants…would suffer devastating damage from catastrophic eruptions…radioactive materials will continue to be scattered throughout the world…
University of Tokyo professor Toshitsugu Fujii, head of government panel on eruption prediction: “Scientifically, they’re not safe… If [reactors] still need to be restarted… it’s for political reasons, not because they’re safe, andyou should be honest about that.”
Surely, though, we’re overreacting, and things aren’t that dangerous, right?
The utility and the [Japanese] Nuclear Regulation Authority have also decided there islittle chance of a major volcanic eruption in the next several decades.
Japanese utility Kyushu Electric Power said on Monday that it was monitoring activity at a volcano near its Sendai nuclear plant, but did not need to take any special precautions after authorities warned of the risk of a larger-than-usual eruption.
***
“We are not currently taking any particular response,” Kyushu Electric spokesman Tomomitsu Sakata said by phone.
“There is no impact in particular to the operations” of the Sendai plant, Sakata said.
See … no problem!
Meanwhile, back in reality, EneNews rounds up reports of the risk:
The Independent, Aug 16, 2015 (emphasis added): Japan’s weather agency issued a warning… that the likelihood of the eruption of [Sakurajima] was extremely high… after it detected a spike in seismic activity… They have warned an evacuation of the city of just over 600,000 people may be necessary. [JMA] said: “The possibility for a large-scale eruption has become extremely high for Sakurajima.”… It comes as a nuclear reactor 50 kilometres (31 miles) away was switched back on.
Mainichi, Aug 17, 2015: On Aug. 15 alone, there were 1,023 volcanic earthquakes… the JMA has pointed out that crustal changes that indicate mountain swell as a result of a magma rise are still continuing… Kazuya Kokubo [with JMA said] “undergroundpressure hasn’t been relieved. An eruption could occur at any time.”
Asahi Shimbun, Aug 16, 2015: … the mountain [is] expanding… [officials] estimate that a large volume of magma continues to accumulate.
Reuters/Kyodo, Aug 15, 2015: The agency also said it had raised the warning level … to an unprecedented 4.
Jiji Press, Aug 17, 2015: [Japan] remained alert for signs of a major eruption… [An official] called on the public to act calmly… a major eruption could beimminent. Level 4 is the highest ever for Sakurajima… “I have lived in Sakurajima for more than 50 years but have not imagined we would have to evacuate,” said Emiko Miyashita, 80… crustal movement was also observed [and there’s] signs indicating magma has risen to near the volcanic vent… “It would be no surprise if it were to erupt at any moment,” an agency official said.
Wall St Journal, Aug 17, 2015: [Japan] remained on high alert for a major eruptionat Mount Sakurajima… Seismic activity began increasing dramatically Saturday morning and data showed swelling of the mountain, the agency said.
Asahi Shimbun, Aug 15, 2015: [JMA] said a major eruption of volcanic Mount Sakurajima could be imminent… signs of sudden crustal movement were also observed… Agency officials said there were indications a much larger eruption was in the offing.
Yomiuri Shimbun, Aug 15, 2015: A major eruption is highly likely to occur, the agency said… There is a possibility that magma has risen to the shallow part of the volcano…
***
Bloomberg, Aug 15, 2015: Volcanic rock and ash could cut off transport routes and prompt workers at Sendai to flee the nuclear site in the event of an eruption… engineering consultant John Large wrote.
The Times, Aug 11, 2015: Environmentalists complain that the company has paid insufficient attention to the effect of heavy ash fall on the plant’s machinery.
Jiji Press, Aug 12, 2015: Sendai nuclear power plant… has not designated a site for relocating nuclear fuel in the event of a massive volcanic eruption, claiming that warning signs would give Kepco enough time to prepare and transfer the fuel… In the event of a major eruption, however, pyroclastic flows could reach the plant and disable cooling functions… which could trigger massive radioactive emissions… The sheer volume [of spent fuel] makes it hard to find a relocation site big enough to take them… Toshitsugu Fujii, a member of the panel [advising the gov’t] said that the panel’s opinion is not necessarily consistent with that of the NRA.
On Sunday, the Egyptian military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Sisi introduced draconian “anti-terrorism” legislation by decree, further strengthening the repressive apparatus of one of the most bloody dictatorships in the world.
The provisions of the new law include:
* Article 1 defines “terrorism” so broadly that it can be used against everything and everyone. Paragraph 7 defines a “terrorist act” as “the use of force, violence, threats, fear” undertaken with the aim of “disturbing public order”,”harming national unity”, “damaging the environment, natural resources, monuments, public and private entities”, “obstructing the work of public institutions, local councils, diplomatic missions, and places of worship from carrying out their work whether wholly or partially” or “impeding the application of the provisions of the constitution and the laws.” It includes “any conduct … which leads to harm to the national economy”.
* Article 6 states that police officers and soldiers will go unpunished if they use force “in the performance of their duties” and to enforce the law.
* Article 26 states that anyone who spreads “terrorism” orally or in writing or “by any other means” can face a prison term of between five and seven years.
* Article 27 states that anyone who “creates a website with the aim of disseminating ideas for carrying out a terrorist act” faces “a minimum of five and a maximum of 15 years imprisonment.”
* For the formation and management of a “terrorist group”, the law provides for life imprisonment or the death penalty. Membership can be punished with up to ten years in prison.
* Under Article 33, journalists whose reporting differs from the official account of a terrorist attack face a fine of at least 200,000 Egyptian pounds (about 22,900 euros) as punishment. The maximum fine is 500,000 pounds (about 57,000 euros).
* Articles 38-41 considerably extend the powers of the judiciary and police. Under Article 38, persons can be arbitrarily arrested without charge or a court order. Article 39 limits the right of detainees to contact their families or a lawyer. Article 41 allows the law enforcement authorities to continually extend the detention of “terror suspects” without a court order.
* Article 48 provides for the establishment of special courts to implement the provisions of the law.
* Article 50 stipulates that the accused may be sentenced in absentia.
* Articles 51 and 52 sharply curtail the ability of “terror suspects” to appeal their convictions.
* Article 54 grants broad powers to the president to “take necessary measures to ensure public order and security whenever there is danger of terrorist crimes”. The president has the power to “isolate areas or evacuate them or impose a curfew to maintain public order and security”. No limits are placed on these quasi-dictatorial powers of the president.
The Egyptian regime is cynically trying to sell the new law as a response to the allegedly erroneous reporting of Islamist terrorist attacks in the country.
For example, the Minister of Justice Ahmed al-Zind said the provisions were a response to reports about the recent series of attacks in the Sinai peninsula, where the Egyptian security forces greatly exaggerated the number of victims. The media reports were “bad for the morale” of the country, Zind said. The government therefore had no choice but to introduce the new rules.
In reality, it is clear that al-Sisi wants to criminalize any opposition to his rule, while providing a pseudo-legal foundation for the methods on which his brutal dictatorship is based. Since the military coup against Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi engineered by al-Sisi in July 2013, the Egyptian security forces have killed thousands of regime opponents, arrested tens of thousands and sentenced more than a thousand political prisoners to death in expedited proceedings.
Amnesty International declared that the law returns Egypt to a dictatorship, as had existed before the overthrow of long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak. The legislation permits “extreme measures that would normally be applied only in a state of emergency,” Amnesty wrote. It provides “the president with similar powers to those enjoyed by Hosni Mubarak during his 30-year … rule.”
In fact, al-Sisi’s counterrevolutionary regime of terror goes far beyond Mubarak’s dictatorship. In a statement, Amnesty wrote that the new law “poses a particular risk for journalists, bloggers, human rights defenders and others who publish credible information legitimately.” Furthermore, it adds “new offenses to the large list of those already punishable by death under the penal code.” In addition, the security forces are granted the right to “use deadly force if they deem it necessary to implement the provisions of the law.”
In sum: Anyone in Egypt who dares even to criticize the regime can now “legally” expect to be imprisoned for life or even sentenced to death.
Despite this, the European governments and the US, who regularly play the “human rights card” to criticize unpopular regimes and to justify their imperialist depredations, have been largely silent about the new anti-terrorism law.
This silence is explained by three basic factors. First, they support al-Sisi’s regime of terror as a bulwark against a possible renewed uprising by the Egyptian workers. Second, they compete for the dictator’s favour, with the aim of defending their economic and geostrategic interests in the region. Third, the Western “democracies” themselves are increasingly turning to al-Sisi’s methods to suppress the growing domestic resistance to their unpopular policies of austerity and war.
Last week, the New York Times reported allegations that prison guards systematically tortured inmates at Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York following the high profile escape of two inmates.
More than 60 prisoners filed complaints claiming that they suffered abuse, including beatings, stranglings and death threats. Most significant, however, was the apparent personal involvement of New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in these brutal actions.
Just hours before state prison guards without name tags descended upon the cell block to torture the escapees’ fellow prisoners, Cuomo had visited the prison, asking one inmate, in the presence of the media, why he did not hear the escapees cutting through their prison bars. “[It] must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” before giving him “his best tough-guy stare,” according to the prisoner, and walking off.
Cuomo later told ABC News, “I chatted with a couple of the inmates myself and I said, you must be a very heavy sleeper. They were heard. They had to be heard.”
Within a matter of hours, the inmate Cuomo spoke to was asked by an unnamed guard, “You know what waterboarding is?” before having his head thrust into a plastic bag hanging from a pipe and being beaten for 20 minutes. Another inmate reported being hung by a plastic bag used as a noose until he passed out.
Despite these shocking revelations, not a single national news outlet has commented on the incident since Wednesday or even bothered to follow up on the story. This includes the supposed “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, whose breaking of the story amounted to a controlled, semi-official release of information.
The abuse of the prisoners is hardly an aberration. Indeed, the Clinton Dannemora prison is notorious for its treatment of those behind bars. According to one local report, in the 1990s “state officials settled a rash of nearly a dozen cases involving alleged brutality by guards against inmates.” Indeed, Cuomo himself defended the prison’s reputation for abuse in an interview last month, declaring that it was not the time “to second-guess the basic operation” at the prison: “the basic operation has been fantastic because no one has ever escaped before.”
This thinly veiled defense of abuse and torture from the governor of one of the largest states in the country has passed without comment from a single political figure, including the various candidates for president in both parties. There have been no calls for an investigation into Cuomo’s role or into the claims of the prisoners.
The cover-up expresses the fact that, for the ruling class, such practices are considered routine and necessary.
The torture in New York State follow revelations this year that police in Chicago regularly “disappeared” prisoners into a “black site” known as Homan Square, where prisoners were shackled into “stress positions” and beaten into confessing to crimes or informing on others. From New York’s Rikers Island, to Florida’s state prisons, to the overcrowded penitentiaries of Southern California, beatings by prison guards take place every day.
Meanwhile, the medieval dungeon has reappeared in America, under the Orwellian name of “solitary confinement.” Every day, more than 80,000 people languish in isolation in America’s prisons, including 17,000 children in juvenile detention centers, according to a report appearing over the weekend in the Times. It is not uncommon for prisoners to spend years and even decades in near-total isolation.
Solitary confinement is classified as a form of torture by the United Nations, with the American Civil Liberties Union reporting that 95 percent of those subjected to the barbaric practice said that it led to psychiatric symptoms, including hallucinations and panic attacks.
Yet in America, children, some as young as 14, are routinely subjected to this torture. Isolation is often enforced on prisoners who have never been convicted of a crime, as in the case of Kalief Browder, a child prisoner who killed himself this year after being released.
Karl Marx wrote in 1859 that the “legal and political superstructure” arises out of the economic structure of society. The increasing prevalence of torture, arbitrary imprisonment, the denial of habeas corpus, and rampant police brutality in the legal field expresses the brutal and exploitative character of social relations in the United States. The richest 400 families in the US have a net worth of $2.29 trillion, while close to half of the population has effectively zero or negative wealth.
The United States, moreover, has been continuously at war for at least two and a half decades. Torture has become an instrument of foreign policy abroad, in CIA detention centers and at Guantanamo Bay, and those who implemented this illegal policy have gone unpunished.
Is it any surprise then that this same president, Obama, who boasts about his role in assassinating people, including US citizens, abroad, presides over a police force armed with armored personnel carriers and machine guns? Or that the gulags run by the military and intelligence apparatus around the world have their parallel in a giant prison complex that contains more individuals than any other country in the world?
