Global Research

Truth In Media has followed the story of scientist Dr. William Thompson since August 2014 when Thompson alleged that a study he worked on “fudged numbers” to lower the number of black children who were adversely affected by a certain type of vaccine. Thompson is a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has been with the agency since 1998.

The statement was released on August 27, 2014 by Dr. Thompson in response to reports that he and co-authors from a 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics did in fact omit important information from a study on the link between vaccines and autism. Below is an excerpt from Thompson’s statement.

Dr. Thompson was originally not intending to be so forthcoming about his involvement until it was revealed that conversations he had with Dr. Brian Hooker had been recorded. Dr. Thompson’s statement claimed that documents had been handed over to Congressman Bill Posey’s office for review. Posey serves on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Ben Swann later confirmed with Posey’s office that they had indeed received documents from Dr. Thompson.

“According to Congressman Posey’s spokesman, George Cecala, “I can confirm that we have received a very large number of documents and we are going through those documents now. There are a lot of them, so it will take some time.” Cecala could not say exactly how many documents are in possession of the Congressman’s staff though sources tell me that as many as 100,000 documents have been handed over.”

Since that time, however, virtually no media publications have mentioned Dr. Thompson and many were left to wonder if anything would ever come of the whole ordeal. That was until Congressman Bill Posey took to the floor of the House on July 29th to discuss Dr. William Thompson and his documents.

Posey started out by reassuring critics that he was for vaccinations. “I am absolutely, resolutely, pro-vaccine. Advancements in medical immunization have saved countless lives and greatly benefited public health,” Congressman Posey stated.

Posey went on to say that parents should have “the best information available to them” when making decisions about their children’s health. “They should be able to count on Federal Agencies to tell them the truth. For these reasons I bring the following matter to The House Floor.”

“In August 2014 Dr. William Thompson a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked with a whistleblower attorney to provide my office with documents related to a 2004 CDC study that examined the possibility of a relationship between mumps, measles, rubella vaccines and autism.”

Congressman Posey goes on to quote a statement from Dr. Thompson that was provided to his office:

“All the authors and I met and decided sometime between August and September ’02 not to report any race effects for the paper. Sometime soon after the meeting we decided to exclude reporting any race effects, the co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can. However, because I assumed it was illegal and would violate both FOIA and DOJ requests, I kept hard copies of all documents in my office, and I retained all associated computer files. I believe we intentionally withheld controversial findings from the final draft of the Pediatrics paper.”

George Cecala, a spokesperson for Posey’s office, confirmed to Forbes that the source of the quote was indeed the set of documents provided to Posey’s office last August. Forbes reports:

“According to Cecala, “those are Thompson’s words,” quoted from the materials that Thompson’s attorneys provided Posey.

Cecala says that the documents in question will be distributed only to members of Congress and will not be made available otherwise until if and when a hearing is held.”

During Posey’s speech he also mentions the controversial Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

“It’s troubling to me that in a recent Senate hearing on childhood vaccinations, it was never mentioned that our government has paid out over 3 Billion Dollars through a Vaccine Injury Compensation Program for children who have been injured by vaccinations.”

Funds awarded through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program are first processed through a special vaccine court. In December 2014, Truth In Media wrote about a report by the Associated Press which revealed that thousands of families with claims with the vaccine court are left to wait for years, sometimes decades before receiving help.

The AP examined hundreds of court decisions, performed more than 100 interviews, and studied a database containing more than 14,500 cases. The database was last updated in January 2013 with the government refusing to release any new updates.

Officially known as the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the so-called vaccine court is a little known system that is intended to address claims of Americans who believe their children have been harmed by vaccinations. The court is an established part of the federal judiciary system however the authorities over the cases are not called judges but rather “special masters”.

The AP investigation found several issues with the court. These include tens of millions of taxpayer dollars that has been paid to private attorneys who often practice “churning”, a practice described as filing a large number of claims regardless of the quality of the claims. In the private court attorneys are paid out whether or not they succeed in convincing the court. That fact has lead to questionable billing practices and an increase in court claims.

The AP report also found that “expert” witnesses for the families and the government often have a lack of credibility or conflicts of interest. The report says that some of the experts are also involved in setting up nonprofits that question vaccine safety. Meanwhile doctors hired by the government to testify in defense of vaccines have ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Please watch Ben Swann’s report on the Vaccine Court and Autism.

Congressman Posey ended his speech by reminding his colleagues that it was their duty to investigate the documents from Dr. Thompson.

“I believe it’s our duty to ensure that the documents Dr. Thompson provided are not ignored. Therefore, I will provide them to members of Congress, and the House Committees upon request.

Considering the nature of The Whistleblower’s documents, as well as the involvement of The CDC, a hearing and a thorough investigation is warranted.

So I ask, Mr. Speaker, I beg, I implore my colleagues on the appropriations committees, to please, please take such action.”