Torture, outlawed explicitly in the Constitution, has reemerged as the organic expression of social relations in the United States, in which a criminal financial oligarchy derives its enormous wealth by robbing and swindling the great mass of society, while the perpetual wars the country is engaged in are increasingly seeping into domestic legal policy.
On 5th of August 2015 the Irish Navy ship LÉ Niamh was sent to help an overcrowded vessel about 25 miles off the Libyan coast. As two rigid inflatable boats (Ribs) from the LÉ Niamh approached they signaled to the people to stay where they were so that life jackets could be given out.
However, according to Capt Dave Barry: “Whatever happened, a number rushed to one side, and it capsized and sank in a couple of minutes”.
Up to 700 people were believed to have been on board.
It is stories like these that have brought the migrant crisis directly to the doorsteps of the Irish public.
The journey to the Irish shores is far too long for these boats to appear on the Irish horizon but the daily media attention has brought about discussions relating to Irish migrant history of fleeing on ‘coffin ships’ to the U.S. in the 1840s. So many died on these hazardous journeys across the Atlantic, it was said that sharks followed the ships for the bodies thrown overboard.
Ireland’s Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald stated recently:
“It is important that Ireland join together with our partners to assist in the relocation effort and show solidarity, just as we have on refugee resettlement and in the exemplary work of the Naval Service in search and rescue in the Mediterranean.”
She also said that Ireland has agreed to accept 600 refugees, mainly from Syria and Eritrea, over the next two years.
While such numbers are very low compared to the numbers applying for asylum in Germany, for example, this does not mean that Ireland is isolating itself from international influences. According to the latest Globalization Index by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute (KOF) Ireland is the most globalized country in the world. While Ireland’s open economy and low corporation tax rates account for much of this position, the individual categories put Ireland fifth in the Social Globalization category (size of foreign population, international information flow (access to internet, TV or foreign press) or import and export of books in relation to GDP).
The ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom years (1995-2000) saw a dramatic rise in its migration rate:
“Comparing Ireland to other EU countries underlines its rapid changes. From 1990 to 1994, Ireland was the only Member State with a negative net migration rate (number of migrants per 1,000 inhabitants) according to the EU statistical agency Eurostat. By 2007, Ireland had the third highest migration rate across the 27 EU Member States — 14.5 migrants per 1,000 inhabitants — surpassed only by Spain and Cyprus.”
During that same time ‘the number of persons seeking asylum in Ireland increased dramatically from only 362 in 1994 to a peak of 11,634 in 2002, before falling off in 2003 and down to approximately 3,900 in 2008. […] Between 1992 and 2008, 9,574 non-EU nationals received refugee status. In 2007, the overall refugee recognition rate of asylum applicants at first and appeal stage was 10 percent.’
By 2014 1,444 asylum applications were received by the Department of Justice ‘compared to 946 in 2013 equating to a 53 per cent increase.’
The difficulties for asylum seekers do not end upon arrival in Ireland as ‘asylum seekers do not have the right to work in Ireland while the government is reviewing their applications. If, however, their applications are successful and they are officially recognized as refugees, they acquire full employment and social rights and can eventually naturalize.’
According to a government website, under the policy of Direct Provision, asylum seekers receive:
‘Accommodation on a full-board basis. The cost of all meals, heat, light, laundry, tv, household maintenance, etc. are paid directly by the State. Personal allowances of €19.10 per adult and €9.60 euro per child per week.’
In a major article in The Irish Times last year, entitled ‘Lives in Limbo’, it was noted that ‘many asylum seekers in the State’s direct provision system spend years in conditions which most agree are damaging to the health, welfare and life-chances of those forced to endure them.’
“The State-run Reception and Integration Agency says it ensures the basic needs of all residents are met. But the United Nations and international human rights groups have heavily criticised the system. Former Supreme Court judge Catherine McGuinness has predicted that a future government will end up publicly apologising for damage done by the direct provision system. The voices of asylum seekers are rarely heard. Many are fearful that speaking out will damage their request for refugee status.”
This does not bode well in the current crisis for the new refugees who will be thrown into a lengthy process unless steps are taken to speed up the whole system.
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist who has exhibited widely around Ireland. His work consists of paintings based on cityscapes of Dublin, Irish history and geopolitical themes (http://gaelart.net/). His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/.
Bereaved UK families who lost sons and daughters in the illegal invasion of Iraq have now threatened legal action against Sir John Chilcot who headed the near two year long, £10m Iraq Inquiry (30th July 2009 – 2nd February 2011) if a date for release of Inquiry findings is not announced publicly within two weeks. Further, suspicions over the reason for the approaching five years near silence from Sir John are raised by a detailed investigation by journalist Andrew Pierce.
Writing in the Daily Mail (1) he highlights the seemingly close relationship between Sir John Chilcot and Tony Blair.
Pierce refers to Blair’s first appearance before the Inquiry five years ago when: “the Chairman, Sir John Chilcot treated him with almost painful deference.” What few realized was that Sir John, a former career civil servant: “could, in fact, have greeted Blair as an old friend.”
They first met in 1997 when Blair was still Leader of the Opposition, at the discreet Travellers Club in Central London, founded in 1819 as: “A meeting place for gentlemen who had travelled abroad, their visitors and (for) diplomats posted in London.” It continues to host: “distinguished members of the Diplomatic Service, the Home Civil Service …”
The meeting took place just months before Blair became Prime Minister. “John Chilcot, at the time, was the most senior civil servant at the Northern Ireland Office … Civil servants often meet Opposition politicians for briefings (prior to) elections but they are usually held in Whitehall Departments where (official) minutes are taken.” A meeting at the ultra discreet Club ensured “it was not made public.”
On becoming Prime Minister (2nd May 1997) Tony Blair: “worked closely with Chilcot on the Northern Ireland peace process.”
On Chilcot’s retirement he was: “knighted by a grateful Blair … in to the fourth most senior order of British chivalry.”
However, points out Andrew Pierce, Sir John never really left Whitehall, undertaking numbers of roles on public committees: “often at the behest of the Blair administration.”
Moreover, in 2004 Lord Butler was charged with convening an Inquiry: “into the role of the (UK) intelligence services in the Iraq war. Blair chose the Members of the Inquiry’s five strong Committee.”
Foxes guarding hen houses cannot fail to come to mind: “ Surprise, surprise, Chilcot was one of the first asked to serve on it …”
Unexpectedly however, the Butler Review as it was named: “Provided devastating evidence that (Blair’s) Downing Street, with collusion of intelligence chiefs ‘sexed up’ the threat” from Saddam Hussein”, yet: “concluded that no one should be held responsible.”
“In short, it let Blair off the hook.”
When Blair’s successor as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown – former Chancellor of the Exchequer who wrote the £mega million cheques for the illegal invasion, thus also part of the crime of enormity – established the Chilcot Inquiry in 2009, it was originally to be held “behind closed doors.” Uproar from opposition MPs, from senior military figures and the public forced it in to the open.
However Philippe Sands, QC., Professor of International Law at University College, London and barrister with Matrix Chambers, a legal firm established, ironically, by Tony Blair’s barrister wife Cherie, quickly questioned the suitability of Sir John to lead the new Inquiry.
Sands questioned what it was in his: “role in the Butler Inquiry that caused the Prime Minister to conclude he was suitable?” He cited a first hand observer who had described Chilcot’s: “obvious deference to governmental authority”, a view he had: “heard repeated several times. More troubling is evidence I have seen for myself.”
He was also dismissive of Sir John’s questioning of Law Lord, Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, who had ruled that the Iraq invasion would be illegal – only to change his mind when Blair wrote on the top left hand side of the page: “I really do not understand this.”
Professor Sands – author of “Lawless World” in which he accuses former President George W. Bush and Tony Blair of conspiring to Invade Iraq in violation of international law – also cited: “Sir John’s spoon-fed questions” to the former Attorney General: “designed to elicit a response” demonstrating: “the reasonableness of his actions and those of the government.”
In context, in “Lawless World” Sands cites a five page long “extremely sensitive” memo (2) relating to a meeting between George W. Bush and Tony Blair at the White House on 31st January 2003. The memo was written by David Manning, Blair’s Chief Foreign Policy Advisor at the time, who was also present.
Content included Bush mooting the idea of painting a U-2 spy-plane in UN colours and flying it low over Iraq in the hope of Iraq reacting by shooting it down, providing a pretext for the US and UK to attack and invade.
It also confirms Bush and Blair agreeing to invade regardless of whether weapons of mass destruction were found by the UN weapons inspectors. This contradicts Blair’s statement to Parliament after his return that Iraq would be given a final chance to disarm.
Giving a further lie to Blair’s Parliamentary assurances, Bush is paraphrased as saying: “The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10th March. This was when the bombing would begin.” (See also 3.)
In an opinion which should surely be George W. Bush’s epitaph he told Blair he: “thought it unlikely there would be internecine warfare between different religious and ethnic groups” after the invasion.
In spite of the erased and ruined lives in millions, the ruins of Iraq, of much of Baghdad “the Paris of the 9th century”, of many of historical gems that have survived assaults over millennia but not Bush and Blair, it seems likely Chilcot’s Inquiry, if it eventually appears, will prove another dead end.
As Sir Christopher Meyer, former UK Ambassador to Washington pointed out: “When Downing Street set up the Inquiry in to ‘phone hacking (by) newspapers, it was a Judicial Inquiry, led by a Judge (with) powers to compel witnesses to answer all questions put to them. Chilcot does not have that power. A Judge should be running this Inquiry, not a retired civil servant.”
Prime Minister David Cameron has paid lip service to exasperation, but as commented on before in these columns, regards Blair as a “mentor” and in opposition aspired to be “heir to Blair.” He has also refused Sir John correspondence between Bush and Blair (held in government archives) which Sir John has been reported as regarding as essential to his findings. Current speculations are, unless the families of the bereaved win out, is that the world will see nothing until late 2016.
Another reason for the inordinate delay is the decision of the Inquiry to write to every witness criticized in order to allow them to respond. How very cosy. Imagine that in a Court of Law.
However, if any of the above has you wondering, there is far worse to come.
According to a recent report (4) although: “as many as one hundred and fifty (government) Ministers, civil servants and senior military figures have been sent details of criticism, including draft pages of the Report”, due to the structure of the Inquiry: “Ministers and officials accused of wrongdoing in (the) Chilcot Inquiry will never be named.”
Indeed: “One former Labour Minister is now said to be going through hundreds of pages of the report ‘with a fine toothcomb’. The ex-Minister has also been offered free legal advice from the Government.”
A £ ten million stitch-up?
Reg Keys, speaking for one of the bereaved UK families threatening action against Sir John Chilcot’s team, who ran as an against Tony Blair in his Durham constituency of Sedgefield as an Independent Parliamentary candidate in 2005, and whose son, Lance Corporal Tom Keys was killed in Iraq in 2003 has had enough. Tony Blair: “should be dragged in shackles to a War Crimes Court” he says (5.)
In a memorable speech (6) on the 2005 election night, Blair and his wife standing with frozen faces, as Keys vowed: “I’ll hold Blair to account.” Unlike Blair, Reg Keys speaks the truth.
Binyamin Netanyahu is an Israeli-born, American-educated, Likud Zionist whose charter calls for a ‘Greater Israel’ to be attained by the ethnic-cleansing of all the land of former Palestine which has been the documented home for the Muslim Arab continuously for over a millennium.
The attempt to achieve this aim is through the continuous, illegal settlement of the Occupied Territories in contempt of the will of the United Nations, the European Union and international law. This Israeli settlement now exceeds a figure in excess of 500,000 including those in Arab East Jerusalem – the Holy City that the UN has long declared to be an international entity with free access to all faiths.
This criminal endeavour continues without restriction through the influence over a compliant US Congress – the membership of which is determined by the American Israel Lobby which finances the selection and election of that important legislative assembly. It also determines the use of the US veto in any United Nations vote critical of Israel. The finance involved is alleged to emanate from gambling profits. It’s called ‘democracy American style’ wherein a pressure group with a claimed 100,000 members exerts its will over 308 million Americans throughout the Union.