Derrick Broze is an investigative journalist, community activist, gardener and promoter from Houston, Texas. He is the founder of The Houston Free Thinkers, and The Conscious Resistance Network. Broze also hosts a weekly podcast under the name the Conscious Resistance Live. His writing can be found on TheConsciousResistance.com , The Liberty Beat, the Anti-Media, Activist Post, and Ben Swann.com

Though transparency was a cause he championed when campaigning for the presidency, President Obama has largely avoided making certain defense costs known to the public. However, when it comes to military appropriations for government spy agencies, we know from Freedom of Information Act requests that the so-called “black budget” is an increasingly massive expenditure subsidized by American taxpayers. The CIA and and NSA alone garnered $52.6 billion in funding in 2013 while the Department of Defense black ops budget for secret military projects exceeds this number. It is estimated to be $58.7 billion for the fiscal year 2015.

What is the black budget? Officially, it is the military’s appropriations for “spy satellites, stealth bombers, next-missile-spotting radars, next-gen drones, and ultra-powerful eavesdropping gear.”

However, of greater interest to some may be the clandestine nature and full scope of the black budget, which, according to analyst Catherine Austin Fitts, goes far beyond classified appropriations. Based on her research, some of which can be found in her piece “What’s Up With the Black Budget?,” Fitts concludes that the during the last decade, global financial elites have configured an elaborate system that makes most of the military budget unauditable. This is because the real black budget includes money acquired by intelligence groups via narcotics trafficking, predatory lending, and various kinds of other financial fraud.

The result of this vast, geopolitically-sanctioned money laundering scheme is that Housing and Urban Devopment and other agencies are used for drug trafficking and securities fraud. According to Fitts, the scheme allows for at least 85 percent of the U.S. federal budget to remain unaudited.

Fitts has been researching this issue since 2001, when she began to believe that a financial coup d’etat was underway. Specifically, she suspected that the banks, corporations, and investors acting in each global region were part of a “global heist,” whereby capital was being sucked out of each country. She was right.

As Fitts asserts,

“[She] served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in US communities…..I later found out that the government contractor leading the War on Drugs strategy for U.S. aid to Peru, Colombia and Bolivia was the same contractor in charge of knowledge management for HUD enforcement. This Washington-Wall Street game was a global game. The peasant women of Latin America were up against the same financial pirates and business model as the people in South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia, Baltimore and the South Bronx.”

This is part of an even larger financial scheme. It is fairly well-established by now that international financial institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund operate primarily as instruments of corporate power and nation-controlling infrastructure investment mechanisms. For example, the primary purpose of the World Bank is to bully developing countries into borrowing money for infrastructure investments that will fleece trillions of dollars while permanently indebting these “debtor” nations to West. But how exactly does the World Bank go about doing this?

John Perkins wrote about this paradigm in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. During the 1970s, Perkins worked for the international engineering consulting firm, Chas T. Main, as an “economic hitman.” He says the operations of the World Bank are nothing less than “pure economic colonization on behalf of powerful corporations and banks that use the United States government as their tool.”

In his book, Perkins discusses Joseph Stiglitz, the Chief Economist for the World Bank from 1997-2000, at length. Stiglitz described the four-step plan for bamboozling developing countries into becoming debtor nations:

Step One, according to Stiglitz, is to convince a nation to privatize its state industries. Step Two utilizes “capital market liberalization,” which refers to the sudden influx of speculative investment money that depletes national reserves and property values while triggering a large interest bump by the IMF. Step Three, Stiglitz says, is “Market-Based Pricing,” which means raising the prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads to “Step Three and a Half: The IMF Riot.” Examples of this can be seen in Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador and many other countries where the IMF’s actions have caused financial turmoil and social strife.

Step 4, of course, is “free trade,” where all barriers to the exploitation of local produce are eliminated.

There is a connection between the U.S. black budget and the trillion dollar international investment fraud scheme. Our government and the banking cartels and corporatocracy running it have configured a complex screen to block our ability to audit their budget and the funds they use for various black op projects. However, they can not block our ability to uncover their actions and raise awareness.

Jake Anderson joined Anti-Media as an independent journalist in April of 2015. His topics of interest include social justice, science, corporatocracy, and dystopian science fiction. He currently resides in Escondido, California. Learn more about Anderson here!

Glyphosate narrowly missed being classed as a known rather than a probable carcinogen in the World Health Organisation evaluation. Claire Robinson reports

An excellent article by Andrew Cockburn in Harpers explains that anti-invasive species hysteria is prevalent across the US, from university biology departments to wildlife bureaucracies to garden clubs. Glyphosate is the weapon of choice for battling invaders that are seen as threatening native species. Over 90 percent of California’s land managers use the compound, which is particularly recommended as a slayer of eucalyptus trees. Last year, the federal government spent more than $2 billion to fight the alien invasion, up to half of which was budgeted for glyphosate and other poisons.

This resulting high exposure to glyphosate of the American public is an especially serious issue since the decision of the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC that the herbicide is a “probable” carcinogen. Monsanto has tried to bamboozle the public about the significance of the IARC decision by confusing the 2A (probable human carcinogen) category that IARC put glyphosate into with the 2B category – “possible human carcinogen”, a group occupied by common substances like coffee and pickled vegetables. The message is: many of us drink coffee and eat pickled vegetables without worrying, so we shouldn’t worry about glyphosate either.