The above has led to the extraordinarily invidious and dangerous position whereby a small Mediterranean state exerts its will over a compliant US House of Representatives in Washington that, in turn, exerts its will over the elected President in the White House. And that influence is now attempting to overturn the important peace initiative with Iran that has been painstakingly negotiated by the UN Security Council and the EU.
The actual status quo is so far-fetched that it would be considered too fantastic even for a ‘House of Cards’ script. But, incredibly, it’s true.
Now democratic political power must be returned to the United Nations, the only globally-elected, international authority that represents us here in Europe and around the world.
Black August month commemoration illustrates ongoing struggle against repression
A former comrade of George L. Jackson, Hugo Pinell, 71, was killed on Aug. 12 near Sacramento.
Pinell, known by many as “Yogi Bear,” had recently been released from solitary confinement after gaining recognition as the longest serving prisoner held in administrative detention in the state of California. He had written to one of his supporters saying that he feared for his life at the facility where he was held. (KPFA interview with Kiilu Nyasha on Aug. 13)
In 1965 Pinell was given a three years to life sentence for the crime of rape, in which he says he was not guilty. He and his mother were told that if he did not confess he could face the death penalty. In addition, Pinell recounted that he was told he would be out of prison within a matter of months.
Pinell was stabbed to death by another prisoner after he was recently released into the general population of the correctional facility known as New Folsom. Corporate media outlets across the United States described the circumstances surrounding his murder as a “riot.” Nonetheless, it appears from these same reports that clashes only erupted after he was brutally stabbed in the prison yard.
Five decades after being sentenced to prison he met a violent and tragic fate. His death has sent shockwaves through the ranks of veteran Black Panther Party members, supporters of political prisoners and anti-racist forces.
San Quinten Six and the Martyrdom of George L. Jackson
Pinell was a member of the San Quinten Six who were involved in the attempted prison break to liberate George Jackson on Aug. 21, 1971, where he was gunned down by guards. Six people lost their lives in that incident, including three prison guards and two white inmates.
After the rebellion at San Quinten on Aug. 21, six inmates were charged in the incident: Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Johnny Larry Spain, David Johnson, Fleeta Drumgo and Luis Talamantez.
George Jackson was already well known throughout the African American revolutionary movement and the left as a whole. His prison letters were published in a book entitled “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.” (1970)
The Soledad Brothers were three African American prisoners, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchett, charged with killing a guard at the California facility in January 1970. Several days earlier, three Black inmates had been killed by white prisoner guards snipping after a racial melee in the yard.
A subsequent grand jury investigation in Monterey County exonerated the guards in the killings of the three inmates. One of the inmates killed by the guards was W.L. Nolen who was a mentor of Jackson.
In addition, Cleveland Edwards was killed in the yard, while Alvin Miller died in the prison hospital a few hours later. White inmate Billy D. Harris was shot in the groin by the guard’s fourth shot and lost his testicles.
In a letter about the Soledad massacre, Jackson wrote that three of his fellow inmates were “murdered by a pig shooting from 30 feet above their heads with a military rifle.” The prison guards that was killed days later was said to have been thrown out of the window in the same cell block as Jackson’s. (Soledad Brother)
A national movement arose in defense of the Soledad Brothers which drew the support of Angela Davis, a Communist Party member and lecturer who had been terminated from University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1969 only because of her political beliefs.
Jackson had been sentenced to a one year to life sentence in California in 1960 for being in the company of several others who had stolen $70 from a filling station. During his tenure in prison, Jackson began to read voraciously on history, military science, philosophy and Marxist-Leninist theory.
Prison authorities attempted to break Jackson’s confidence and defiance for many years. He became a leader and mentor for other prisoners during a period when the Civil Rights, Black Power, Anti-War and Left movements were gaining tremendous ground in the U.S.
His letters reveal also his interests in world affairs and revolutionary movements aimed at national liberation and socialism. Jackson is credited, along with W.L. Nolen, in the founding of the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), a revolutionary prisoner organization in 1966.
Later Jackson and other BGF members were won over by the Black Panther Party (BPP) under Huey P. Newton. At the time of his assassination George Jackson was designated as the field marshal of the BPP.
Pinell spent decades in solitary confinement due to his refusal to compromise with the system and was the only person left from the San Quinten Six remaining in prison. All of the others charged in the Aug. 21, 1971 rebellion had been released decades earlier.
Black August Started by Political Prisoners
This attack comes during Black August, an annual commemoration of the resistance of African Americans to oppression and exploitation. Black August was created by political prisoners years ago and continues to be celebrated across the U.S.
The month-long acknowledgement of resistance fighters stems from the historical fact that many great efforts aimed at liberation took place during August.
Such historical developments include the beginning of the Haitian Revolution (1791), Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia (1831), John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry (1859), the Watts Rebellion (1965), the attempt by Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of George, to free him from prison (1970), the San Quinten Rebellion (1971), the attack on the MOVE residence in Philadelphia (1978), the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and now of course the assassination of Hugo Pinell.
The killing of Pinell illustrates even further the character of national oppression, economic exploitation and political repression against the African American people. Resistance to the inhumane conditions prevailing both outside and inside prison walls is continuing through the rebellions and mass demonstrations in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities.
African Americans are still subjected to jobless rates at least twice as high as whites. Millions are confined to low-wage employment with no economic security or social benefits.
Every week news stories are reported about African Americans being gunned down by police and vigilantes. At the same time the federal government even under a Democratic Black president has systematically refused to seriously address the mounting crises in communities across the country.
The school-to-prison pipeline is still very much in evidence in urban areas. A disproportionate number of inmates and people under judicial supervision are African Americans and Latinos from poor and working class backgrounds.
Many of those who come out of prison are faced with numerous obstacles to finding employment, housing, educational resources and the right to participate in electoral politics. Conditions within the prisons and jails are horrendous with overcrowding, food unfit for consumption, threats of violence and abuse by guards and other inmates.
There are still many political prisoners inside the U.S. despite the “human rights” posture of successive administrations. Until the system of national oppression and capitalist exploitation is overthrown there will not be any hope for ending the prison-industrial-complex.
Moreover, until the system is transformed the oppressed will continue their rebellion against it seeking its eradication. Prisoners have continued to engage in protest activities through work stoppages and hunger strikes.
The progressive and left movement in the U.S. and around the world will be compelled to escalate their efforts in support of prisoners.
Despite all the contemporary global interconnectedness, the lack of an international social consciousness among artists (whose work is linked only by its sameness and market-ready designs and styles) evokes frustration in the politically conscious critic and commentator. As Andre Vltchek wrote after a recent trip to Paris:
Galleries exhibit endless lines and squares, all imaginable shapes and colors. In several galleries, I observe abstract, Pollock-style ‘art’. I ask owners of the galleries, whether they know about some exhibitions that are concentrating on the plight of tens of thousands of homeless people who are barely surviving the harsh Parisian winter. Are there painters and photographers exposing monstrous slums under the highway and railroad bridges? And what about French military and intelligence adventures in Africa, those that are ruining millions of human lives? Are there artists who are fighting against France becoming one of the leading centers of the Empire? […] No new symphonies or operas dedicated to the victims of Papua, Kashmir, Palestine, Libya, Mali, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Iraq.[1]
Crisis? What Crisis? by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin Triptych / Oil on canvas / 60cm x 180cm / 23.6 in x 70.6 in
The difficulties of creating a socially conscious art are revealed in the comments by Jim Fitzpatrick, a contemporary Irish artist with an internationalist outlook who is well known for his iconic two-tone portrait of Che Guevara created in 1968 and which was based on a photo by Alberto Korda.[2] Fitzpatrick’s internationalist consciousness is evident in his early awareness of Che’s revolutionary activities:
I was very inspired by Che’s trip to Bolivia. He went there with the intent to overthrow the intensely corrupt government, helped by the Americans at the time, and that’s where he died. I thought he was one of the greatest men who ever lived and I still do in many ways.[3]
Fitzpatrick met Che in the Royal Marine Hotel bar in Kilkee, Co Clare, in the summer of 1961 and his description of their meeting highlights the reciprocity of international consciousness:
We talked for a few minutes once he realised that I knew who he was. His English was faltering, but he could make himself understood. The first thing he said was, ‘You know I’m Irish. My father was Guevara Lynch.’ I was taken aback by that because I didn’t know that at all.”[…] “Che read his James Joyce. When he was a young lad he began keeping a philosophical dictionary. He didn’t write or speak much about the Irish rebellion, but it’s my understanding that he was certainly aware of it, and aware of the idea of the Irish rebel, which appealed to him very much.[4]
9/11 Mystery Play by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin Triptych / Oil on canvas / 60cm x 180cm / 23.6 in x 70.6 in
Fitzpatrick’s poster of Che was published in 1968 and immediately ran into trouble:
Every shop that stocked the poster was threatened or harassed: in the very fashionable Brown Thomas of Grafton Street [Dublin], which sold cards and posters in those faraway days, a well-turned out lady bought the entire stock, tore them all to pieces in front of the astonished staff and walked out!”5]
Despite the fame and notoriety in certain quarters the poster brought him over the years, his influence over younger artists was countered by state conservatives:
Gaza Ambulance by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin Triptych / Oil on canvas / 60cm x 180cm / 23.6 in x 70.6 in
The artist himself tells the story of a conversation he had at a party many years ago with the then president of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin: “You probably don’t know this, but every year at least half the candidates for placement in the college have portfolios that show the huge influence your work has on the younger artists of this country….” “Quite right,” said Fitzpatrick, feeling slightly gratified at such a great compliment, “I had absolutely no idea; what do you do with them all?” “Oh, we just fuck them all out![6]
The difficulties of doing international political art are well described by the American artist, Leon Golub (1922 – 2004). Much of Golub’s work covered themes such as racial inequality, oppression, exclusion, and violent aggression. In one interview he stated:
I was attempting a kind of heroic/antiheroic public art. The kind of thing which is emblazoned in a big way on the walls of a culture. Take, for example, “Interrogations”- a painting that is 10 by 14 feet. Perhaps that’s not public art in the conventional sense as torture scenes are usually hidden from view and are not ordinarily celebrated on public walls. At the same time it is an ordinary fact that in many countries torture is a day-to-day reality, people are yanked off the streets, jailed, and tortured. In that sense, to put out an Interrogation is to make a public statement. Even if the statement has to stay in a studio – if you’re lucky, end up in a museum. Even a museum might be reluctant to acquire one.[7]
Golub describes his methodology:
Odessa by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin Diptych / Oil on canvas / 60cm x 120cm / 23.6 in x 47 in
I’m always on the hunt for source material. I have a huge collection of photographs as I’ve been doing this for many years. […] In the earlier works, for example, the Vietnam paintings, typically although not invariably, the figures were not projectively imagined; they’re taken from photographs, partially varied but basically whole. More recently a figure will be constructed from many source photos, partly as I want to make it my own and partly because I can be more dramatically effective. This guy who’s smiling with the flag on his chest, I don’t have a head just like his but I have a number of heads of guys smiling in somewhat similar fashion and I work it out that way.[8]
It is in the desire to create an international art that the aesthetic principles of Social Realism [witnessing/painting local people/situations] begin to break down. It is not always possible to be a witness to international events so source material has to be found using other means. Today the internet is used by many artists in the same way as journalists as a basis for research.
While Golub collected visual material from many different sources some artists work directly with people in difficult situations. Another contemporary Irish artist, Brian Maguire, produces paintings which cover many subjects from around the world. His work reveals a strong social conscience, tackling many difficult situations that do not always get the attention of the main-stream media. One project covered the deaths of thousands of women slain at the hands of drug cartels in the Mexican city of Juárez:
The killing campaign in Mexico has taken the lives of more than 1,400 young women since 1994, mainly factory girls working in maquiladoras, sweatshops of sorts, who were abducted around town. Maguire spent time with the victim’s mothers, discussing their daughter’s lives and premature deaths, before beginning to paint two portraits of each victim: one representing the young girl during her life and another, after death.[…] “You have to bring some value to the place and people, which gives you the right to work there […] For a start, I can take their story outside Mexico, and tell it to Europe…I can campaign for them by showing my paintings in museums. [9]
Making art with an international social consciousness maybe an uphill struggle for many artists but it gives the artist an important role in the struggles of many ordinary people while at the same time showing that art can be a voice for the expression of the many in the face of adversity. Furthermore, taking stories outside of their original contexts reveals to many others the similarities of distant situations, often connected by the same globalist entities.
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist who has exhibited widely around Ireland. His work consists of paintings based on cityscapes of Dublin, Irish history and geopolitical themes (http://gaelart.net/). His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/.
In his book ‘Altered Genes,Twisted Truths’, US public interest attorney Steven Druker exposed the fraudulent practices and deceptions that led to the commercialisation of GM food and crops in the US. Not long after the book’s release, he wrote an open letter to the Royal Society in Britain calling on it to acknowledge and correct the misleading and exaggerated statements that it has used to actively promote GMOs and in effect convey false impressions and the other to Monsanto. He followed this up by delivering a challenge to Monsanto’s headquarters on May 20, 2015 calling on the company to address the evidence presented in the book.
The fully referenced book exposes the substantial risks of genetically engineered foods and the multiple misrepresentations conveyed by scientists and official bodies that have allowed them to permeate world markets. Druker has given Monsanto a chance to publicly critique his claims and argues that if the company cannot prove that his book is essentially erroneous, the world will have a right to regard these controversial foods as unacceptably risky – and to promptly ban them.
‘Altered Genes, Twisted Truth’ is the result of more than 15 years of intensive research and investigation by Druker, who initiated a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on GM foods. The book indicates that the commercialisation of GM food in the US was based on a massive fraud. The FDA files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 but only because the FDA covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers, lied about the facts and then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing.
If the FDA had heeded its own experts’ advice and publicly acknowledged their warnings that GM foods entailed higher risks than their conventional counterparts, Druker says that the GM food venture would have imploded and never gained traction anywhere.
He also argues that that many well-placed scientists have repeatedly issued misleading statements about GM foods, and so have leading scientific institutions such as the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the UK’s Royal Society.
Druker states that contrary to the claims of biotech advocates, humans have indeed been harmed by consuming the output of genetic engineering. He also explains that laboratory animals have also suffered from eating products of genetic engineering, and well-conducted tests with GM crops have yielded many troubling results, including intestinal abnormalities, liver disturbances, and impaired immune systems.
Druker says:
Contrary to the assertions of its proponents, the massive enterprise to reconfigure the genetic core of the world’s food supply is not based on sound science but on the systematic subversion of science – and it would collapse if subjected to an open airing of the facts.
In his open letter to Monsanto, dated 19 May, Druker challenged Monsanto Chief Technology Officer, Robb Fraley, to:
Face Up to the Extensive Evidence Demonstrating that Genetically Engineered Foods Entail Unacceptable Risks and Should Be Promptly Removed from the Market.
Druker finishes his letter by saying:
If by July 20th you and your allies have not been able to refute the essential factual accuracy of Altered Genes, Twisted Truth according to the terms set forth above, the world will have a right to assume that it is as sound as the experts who reviewed it have affirmed – and to conclude that GE foods are unacceptably risky and must be banned.
In his letter to the Royal Society, Druker provides specific instances where its members have at various times made false statements and the institutes actions were not objective or based on scientific reasoning but seemingly were little more than biased and stridently pro-GMO. He argued that the Royal Society has misrepresented the case for GMOs and has effectively engaged in a campaign of disinformation.
The Royal Society acts as a scientific advisor to the British government. It disseminates scientific advances through its journals. It also promotes science information and communication with the public. The Royal Society is a prestigious institution that feeds into policy formulation processes at national level in the UK.
By the mid-1990’s, Druker notes that the Royal Society had become a partisan defender of GM foods and embraced a proactive policy on their behalf. In pursuing this proactive policy, he argues that several individuals holding prominent positions within the society – and even the society itself – have issued misleading statements in regard to GM foods that have created significant confusion and illegitimately downplayed their risks. He then goes on to document specific instances of occasions when this occurred.
Certain claims made in favour of GMOs were not supported by solid scientific evidence, neither did they clearly represent a consensus within the scientific community. However, Druker notes that the society’s most deplorable actions in defence of GM foods were directed at the research on GM potatoes conducted at the Rowett Institute under the direction of Dr. Arpad Pusztai. That research study is still one of the most rigorous yet performed on a GM food. It continues to be highly relevant because it controlled for the effects of the new foreign protein – which entails that the adverse results it registered were attributable to a broader feature of the genetic engineering process itself.
Druker then goes on to present seven specific instances of the Society’s offenses against that particular piece of research, including what could be described as a PR campaign mounted against Pusztai and his study. Even the editor of the respected journal The Lancet published an editorial rebuking the Society for a “gesture of breath-taking impertinence to the Rowett Institute scientists…”
Druker states that having unfairly attacked the research, the Society then strove to prevent it from being published. Even after the research was published (in The Lancet in October 1999), the Society continued to unjustly malign it.
He called on the Society to clear up the confusion caused by the misleading statements it has made to promote GM food and issue a formal statement acknowledging the following.
A. That there is not now nor never has been a consensus within the scientific community that GM foods are safe, that many well-credentialed experts do not regard their safety as having been established, and that a substantial number think that the research as a whole casts the safety of many of them in doubt.
B. That neither you nor any other scientific body has directly confronted and refuted the cautionary reasoning in the 2001 report issued by the Royal Society of Canada (which it has never retracted or revised) – and that this report stands as one of the compelling testaments that there is not a scientific consensus that GM foods are safe.
C. That the process of creating new varieties of food crops via genetic engineering is not more precise and predictable than conventional breeding in regard to food safety and instead entails a greater likelihood of unintended effects that could directly impact consumer health.
D. That although there are known instances in which genetic engineering has induced the production of a novel toxin or allergen, there are none in which conventional breeding has done so.
E. That Dr. Pusztai’s research was properly peer-reviewed and gained publication in The Lancet based on its merits, with five out of six referees voting in favor – and that, contrary to claims that the Society and other proponents of GM foods have advanced, the research has never been refuted or in any way discredited by subsequent studies – which entails that it is still relevant today.
F. Your statement should also contain a formal apology to Dr. Pusztai and his colleagues for the irresponsible manner in which the Society and several of its members have besmirched their reputations and derided the integrity of their research.
Druker continued by stating:
Unless you promptly take these steps, it will demonstrate that your commitment to promoting GM foods is stronger than your commitment to honoring the truth and upholding the integrity of science.
According to Druker, it is time The Royal Society confronted the facts about GM foods and set the record straight. He also challenged it to find factual or logical inaccuracies in his book. He finished his letter by stating:
If you have not done so by 20 April 2015, the world will have a right to assume that it [his book] is as sound as the experts who reviewed it have affirmed – and that GM foods are therefore unacceptably risky and must be banned.
And the response from Monsanto and the Royal Society?
Silence!
As the preeminent scientific body within the UK that advises the government, the Royal Society has an obligation to the British public to provide a public response and “put the record straight” on GMOs, not least because the current staunchly pro-GMO Cameron-led administration will likely sanction the planting of GM crops in England within the next couple of years and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal could open the floodgates to GM foods appearing on the shelves of UK supermarkets.
The purpose of The Royal Society is according to its website to “recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.”
The Royal Society’s record on GMOs has been shameful (as a prominent public body in the UK, it is certainly not alone in this respect). Given what is at stake, its silence towards the issues raised by Steven Druker is little better.
As for Monsanto, perhaps it too, like the RS, hopes that by ignoring Druker, he and his book will quickly fade from public memory.
Or perhaps the company is just too preoccupied with fighting lawsuits, trying to influence legislation by pouring money into campaigns, attacking critics, infiltrating public bodies, pouring more money into its PR spin machine, funding ‘travel expenses’ for pro-GM scientists, lobbying the EU to try to get GMOs into Europe, mounting a campaign against WHO-associated scientists, fighting a rear-guard action in Argentina, managing its profits courtesy of the massive subsidies given to US farmers, working with the Gates Foundation to uproot indigenous agriculture in Africa or cementing its grip in Ukraine on the back of the US-led coup there.
As you can see from this somewhat shortened list, its workload is huge. However, you will not see any of that listed under any ‘who we are’ section of its website or a listed under any ‘what we do’ explanation.
Monsanto is a very busy company. But it seems some things are best ignored rather than addressed. Or perhaps it was always the case that it was simply not up to the challenge laid down by Steven Druker. It’s something many have suspected all along.
“Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions,” said Noam Chomsky. Much like Nobel Peace-prize winner Barack Obama 30 years later, Carter was an advocate of human rights in the abstract, but of repression and imposition of power through violence in practice.
Like the current occupant of the White House, Jimmy Carter entered office with a promise to respect human rights, but failed miserably when given the opportunity to do so.
Carter just last month published a memoir about his “Full Life.” Others have begun to look back at his four years as President. David Macaray, writing in CounterPunch on 8/14/15, noted that despite his reputation as a President so hapless his fellow Democrats tried to knock him off in a primary, “a closer look shows that Carter accomplished some fairly important things during his single term in office – things that, given the near-paralytic gridlock that defines today’s politics, seem all the more impressive in hindsight.”
Macaray lists 10 accomplishments which were, indeed, impressive. Among them were supporting SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitations Talks); brokering the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty through diplomacy at the Camp David Accords; granting amnesty to Vietnam draft-dodgers, and presenting a plan for universal health care.
However, the self-professed advocate for human rights demonstrated quite the penchant for bloodshed. While he didn’t initiate any aggressive invasions of foreign nations the way his predecessors and successors did in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries, Carter proved remarkably generous at providing financial, military, diplomatic and ideological support for fascist dictatorships that tortured and killed millions of members of their domestic populations in an effort to crush popular movements for social justice. Some of the regimes he backed carried out mass slaughter that amounted to genocide.
Below are some of Carter’s most shameful and indefensible foreign policy positions that caused monumental levels of death, destruction and suffering for poor, socially disenfranchised people from Asia to Latin America to Africa.
1. Zaire, 1977
After the CIA-sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, Mobutu Sese Seko ruled as dictator for 16 years – changing the name of the Congo in 1971 to Zaire. In early 1977, rebels fighting with the revolutionary MPLA popular movement in Angola re-entered Zaire to resume their civil war and oust the military strongman. Mobutu sought help from his American and European allies to crush the movement.
William Blum writes in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II that Carter, who had been in office for only two months, was reluctant to involve his administration in a far-reaching intervention whose scope and length could not be easily anticipated.
However, Carter did provide “non-lethal” aid, while he did not protest as European countries offered military aid, and Morocco sent several thousand of its US-trained military forces to aid Mobutu.
“President Carter asserted on more than one occasion that the Zaire crisis was an African problem, best solved by Africans, yet he apparently saw no contradiction to this thesis in his own policy, nor did he offer any criticism of France or Belgium, or of China, which sent Mobutu a substantial amount of military equipment,” writes Blum. [1]
2. Guatemala, 1977
The Carter administration issued a report critical of the human rights records of the military government and officially cut off aid. However, Blum argues that this was little more than a public relations stunt while tangible support continued: “the embargoes were never meant to be more than partial, and Guatemala also received weapons and military equipment from Israel, at least part of which was covertly underwritten by Washington. As further camouflage, some of the training of Guatemala’s security forces was reportedly maintained by transferring it to clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.” [2]
Meanwhile, the horrors of a genocidal campaign against the indigenous population continued unabated on Carter’s watch. Death squads were eliminating peasants, labor leaders, human rights activists and clergy. In the countryside, the military would torture and burn alive “subversives,” such as Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú’s own brother.
3. East Timor, 1977
After the democratically-elected President Sukarno of Indonesia was overthrown with the assistance of the CIA in 1967, mass-murderer Suharto assumed power as military dictator and a strong ally of the US government.
In late 1975, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford gave the green light to Suharto to invade neighboring East Timor. After occupying the capital city Dili, Indonesian troops systematically rooted out resistance by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN) and the civilian population across the island. Residents of occupied areas were subjected to massive re-education brainwashing campaigns. The death toll from violence by Indonesian forces, malnutrition and disease quickly climbed into the tens of thousands.
The genocidal slaughter reached its peak in 1977, On March 1, 95 members of the Australian Parliament sent a letter to Carter claiming the Indonesian troops were carrying out “atrocities” and asking the American President “to comment publicly on the situation in East Timor.” [3]
The response was crickets. Carter ramped up aid with funding and weapons to the murderous Indonesian regime, brazenly flaunting the human rights requirements imposed on American aid.
As journalist Richard Dudman reported at the time: “amid all the talks about human rights, the country with perhaps the worst record has been getting increased amounts of economic and military aid from the Carter administration,” which is attributed to the “bonanza enjoyed by American oil companies and multi-national corporations since the present military regime came to power.” [4]
Precise statistics on the death toll of East Timorese at the hands of the Indonesian forces – who enjoyed the unconditional support of the US government – are hard to come by, but FAIR noted in a 1994 article that “by the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.”
4. Angola, 1978
In 1978, the South African Defence Forces (SADF) carried out a massacre against a refugee camp in Cassinga, Angola. SADF bombers dropped bombs over sovereign Angolan territory that killed more than 600 Namibians.
When details of the attack came to light, the U.S. made sure that the racist regime would not face sanctions in the UN Security Council.
Carter took the excuses of the apartheid government at face value: “They’ve claimed to have withdrawn and have not left any South African troops in Angola. So we hope it’s just a transient strike in retaliation, and we hope it’s all over.”
Granting the racist South Africans a blanket diplomatic shield at the UN and allowing them free reign to terrorize their neighboring Southwest African countries at will, while subjecting their own domestic population to the crime against humanity of apartheid, would prolong the suffering of millions of Africans for another 15 years.
Meanwhile, Carter and his administration would continue demanding the immediate exit of the Cuban military from Angola. As many as 30,000 Cuban troops had been stationed in Angola since 1975 to prevent South Africa from toppling the nascent revolutionary MPLA government and installing a puppet regime that, according to historian Piero Gleijeses, “would be the centerpiece of the Constellation of Southern African States that [South Africa] sought to create.” The constellation would be “anticommunist, tolerant of apartheid, and eager to persecute [Nelson Mandela’s] ANC and [Namibian liberation movement] SWAPO.” [5]
5. Afghanistan, 1979
When the Communist government came to power in 1978, they brought health care and education to a wide segment of the Afghan population. In cities such as Kabul, women enjoyed significant freedom. But this state of affairs was impermissible to the U.S. government, who sought to empower a local opposition and recruit foreign fundamentalist jihadists to join the struggle to topple the Communist regime.
“US foreign service officers had been meeting with Moujahedeen leaders to determine their needs at least as early as April 1979,” writes Blum. “And in July, President Carter had signed a ‘finding’ to aid the rebels covertly, which led to the United States providing them with cash, weapons, equipment and supplies, and engaging in propaganda and other psychological operations in Afghanistan on their behalf.” [6]
Blum says that intervention by the US and other countries worried Russia about what kind of government would end up on their borders. The Russians, Blum writes, “consistently cited these ‘aggressive imperialist forces’ to rationalize their own intervention in Afghanistan, which was the first time Soviet ground troops had engaged in military action anywhere in the world outside its post-World War II Eastern European borders.” [7]
Soviet troops would enter Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. By the time they left in disgrace ten years later, the country was largely reduced to rubble. The devastation was so severe that the Taliban, who managed to displace the barbaric Moujahedeen, were seen by many as liberators.
It would be another 22 years before the U.S. experienced blowback on its home soil, when one of the “Anti-Soviet warriors” they had courted and helped train from Saudi Arabia would mastermind a plot to turn civilian airliners into missiles that were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
6. El Salvador, 1980
On February 19, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, hugely popular among Salvadorans for his embrace of liberation theology, which sought to improve the socioeconomic conditions of oppressed people, sent a letter to Jimmy Carter that is worth quoting at length:
In the last few days news has appeared in the national press that worries me greatly: according to the reports your government is studying the possibility of economic and military support and assistance to the present junta government.
Because you are a Christian and because you have shown that you want to defend human rights I venture to set forth for you my pastoral point of view concerning this news and to make a request.
I am very worried by the news that the government of the United States is studying a form of abetting the arming of El Salvador by sending military teams and advisors to ‘train three Salvadoran batallions in logistics, communications, and intelligence.’ If this information is correct, the contribution of your government instead of promoting greater justice and peace in El Salvador will without doubt sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people which repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their most fundamental human rights.
Romero went on to say that the junta had “reverted to repressive violence producing a total of deaths and injuries much greater than in the recent military regimes whose systematic violation of human rights was denounced by the International Committee on Human Rights.”
“I hope that your religious sentiments and your feelings for the defense of human rights will move you to accept my petition, avoiding by this action worse bloodshed in this suffering country,” Romero pleaded.
Romero’s letter to the President went unanswered. Nine days later, the Archbishop was gunned down at the altar by a death squad assassin while holding the Eucharist above his head. At his funeral, snipers opened fire on defenseless mourners, killing at least 30 people.
Carter responded by sending $5 million in aid to the junta. They would use it to escalate their bloody counterinsurgency campaign. Fueled by American money and arms, the Civil War in El Salvador would rage on for another 12 years. It would reach its horrific culmination with massacre of six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter in 1989.
Post-Presidency and Legacy
It should be noted that Carter’s actions after leaving the White House have been, by far, the most impressive of any ex-President. Most importantly, he was the first mainstream political figure to call Israel’s policies in the occupied territories Apartheid. This major paradigm shift has paved the way for the mainstream legitimacy of international Palestinian solidarity movements such as BDS to challenge the state of Israel’s crimes.
His Carter Center also has done extensive work studying voting systems and certifying the validity of electoral processes. In 2013, Carter debunked Secretary of State John Kerry’s description of the Venezuelan election of Nicolas Maduro as questionable by stating that that the voting was “free and fair.” This was an strong counterweight to American state propaganda, which sought to empower the losing Venezuelan opposition by refusing to grant legitimacy to the socialist, democratically-elected government.
But Carter’s post-Presidency activism cannot bring back to life the millions of people whose lives he was complicit in extinguishing. Carter leaves behind a blood-soaked legacy strongly at odds with the view he evidently held of himself as a human rights champion. The fact that he is probably the least violent of American Presidents is as much an indictment of the American public – among whom he is still perceived as a pacifist – as it is on his murderous presidential peers.
Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.
Notes
[1] Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II – Updated Through 2003. Common Courage Press, 2008. Kindle edition.
[2] Ibid.
[3] as quoted in Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman. The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume 1. Boston: South End Press, 1979, pg. 171
[4] Ibid, pg. 173
[5] Gleijeses, Piero. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991. The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Kindle edition.
[6] Blum, op. cit.
[7] Blum, op. cit.
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Comments Off on Jimmy Carter’s Legacy. Human Rights in the Abstract versus “Shameful and Indefensible Foreign Policy Positions”
“Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions,” said Noam Chomsky. Much like Nobel Peace-prize winner Barack Obama 30 years later, Carter was an advocate of human rights in the abstract, but of repression and imposition of power through violence in practice.
Like the current occupant of the White House, Jimmy Carter entered office with a promise to respect human rights, but failed miserably when given the opportunity to do so.
Carter just last month published a memoir about his “Full Life.” Others have begun to look back at his four years as President. David Macaray, writing in CounterPunch on 8/14/15, noted that despite his reputation as a President so hapless his fellow Democrats tried to knock him off in a primary, “a closer look shows that Carter accomplished some fairly important things during his single term in office – things that, given the near-paralytic gridlock that defines today’s politics, seem all the more impressive in hindsight.”
Macaray lists 10 accomplishments which were, indeed, impressive. Among them were supporting SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitations Talks); brokering the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty through diplomacy at the Camp David Accords; granting amnesty to Vietnam draft-dodgers, and presenting a plan for universal health care.
However, the self-professed advocate for human rights demonstrated quite the penchant for bloodshed. While he didn’t initiate any aggressive invasions of foreign nations the way his predecessors and successors did in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries, Carter proved remarkably generous at providing financial, military, diplomatic and ideological support for fascist dictatorships that tortured and killed millions of members of their domestic populations in an effort to crush popular movements for social justice. Some of the regimes he backed carried out mass slaughter that amounted to genocide.
Below are some of Carter’s most shameful and indefensible foreign policy positions that caused monumental levels of death, destruction and suffering for poor, socially disenfranchised people from Asia to Latin America to Africa.
1. Zaire, 1977
After the CIA-sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, Mobutu Sese Seko ruled as dictator for 16 years – changing the name of the Congo in 1971 to Zaire. In early 1977, rebels fighting with the revolutionary MPLA popular movement in Angola re-entered Zaire to resume their civil war and oust the military strongman. Mobutu sought help from his American and European allies to crush the movement.
William Blum writes in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II that Carter, who had been in office for only two months, was reluctant to involve his administration in a far-reaching intervention whose scope and length could not be easily anticipated.
However, Carter did provide “non-lethal” aid, while he did not protest as European countries offered military aid, and Morocco sent several thousand of its US-trained military forces to aid Mobutu.
“President Carter asserted on more than one occasion that the Zaire crisis was an African problem, best solved by Africans, yet he apparently saw no contradiction to this thesis in his own policy, nor did he offer any criticism of France or Belgium, or of China, which sent Mobutu a substantial amount of military equipment,” writes Blum. [1]
2. Guatemala, 1977
The Carter administration issued a report critical of the human rights records of the military government and officially cut off aid. However, Blum argues that this was little more than a public relations stunt while tangible support continued: “the embargoes were never meant to be more than partial, and Guatemala also received weapons and military equipment from Israel, at least part of which was covertly underwritten by Washington. As further camouflage, some of the training of Guatemala’s security forces was reportedly maintained by transferring it to clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.” [2]
Meanwhile, the horrors of a genocidal campaign against the indigenous population continued unabated on Carter’s watch. Death squads were eliminating peasants, labor leaders, human rights activists and clergy. In the countryside, the military would torture and burn alive “subversives,” such as Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú’s own brother.
3. East Timor, 1977
After the democratically-elected President Sukarno of Indonesia was overthrown with the assistance of the CIA in 1967, mass-murderer Suharto assumed power as military dictator and a strong ally of the US government.
In late 1975, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford gave the green light to Suharto to invade neighboring East Timor. After occupying the capital city Dili, Indonesian troops systematically rooted out resistance by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN) and the civilian population across the island. Residents of occupied areas were subjected to massive re-education brainwashing campaigns. The death toll from violence by Indonesian forces, malnutrition and disease quickly climbed into the tens of thousands.
The genocidal slaughter reached its peak in 1977, On March 1, 95 members of the Australian Parliament sent a letter to Carter claiming the Indonesian troops were carrying out “atrocities” and asking the American President “to comment publicly on the situation in East Timor.” [3]
The response was crickets. Carter ramped up aid with funding and weapons to the murderous Indonesian regime, brazenly flaunting the human rights requirements imposed on American aid.
As journalist Richard Dudman reported at the time: “amid all the talks about human rights, the country with perhaps the worst record has been getting increased amounts of economic and military aid from the Carter administration,” which is attributed to the “bonanza enjoyed by American oil companies and multi-national corporations since the present military regime came to power.” [4]
Precise statistics on the death toll of East Timorese at the hands of the Indonesian forces – who enjoyed the unconditional support of the US government – are hard to come by, but FAIR noted in a 1994 article that “by the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.”
4. Angola, 1978
In 1978, the South African Defence Forces (SADF) carried out a massacre against a refugee camp in Cassinga, Angola. SADF bombers dropped bombs over sovereign Angolan territory that killed more than 600 Namibians.
When details of the attack came to light, the U.S. made sure that the racist regime would not face sanctions in the UN Security Council.
Carter took the excuses of the apartheid government at face value: “They’ve claimed to have withdrawn and have not left any South African troops in Angola. So we hope it’s just a transient strike in retaliation, and we hope it’s all over.”
Granting the racist South Africans a blanket diplomatic shield at the UN and allowing them free reign to terrorize their neighboring Southwest African countries at will, while subjecting their own domestic population to the crime against humanity of apartheid, would prolong the suffering of millions of Africans for another 15 years.
Meanwhile, Carter and his administration would continue demanding the immediate exit of the Cuban military from Angola. As many as 30,000 Cuban troops had been stationed in Angola since 1975 to prevent South Africa from toppling the nascent revolutionary MPLA government and installing a puppet regime that, according to historian Piero Gleijeses, “would be the centerpiece of the Constellation of Southern African States that [South Africa] sought to create.” The constellation would be “anticommunist, tolerant of apartheid, and eager to persecute [Nelson Mandela’s] ANC and [Namibian liberation movement] SWAPO.” [5]
5. Afghanistan, 1979
When the Communist government came to power in 1978, they brought health care and education to a wide segment of the Afghan population. In cities such as Kabul, women enjoyed significant freedom. But this state of affairs was impermissible to the U.S. government, who sought to empower a local opposition and recruit foreign fundamentalist jihadists to join the struggle to topple the Communist regime.
“US foreign service officers had been meeting with Moujahedeen leaders to determine their needs at least as early as April 1979,” writes Blum. “And in July, President Carter had signed a ‘finding’ to aid the rebels covertly, which led to the United States providing them with cash, weapons, equipment and supplies, and engaging in propaganda and other psychological operations in Afghanistan on their behalf.” [6]
Blum says that intervention by the US and other countries worried Russia about what kind of government would end up on their borders. The Russians, Blum writes, “consistently cited these ‘aggressive imperialist forces’ to rationalize their own intervention in Afghanistan, which was the first time Soviet ground troops had engaged in military action anywhere in the world outside its post-World War II Eastern European borders.” [7]
Soviet troops would enter Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. By the time they left in disgrace ten years later, the country was largely reduced to rubble. The devastation was so severe that the Taliban, who managed to displace the barbaric Moujahedeen, were seen by many as liberators.
It would be another 22 years before the U.S. experienced blowback on its home soil, when one of the “Anti-Soviet warriors” they had courted and helped train from Saudi Arabia would mastermind a plot to turn civilian airliners into missiles that were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
6. El Salvador, 1980
On February 19, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, hugely popular among Salvadorans for his embrace of liberation theology, which sought to improve the socioeconomic conditions of oppressed people, sent a letter to Jimmy Carter that is worth quoting at length:
In the last few days news has appeared in the national press that worries me greatly: according to the reports your government is studying the possibility of economic and military support and assistance to the present junta government.
Because you are a Christian and because you have shown that you want to defend human rights I venture to set forth for you my pastoral point of view concerning this news and to make a request.
I am very worried by the news that the government of the United States is studying a form of abetting the arming of El Salvador by sending military teams and advisors to ‘train three Salvadoran batallions in logistics, communications, and intelligence.’ If this information is correct, the contribution of your government instead of promoting greater justice and peace in El Salvador will without doubt sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people which repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their most fundamental human rights.
Romero went on to say that the junta had “reverted to repressive violence producing a total of deaths and injuries much greater than in the recent military regimes whose systematic violation of human rights was denounced by the International Committee on Human Rights.”
“I hope that your religious sentiments and your feelings for the defense of human rights will move you to accept my petition, avoiding by this action worse bloodshed in this suffering country,” Romero pleaded.
Romero’s letter to the President went unanswered. Nine days later, the Archbishop was gunned down at the altar by a death squad assassin while holding the Eucharist above his head. At his funeral, snipers opened fire on defenseless mourners, killing at least 30 people.
Carter responded by sending $5 million in aid to the junta. They would use it to escalate their bloody counterinsurgency campaign. Fueled by American money and arms, the Civil War in El Salvador would rage on for another 12 years. It would reach its horrific culmination with massacre of six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter in 1989.
Post-Presidency and Legacy
It should be noted that Carter’s actions after leaving the White House have been, by far, the most impressive of any ex-President. Most importantly, he was the first mainstream political figure to call Israel’s policies in the occupied territories Apartheid. This major paradigm shift has paved the way for the mainstream legitimacy of international Palestinian solidarity movements such as BDS to challenge the state of Israel’s crimes.
His Carter Center also has done extensive work studying voting systems and certifying the validity of electoral processes. In 2013, Carter debunked Secretary of State John Kerry’s description of the Venezuelan election of Nicolas Maduro as questionable by stating that that the voting was “free and fair.” This was an strong counterweight to American state propaganda, which sought to empower the losing Venezuelan opposition by refusing to grant legitimacy to the socialist, democratically-elected government.
But Carter’s post-Presidency activism cannot bring back to life the millions of people whose lives he was complicit in extinguishing. Carter leaves behind a blood-soaked legacy strongly at odds with the view he evidently held of himself as a human rights champion. The fact that he is probably the least violent of American Presidents is as much an indictment of the American public – among whom he is still perceived as a pacifist – as it is on his murderous presidential peers.
Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.
References
[1] Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II – Updated Through 2003. Common Courage Press, 2008. Kindle edition.
[2] Ibid.
[3] as quoted in Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman. The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume 1. Boston: South End Press, 1979, pg. 171
[4] Ibid, pg. 173
[5] Gleijeses, Piero. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991. The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Kindle edition.
I have been contacted by attorney John Remington Graham, a member in good standing of the Minnesota bar. He informs me that acting in behalf of Maret Tsanaeva, the aunt of the accused Tsamaev brothers and a citizen of the Kyrgyz Republic where she is qualified to practice law, he has assisted her in filing with the US District Court in Boston a pro se motion, including an argument of amicus curiae, and an affidavit of Maret Tsarnaeva. The presiding judge has ordered that these documents be included in the formal record of the case so they will be publicly accessible. The documents are reproduced below.
The documents argue that on the basis of the evidence provided by the FBI, there is no basis for the indictment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The FBI’s evidence clearly concludes that the bomb was in a black knapsack, but the photographs used to establish Dzhokhar’s presence at the marathon show him with a white knapsack. Moreover, the knapsack lacks the heavy bulging appearance that a knapsack containing a bomb would have.
As readers know, I have been suspicious of the Boston Marathon Bombing from the beginning. It seems obvious that both Tsamaev brothers were intended to be killed in the alleged firefight with police, like the alleged perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo affair in Paris. Convenient deaths in firefights are accepted as indications of guilt and solve the problem of trying innocent patsies.
In Dzhokhar’s case, his guilt was established not by evidence but by accusations, by the betrayal of his government-appointed public defender Judy Clarke who declared Dzhokhar’s guilt in her opening statement of her “defense,” by an alleged confession, evidence of which was never provided, written by Dzhokhar on a boat under which the badly wounded youth lay dying until discovered by the boat owner and hospitalized in critical condition. Following his conviction by his defense attorney, Dzhokhar allegedly confessed again in jihadist terms. As legal scholars have known for centuries, confessions are worthless as indicators of guilt.
Dzhokhar was not convicted on the basis of evidence.
In my questioning of John Remington Graham, I concluded that despite 48 years of active experience with criminal justice, both as a prosecuting attorney and defense attorney, he was shocked to his core by the legal malfeasance of the Tsarnaev case. As Graham is nearing the end of his career, he is willing to speak out, but he could not find a single attorney in the state of Massachusetts who would sponsor his appearance before the Federal District Court in Boston.
This tells me that fear of retribution has now extended its reach into the justice (sic) system and that the America that we knew where law was a shield of the people no longer exists.
Here is the Affidavit of Maret Tsarnaeva:
AFFIDAVIT OF MARET TSARNAEVA CONCERNING THE PROSECUTION OF DZHOKHAR TSARNAEV
Mindful that this affidavit may be filed or displayed as an offer of proof with her authorization in public proceedings contemplated by the laws of the United States of America, and in reliance upon Title 28 of the United States Code, Section 1746, Maret Tsarnaeva deposes and says:
I am the paternal aunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who has been prosecuted before the United States District Court for Massachusetts upon indictment of a federal grand jury returned on June 27, 2013, for causing one of two explosions on Boylston Street in Boston on April 15, 2013. In the count for conspiracy, certain other overt acts of wrongdoing are mentioned. As I understand the indictment, if Dzhokhar did not carry and detonate an improvised explosive device or pressure-cooker bomb as alleged, all thirty counts fail, although perhaps some lingering questions, about which I offer no comment here, might remain for resolution, subject to guarantees of due process of law, within the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I am currently living in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya which is a republic within the Russian Federation. My academic training included full-time studies in a five-year program of the Law Faculty at the Kyrgyz State University, and I also hold the degree of master of laws (LL. M.), with focus on securities laws, granted by the University of Manitoba while I lived in Canada. I am qualified to practice law in Kyrgyzstan. I am fluent in Russian, Chechen, and English, and am familiar with other languages. I am prepared to testify under oath in public proceedings in the United States, if my expenses are paid, and if my personal safety and right of return to my home in Chechnya are adequately assured in advance.
Aside from other anomalies and other aspects of the case on which I make no comment here, I am aware of several photo exhibits, upon which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) relied, or of evidence which their crime laboratory has produced, and certain other reports or material. Together, these plainly show that Dzhokhar was not carrying a large, nylon, black backpack, including a white-rectangle marking at the top, and containing a heavy pressure- cooker bomb, shortly before explosions in Boston on April 15, 2013, as claimed by the FBI and as alleged in the indictment for both explosions. On the contrary, these photo exhibits show unmistakably that Dzhokhar was carrying over his right shoulder a primarily white backpack which was light in weight, and was not bulging or sagging as would have been evident if it contained a heavy pressure-cooker bomb. The only reasonable conclusion is that Dzhokhar was not responsible for either of the explosions in question.
On or about June 20-21, 2013, during their first trip to Russia, which lasted about ten days more or less, Judy Clarke and William Fick, lawyers from the federal public defender’s office in Boston, visited my brother Anzor Tsarnaev, and his wife Zubeidat, respectively the father and mother of Dzhokhar. The meeting was at the home of Dzhokhar’s parents in Makhachka which is in the republic of Dagestan adjacent to the republic of Chechnya, and about three hours’ drive from Grozny. My mother, my sister Malkan, and I were present at this meeting. Zubeidat speaks acceptable English. Mr. Fick is fluent in Russian.
Laying aside other details of the conversation on June 20-21, 2013, I wish to note the following:
— The lawyers from Boston strongly advised that Anzor and Zubeidat refrain from saying in public that Dzhokhar and his brother Tamerlan were not guilty. They warned that, if their advice were not followed, Dzhokhar’s life in custody near Boston would be more difficult;
— Mme Clarke and Mr. Fick also requested of Anzor and Zubeidat that they assist in influencing Dzhokhar to accept the legal representation of the federal public defender’s office in Boston. Mr. Fick revealed that Dzhokhar was refusing the services of the federal public defender’s office in Boston, and sending lawyers and staff away when they visited him in custody. In reaction to the suggestion of Mr. Fick, lively discussion followed;
— As Dzhokhar’s family, we expressed our concern that the federal public defender’s office in Boston was untrustworthy, and might not defend Dzhokhar properly, since they were paid by the government of the United States which was prosecuting him, as many believe for political reasons. Dzhokhar’s parents expressed willingness to engage independent counsel, since Dzhokhar did not trust his government-appointed lawyers. Mr. Fick reacted by saying that the government agents and lawyers would obstruct independent counsel;
— I proposed that Dzhokhar’s family hire independent counsel to work with the federal public defender’s office in order to assure proper and effective representation of Dzhokhar. Mr. Fick replied that, if independent counsel were hired by the family, the federal public defender’s office in Boston would withdraw;
— Mr. Fick then assured Anzor and Zubeidat that the United States Department of Justice had allotted $5 million to Dzhokhar’s defense, and that the federal public defender’s office in Boston intended to defend Dzhokhar properly. Zubeidat then and there said little concerning assurances of Mr. Fick. But for my part, I never believed that the federal public defender’s office in Boston ever intended to defend Dzhokhar as promised. And my impressions from what happened during the trial lead me to believe that the federal public defender’s office in Boston did not defend Dzhokhar competently and ethically.
In any event, I am aware that, following the meeting on June 20-21, 2013, Mme Clarke and Mr. Fick continued to spend time with Anzor and Zubeidat, and eventually persuaded Zubeidat to sign a typed letter in Russian to Dzhokhar, urging him to cooperate wholeheartedly with the federal public defender’s office in Boston. I am informed by my sister Malkan, that Zubeidat gave the letter to the public defenders, shortly before their departure from Russia on or about June 29, 2013, for delivery to Dzhokhar.
During subsequent trips Mme Clarke and Mr. Fick to see Dzhokhar’s parents in Makhachkala, the strategy for defending Dzhokhar was explained, as I learned from my sister Malkan. The public defender’s office in Boston intended to contend at trial, as actually has happened since, that Tamerlan, now deceased, was the mastermind of the crime, and that Dzhokhar was merely following his big brother. I was firmly opposed to this strategy as morally and legally wrong, because Dzhokhar is not guilty, as FBI-generated evidence shows. Some ill- feeling has since developed between myself and Dzhokhar’s parents over their acquiescence.
On or about June 19, 2014, during their visit to Grozny over nearly two weeks, three staff members from the public defender’s office in Boston visited my mother and sisters in Grozny. I am told that they also visited Dzhokhar’s parents in Makhachkala.
The personnel visiting my mother and sisters in Grozny on or about June 19, 2014, included one Charlene, who introduced herself as an independent investigator, working in and with the federal public defender’s office in Boston; another by the name of Jane, a social worker who claimed to have spoken with Dzhokhar; and a third, by the name of Olga, who was a Russian- English interpreter from New Jersey. They did not leave business cards, but stayed at the main hotel in Grozny, hence I presume that their surnames can be ascertained.
I was not present at the meeting in Grozny on or about June 19, 2014, but my sister Malkan, who was present, called me by telephone immediately after the meeting concluded. She revealed to me then the details of the conversation at the meeting. Malkan and I have since spoken about the visit on several occasions.
Malkan speaks Russian and Chechen and is willing to testify under oath in public proceedings in the United States through an interpreter in Russian, if her expenses are paid, and if her personal safety and right of return to her home in Chechnya are adequately assured in advance. She relates, and has authorized me to state for her that, during the conversation on June 19, 2014, in Grozny, Charlene the independent investigator stated flatly that the federal public defender’s office in Boston knew that Dzhokhar was not guilty as charged, and that their office was under enormous pressure from law enforcement agencies and high levels of the government of the United States not to resist conviction. [Remember what happened to Lynne Stewart, the federally appointed public defender who actually served her client. She was sentenced to prison.]
This affidavit is executed outside of the United States, but the foregoing account is true to the best of my knowledge, information, and belief, and subject to the pains and penalties of perjury under the laws of the United States of America.
Given on this 17th day of April 2015.
/s/ Maret Tsarnaeva
Here is the Argument of Amicus Curiae:
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
ARGUMENT OF AMICUS CURIAE No. 13-CR-10200-GAO
MAY IT PLEASE THE COURT:
1. Federal jurisdiction: The constitutional authority of the United States cannot be extended to the prosecution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in light of the opinion of the court in United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549 (1995), and views of Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist, Ns. 17, 22, and 34 [Clinton Rossiter (ed.), Mentor edition by New American Library, New York, 1961, pp. 118, 143-144, and 209]. Congress has broad power to regulate commerce, including trade and the incidents of trade, but domestic crimes and use of weapons are generally reserved to the States. If there is sufficient evidence to prosecute Dzhokhar for murder and mayhem, he should and can be prosecuted exclusively by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Accordingly, amicus urges that the indictment now pending should be dismissed, and the conviction of her nephew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of charges under several acts of Congress should be vacated.
2. The actual innocence of the accused: Laying aside misgivings of amicus and many others about of the “official” scenario concerning this case, as broadcast to the world by the government and mainstream news media of the United States, evidence generated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), confirmed on the judicial record of this cause, and clarified by the indictment, or suitable for judicial notice under Rule 201(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence, conclusively proves that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev cannot be guilty of the crimes charged in this prosecution.
The formal indictment against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was returned on June 27, 2013. The document is 74 pages long, and accuses Mr. Tsarnaev (hereinafter called Dzhokhar) of heinous crimes, including many counts punishable by death. The central event for which Dzhokhar is alleged to have been responsible, according to the indictment, took place, on Boylston Street, in front of the Forum Restaurant, near the finish line of the Boston marathon on April 15, 2013. The most important paragraphs of the indictment are numbered 6, 7, and 24 (including several other paragraphs repeating expressly or by implication the substance thereof). Paragraphs 6-7, read in themselves and in context, state that, acting in concert withhis (now deceased) brother, Dzhokhar set down on the sidewalk and detonated one of two “black backpacks” which contained “improvised explosive devices,” these “constructed from pressure cookers, low explosive power, shrapnel, adhesive, and other materials.” Paragraph 24 clarifies that the black backpack carried, and containing the pressure-cooker bomb allegedly detonated by Dzhokhar, was placed in front of the Forum Restaurant and was associated with the second explosion. The indictment says in paragraph 6 that both bombs exploded at about 2:49 in the afternoon (Eastern time), and that the bombs Dzhokhar and his brother placed and detonated each killed at least one person, and wounded scores of others.
On the morning after the explosions, i. e., on April 16, 2013, Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, made a public statement at a press conference, which is published in printed form on the FBI website and in the news media concerning the facts later set forth in the indictment. Mr. DesLauriers said, as paragraphs 6-7 of the indictment substantially confirm,
. . . this morning, it was determined that both of the explosives were placed in a dark-colored nylon bag or backpack. The bag would have been heavy, because of the components believed to be in it.
. . . we are asking that the public remain alert, and to alert us to the following activity . . . someone who appeared to be carrying an unusually heavy bag yesterday around the time of the blasts and in the vicinity of the blasts.
The FBI also published on April 16, 2013, a crime lab photo of a bomb fragment found after the explosions This photo is reproduced asTsarnaeva exhibit 1 in the appendix hereof, and is believed proper for judicial notice.
From this bomb fragment, the FBI crime lab was able to reconstruct the size, shape, and type of pressure cookers, as was reported on information published by the FBI to the nation on ABC News Nightline on April 16, 2013. A still-frame, taken from (about 01:39-01:54) of this ABC television report, is reproduced as Tsarnaeva exhibit 2 in the appendix hereof, and is offered for judicial notice. A larger segment of this ABC Nightline News report (at about 01:31-02:14) elaborates facts set forth in paragraphs 6-7 of the indictment, including reference to three of the four exhibits reproduced in the appendix hereof. Each of the pressure cookers in question was a Fagor, 6-quart model, marketed in or near Boston and elsewhere in the United States by Macey’s. Its external dimensions are probably about 81⁄2 inches in height, including cover, and about 9 inches in diameter. Stripped of hard plastic handles and filled with nails, bee bees, and other such metal, then prepared as a bomb, it would cause a bag carrying it to be, as observed by the FBI chief in Boston during his press conference on April 16, 2013, “unusually heavy.”
Again on April 16, 2013, the FBI published a crime lab photo, here reproduced as Tsarnaeva exhibit 3 in the appendix hereof, and showing a blown- out backpack which is said to have contained one of the bombs, — a black nylon bag with a characteristic white rectangle marking about 3 by 11⁄2 inches more or less as it appeared following the explosions the day before. This photo pictures the “dark colored nylon bag or backpack” which Mr. DesLauriers described in his press conference on the day after the explosions when he described what was carried by the guilty parties. It was one of the “black backpacks” referenced in paragraph 7 of the indictment. It is pictured in prosecution exhibit 26 which was introduced on the second day of the trial in this cause (day 28 on the transcript, March 5, 2015), showing that the bag or backpack in question was found on the street near the post box in front of the Forum Restaurant on Boylston Street, and, as previously noted, was associated with the second explosion on April 15, 2013, which, in paragraph 24 of the indictment, Dzhokhar is alleged to have detonated. This general impression is confirmed by defense exhibit 3090, showing a backpack with black exterior or covering, and introduced on the sixteenth day of the trial (day 42 on the transcript, March 31, 2015). Tsarnaeva exhibit 3 is also suitable for judicial notice.
On April 18, 2013, the FBI published a 29-second street video claimed to have been taken from Whiskey’s Steak House on Boylston Street at about 02:37- 38 o’clock in the afternoon (Eastern time), only minutes before the explosions on April 15, 2013. It definitively settles the principal question raised by the indictment and the plea of not guilty interposed against it. Part of this video is tucked into prosecution exhibit 22 introduced on the third day of the trial in this cause (day 29 on the transcript, March 9, 2015). From this street video, three still-frame photos have been extracted. Two of these still-frame photos were published by the FBI on April 18, 2013, on posters which were used to identify suspects. All three photos were published by CNN and the Associated Press on April 19, 2013. The third still-frame photo from this video is most telling, and is reproduced as Tsarnaeva exhibit 4 in the appendix hereof. As already noted, the FBI and the indictment have together affirmed that the culprits who detonated these explosions were carrying large, unusually heavy, black backpacks concealing pressure-cooker bombs; but, the third still-frame photo from the Whiskey’s Steak House video reproduced as Tsarnaeva exhibit 4, and drawn from a street video already used by the FBI to identify the suspects and acknowledged by the government in this prosecution, shows unmistakably that, shortly before the explosions, Dzhokhar was carrying a small-size, white* backpack over his right shoulder the same light in weight, not heavy laden, and displaying no sagging or bulging as would normally be evident if the bag identified contained a pressure-cooker bomb of the size and weight which the FBI has described.
(*For all practical purposes and to the naked eye, the color is white, although technical computer analysis suggests a very whitish shade of gray.)
Dzhokhar is not guilty of carrying and detonating a pressure-cooker bomb, as charged in the indictment, as is literally as obvious as the difference between black and white. There were and remain other suspects whose identities have been credibly suggested. See, e. g., Toni Cartalucci, Land Destroyer Report, April 19, 2013 (illustrated commentary entitled “‘Contractors’ Stood Near Bomb, Left Before Detonation.”). But here it is enough to reflect on the comment of Lord Acton that “historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.” — J. Rufus Fears, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1985, Vol. 2, p. 383 (Letter to Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887). Whatever is done in judicial proceedings, history will judge this case, as surely as history has judged other significant cases.
3. The grievance of amicus: It is impossible that federal prosecutors and counsel for the accused did not know of the exculpatory evidence which has just been identified and illustrated. Yet federal prosecutors went head without probable cause, as if decisive evidence of actual innocence, impossible to ignore in a diligent study of this case, did not exist, as is wholly unacceptable in light of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83 at 86-87 (1963).
Moreover, in her opening statement at trial on March 4, 2015, as reflected in the fourth paragraph of the transcript of her comments, court-appointed counsel for the accused forcefully insisted that Dzhokhar was guilty of capital felonies, as is positively disproved by evidence generated by the FBI, reinforced by the indictment itself. She said,
“The government and the defense will agree about many things that happened during the week of April 15th, 2013. On Marathon Monday, Tamerlan Tsarnaev walked down Boylston Street with a backpack on his back, carrying a pressure cooker bomb, and put it down in front of Marathon Sports near the finish line of the Marathon. Jahar [i. e., Dzhokhar] Tsarnaev walked down Boylston Street with a backpack on his back carrying a pressure cooker bomb and placed it next to a tree in front of the Forum Restaurant. The explosions extinguished three lives.”
And in her summation to the jury on April 6, 2015, as the transcript shows, court-appointed counsel for the accused said nothing of the exculpatory evidence in this case. She did not even ask for a verdict of not guilty. She could hardly have done more to promote a conviction and the severest sentence possible, even though the third still-frame photo from the video at Whiskey’s Steak House, reproduced as Tsarnaeva exhibit 4, showed Dzhokhar carrying a white backpack, as alone was enough to defeat the indictment insofar as paragraph 7 thereof averred that the accused and his brother committed the principal acts of wrongdoing by carrying and setting down black backpacks. Such misconduct is altogether unacceptable in light of Strickland v. Washington, 446 U. S. 668 at 687- 688 (1984).
The misconduct of which amicus complains served to conceal decisive exculpatory evidence by legerdemain. Amicus urges not only that the death penalty may not be imposed in this case, for all three opinions in Herrera v. Collins, 506 U. S. 390 (1993), allow that the death penalty may not be constitutionally imposed where the accused is demonstrably innocent, but that sua sponte this court order a new trial with directions that new counsel for the accused be appointed, motivated to provide an authentic defense for Dzhokhar.
4. The corpus delicti: Paragraph 10 of the indictment recites a statement in the nature of a confession by Dzhokhar written on the inner walls of a boat in Watertown. But with respect to any and all evidence offered or treated as suggesting an extrajudicial admission of guilt in this case, amicus cites the penetrating observation by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, Edward Christian, London, 1765, Book IV, p. 357: “[E]ven in cases of felony at common law, [confessions] are the weakest and most suspicious of all testimony, ever liable to be obtained by artifice, false hopes, promises of favour, or menaces, seldom remembered accurately, or reported with due precision, and incapable in their nature of being disproved by other negative evidence.” Amicus and countless others suspect that the alleged confession in the boat was staged as artifice to suit the government’s case, and not authentic. But she stands on ancient wisdom which casts doubt on all extrajudicial confessions without adequate safeguards, including the rule that an extrajudicial confession is insufficient to convict, unless the corpus delicti be sufficiently proved up. The rule is defined with various degrees of rigor from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In federal courts, in any event, the corroboration required to sustain a confession or statement in the nature of a confession need only be independent, substantial, and reveal the words in question to be reasonably trustworthy, as appears, e. g., in Opper v. United States, 348 U. S. 84 (1954).
If such be the law here applicable, the required corroboration in this case must include evidence showing that Dzhokhar actually carried a large, heavy, black backpack on Boylston Street before the explosions on the afternoon on April 15, 2013, as claimed by the FBI and alleged in the indictment. Tsarnaeva exhibit 4, a product of investigation by the FBI, shows plainly that Dzhokhar did no such thing, hence no required corroboration has been established
5. Closing remarks: The views here expressed are not unique, but shared by good Americans, and others the world over. The undersigned and her sister Malkan are prepared to testify as expressed in the affidavit filed in support of the motion for leave to file a submission as amicus curiae. This argument is
The undersigned certifies that this submission is consistent with the rules of this Court, that it is prepared in 14-point Times New Roman font, and that the bare text thereof consists of 2,331 words.
May 15, 2015 /s/ Maret Tsarnaeva
APPENDIX TSARNAEVA EXHIBIT 1
TSARNAEVA EXHIBIT 2
TSARNAEVA EXHIBIT 3
TSARNAEVA EXHIBIT 4
This is the communication I received from attorney John Remington Graham:
TO DR. PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, GREETINGS :
Dear Sir, — By way of introduction. I have practiced criminal law for nearly forty-eight years, both prosecuting and defending, and served as a founding professor in an accredited law school in my native Minnesota. I have appeared as counsel before courts of record in sixteen jurisdictions, and have a background in forensic science and medicine. I can provide a résumé on request.
On March 25, 2015, while the trial was underway, I wrote and distributed a short opinion on the prosecution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, accused of capital felonies in Boston on April 15, 2013 in United States v. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, No. 13-CR-10200-GAO on the docket of the United States District Court for Massachusetts, commonly known as the “Boston marathon case”, or “the Boston bomber case”. I used eight photo exhibits to explain my conclusions that, as a matter of law, there was no probable cause to support the indictment, and that Mr. Tsanaev was plainly not guilty as charged. These views were shared by others reporting on the internet, but my opinion was meant to provide professional assurance to fellow citizens that, legally speaking, something was radically wrong with the prosecution. In fact there were then and still are a great many anomalies with the case.
The substance of the Boston marathon case, as I then saw it, and as I still see it, is that, on the day after the explosions on Boylston Street in Boston, the FBI crime lab determined from fragments at the crime scene, the FBI chief in Boston announced, and the indictment itself later confirmed that, shortly before the explosions, the culprits were carrying large, heavy-laden, black backpacks containing pressure cooker bombs. Two days later, the FBI chief in Boston stated publicly that the suspects were identified by a certain street surveillance video, which for some days was later displayed for public viewing on the FBI website. The video had been taken from Whiskey’s Steak House, and was used to create still-frame photos of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (the big brother, now deceased), and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the little brother, later accused) as they walked up Boylson Street toward the finish line of the Boston marathon, shortly before the bombs went off. These two still frames were featured on posters distributed by the FBI in soliciting cooperation from the general public. But there is a third still-frame photo, taken from the same video, which shows unmistakably that Dzhokhar was carrying a small, light-weight, white backpack. The backpack carried by Dzhokharwas flat, and did not sag or bulge as would have been apparent if it contained a pressure cooker bomb filled with shrapnel as described in the indictment.This third still-frame photo was published by the major news media of the United States. I retrieved my first copy of this third still-frame photo from an internet report of CNN on April 19, 2015.
The bottom line is that the FBI’s own evidence eliminates Dzhokhar as a suspect, and conclusively proves he is not guilty as charged. This reality is literally as clear as the difference between black and white. The establishment press knew about it, and I cannot imagine how the federal prosecutors and counsel for the accused could not have known about it. So obvious was the actual innocence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that there was no need for a trial at all, because a good criminal defense lawyer could have taken the FBI information published the day after the explosions, the text of the indictment, and the third still-frame photo from the street surveillance video used by the FBI to identify suspects, and employed those items to support a pre-trial motion for dismissal of the indictment. I have on many occasions made such motions or seen such motions made by colleagues in federal courts, based on facts revealed by disclosures which prosecutors must and routinely do make available to counsel for the accused under a famous decision of the United States Supreme Court. And I have seen such motions granted on not a few occasions. Such practice is not uncommon, as I know from my own experience.
What was going on in Dzhokhar’s case? Why was there no motion to dismiss the indictment based on indisputable facts? Why was there a trial at all? Why did Judy Clarke, a big-time death-penalty lawyer appointed to defend Dzhokhar, admit to the jury in her opening statement that her client was guilty? She had decisive evidence that her client was not guilty. Why did she not use it, bring the case to an end, and thereby save her client’s life? In her final summation to the jury, Mme Clarke did not even ask for a verdict of not guilty. She made no mention of the exculpatory evidence generated by the FBI and mentioned in the indictment. Available were widely published photographs of possible paramilitary agents near the crime scene in Boston about the time of the explosions, carrying large, heavy-laden, black backpacks with characteristic markings which the FBI crime lab material revealed. But these persons with black backpacks were never investigated by the FBI. Why not?
I contacted Maret Tsarnaeva, the paternal aunt of Dzhokhar living in Chechnya which is part of the Russian Federation, a lawyer trained in the old Russian school of law in the Kyrgyz Republic which was once part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but has been independent since the conclusion of the former Cold War. A very bright and interesting woman Maret turned out to be, and, from the beginning, she maintained that her nephew was not guilty. My conversations with her over Skype led me to conclude that Judy Clarke and her colleagues in the federal public defender’s office in Boston could not stand up to the political pressure and thus threw the case instead of defending Dzhokhar.
Mme Tsarnaeva executed an affidavit on April 17, 2015, which explains events when representatives of the federal public defender’s office in Boston met with Dzhokhar’s family in Russia. For those interested in details, I attach a copy of her affidavit exactly as sent to me by Maret from Russia and later filed with the federal district court in Boston, except that the affidavit filed in the federal district court includes Maret’s original signature in Russian script which I can verify with my business records.
Maret hoped to call exculpatory evidence to the attention of the presiding judge, because Dzhokhar’s lawyers were not defending the accused and federal prosecutors were acting without probable cause. After diligent research on options was made, Maret decided to attempt an appearance before the federal district court in Boston as a friend of the court. She had to apply to the presiding judge for permission to appear in this capacity, and to make a motion asking the court to appointment me as her personal counsel for this purpose on special occasion. Normally, to be admitted to practice before the court on special occasion, I would need a motion from a member of the local bar. My paralegal assistant and I contacted many lawyers in Massachusetts. Some were sympathetic, but none dared to participate, lest their reputations be harmed. I had practiced before the federal district court in Boston some years previously, and then had no difficulty in securing the routine courtesy of a member of the local bar in sponsoring my appearance on special occasion. But not even the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts dared to assist Maret or myself. I had to assist Maret in making an intervention pro se, representing herself, while she listed me as “of counsel” so as to signal that she was guided by a lawyer, and asked the presiding judge to admit me on special occasion without sponsoring motion of a member of the local bar, due to unusual circumstances. On instructions of court personnel, we could not proceed on the electronic record, and Maret’s pro se motion with supporting documents was served upon the federal district attorney and the federal public defender in paper and by registered mail, and the papers had to be filed with the office of the clerk of the federal district court, again in paper and regular postal service. But our task was accomplished by May 29, 2015.
For your convenience, I attach herewith the formal argument made by Maret Tsarnaeva acting pro se with my guidance, exactly as filed in the federal district court in Boston, except that the copy served and filed included the signature of Maret Tsarnaeva in Russian script, as I can demonstrate from my business records. We showed by text and exhibits, and by reference to the trial record and FBI-generated evidence that Dzhokhar cannot be guilty, because the FBI determined and the indictment alleged that the culprits carried black backpacks, but the FBI’s evidence showed that Dzhokhar was carrying a white backpack.
Maret expressed her grievances against the unethical misconduct of the federal prosecutors in proceeding when they knew they had no probable cause, and the unethical misconduct of court-appointed counsel in not defending in earnest. We enclosed the four most critical photo exhibits, including the results of the FBI crime lab investigation and the exculpatory third still-frame photo from the video used by the FBI to identify the culprits.
I am aware that many incredulous citizens cannot accept that the government of the United States would stage a show trial in Boston to convict an innocent young man and sentence him to death. But such events are not unusual in history. Judicial murder spoils the history of many nations. These incredulous citizens point to Dzhokhar’s alleged confession statements inside the boat in Watertown and at the time of sentencing. But contrary to the beliefs of the uninitiated, it has been clear from ancient times that confession statements are the weakest and most suspicious of all testimony, as is stated by legal scholars going back many centuries. Maret’s pro se argument cited Sir William Blackstone, from whom the founding fathers of the United States learned the law, for this truth. False confessions are very common, and result from fabrication, artifice, duress, unfounded hopes, attempts to curry favor, even brainwashing. Hence, going back centuries the law has struggled to develop safeguards against false confessions.
The intervention by Maret Tsarnaeva in behalf of her nephew in the Boston marathon case is significant because, although denying her motion to appear as a friend of the court, the presiding judge entered an order, which appears on the electronic record, is numbered 1469, and directs that her filings be maintained by the office of the clerk of the federal district court in Boston. These documents should be accessible to those wishing to see and read them. Therefore, it is a matter of public record, not merely a matter of internet protest or gossip, that the federal prosecutors, the court-appointed lawyers for the accused, and the presiding judge are all aware of the FBI’s own evidence which excludes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a suspect, and proves his actual innocence. It is also clear that the major news media of the United States, which orchestrated a false appearance that Dzhokhar was guilty of heinous crimes, and called for his execution, were aware that he was not guilty. They knew, as the report of CNN four days after marathon Monday makes plain, that Dzhokhar was in fact carrying a small, light-weight, white backpack, and that the government’s own evidence shows that the culprits, whoever they were, carried large, heavy-laden, black backpacks.
John Remington Graham of the Minnesota Bar (#3664X)
John Remington Graham is an attorney with decades of experience in the fields of constitutional, environmental, and criminal litigation. He served as a federal public defender; special counsel to Brainerd, Minnesota; and Crow Wing County attorney. He has a great many publishing credits in constitutional law and history, and also forensic medicine and science. He has lectured on constitutional law and legal history in the United States and Canada. Graham was also cofounding professor of law at Hamline University in Minnesota. As a young lawyer, he quickly realized an investigation into constitutional history was necessary to properly defend his clients against the judicial machine. Since then, Graham has been a diligent student of American, Canadian, and English constitutional history and law. He recognized that the American Constitution could not be understood without a thorough knowledge of its foundation in English Constitutional law and history. He has participated in major cases raising difficult questions of constitutional law, appearing before courts in sixteen jurisdictions within the United States. Additionally, in 1998 he was the advisor on British constitutional law and history for the amicus curiae for Quebec in the Canadian Supreme Court, a position that afforded him the opportunity of shaping Quebec’s argument in its case for peaceable secession. Graham received both a bachelor of arts in philosophy and a law degree from the University of Minnesota. Graham, his wife, and children have lived in Minnesota and Quebec.