Cockburn’s article reveals that the discussion at IARC was NOT about whether glyphosate should be in category 2A (probable carcinogen) or category 2B (possible carcinogen). Instead the discussion was about whether glyphosate should be classed in category 1 (known human carcinogen).

The IARC group was headed by Aaron Blair, an epidemiologist who spent thirty years at the National Cancer Institute. Cockburn paraphrases Blair as follows:

“According to Blair, there were good grounds to declare that glyphosate definitely causes cancer” – in other words, it should be classed in category 1 as a known human carcinogen. But “This did not happen, [Blair] said, because ‘the epidemiologic data was a little noisy’. In other words, while several studies suggested a link, another study, of farmers in Iowa and North Carolina, did not. Blair pointed out that there had been a similar inconsistency in human studies of benzene, now universally acknowledged as a carcinogen. In any case, this solitary glitch in the data caused the group to list glyphosate as a probable (instead of a definite) cause of cancer.”

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant called the IARC study “junk science” that should be retracted. But Blair replied, “Historically, the same thing happened with tobacco, the same thing happened with asbestos, the same thing happened with arsenic… It’s not junk science.”

The bottom line is that Blair has placed the row in historical perspective by comparing glyphosate with benzene, tobacco, asbestos and arsenic. And we all know how dangerous they are.

Iowa and North Carolina study not reassuring

Blair of the IARC mentions the Agricultural Health Study in Iowa and North Carolina as a study which, in Cockburn’s paraphrasis, did not find a link between glyphosate and cancer. In reality, though, the study is not reassuring and doesn’t contradict other studies that did find a link, for two reasons.

1. The study did find “a suggested association” between glyphosate exposure and multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. A rebuttal study commissioned by Monsanto and published in 2015 ahead of the re-evaluations of glyphosate by the US and the EU used a different dataset and concluded “no convincing evidence” of a link. Whether the Monsanto re-analysis is more reliable than the findings of the publicly funded Agricultural Health Study is debatable.

2. In a separate study also conducted in Iowa, detectable levels of glyphosate were found in urine samples from farm families and non-farm families. The researchers put this down to the fact that glyphosate herbicides are used in home gardens as well as in agriculture. Thus in the Agricultural Health Study the control population is as likely to be exposed to glyphosate as the “exposed” population, so the differences between the groups may be small or non-existent. The implication of the urine study is that the real link between glyphosate and cancer could be far stronger than was found in the Agricultural Health Study.

Glyphosate-resistant weeds: the ultimate invasive species

The massive irony emphasised by Cockburn’s article is that America’s reliance on the probable carcinogen glyphosate has backfired. Glyphosate over-use on both invasive species and GM glyphosate-tolerant crops has led to the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds. The agricultural consultant Dr Charles Benbrook is quoted in the article as saying, “It’s a disaster… As resistant weeds spread and become more of an economic issue for more farmers, the only way they know how to react — the only way that they feel they can react — is by spraying more.”

It has become common for farmers to spray three times a season instead of once, and Benbrook estimates that the extra doses of herbicide will add up to 75,000 tons in 2015. Farmers now have to contend with glyphosate-tolerant marestail that grows up to eight feet tall, with stems thick enough, according to one farmer, to “stop a combine in its tracks”. It is, according to Cockburn, the ultimate “alien invasive, made right here in America”.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index was down a meager -0.96 percent at the close yesterday on the news of China’s devaluation of its currency, the Yuan, but some noteworthy individual stocks took a more dramatic pounding. Apple lost 5.20 percent; Micron Technology was in the red by 4.99 percent; Yum! Brands closed down 4.87 percent while General Motors lost 3.48 percent. All of these companies rely on China as a major export market. 

According to a March report from FactSet, “companies in the S&P 500 in aggregate generate about 10 percent of sales from the Asia Pacific region, most of which comes from China and Japan.” Some U.S. companies, however, derive a far greater percentage of their sales from China. According to Sue Chang, a MarketWatch reporter using data from FactSet, 52 percent of Yum! Brands sales come from China while 40 percent of Micron Technology’s are derived from China.

A slowdown in economic growth in China could also see individual U.S. states licking their wounds as well. The following statistics come from the US-China Business Council:

• Forty-two states experienced at least triple-digit export growth to China since 2005, and five states saw export growth of more than 500 percent over the same period.
• China was among the top three export markets for 39 states in 2014. That includes states that are not usually associated with strong China trade ties, including Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Alabama, Ohio, and South Carolina.
• In 2014, thirty-one states exported more than $1 billion to China.

The chart above shows the U.S. states that could be most dramatically impacted should China’s economic slump worsen. Washington state saw its exports to China grow from $3.3 billion in 2005 to a whopping $15.3 billion in 2014. Washington state’s major exports to China include transportation equipment, forestry products, computers and electronics, primary metal manufacturing, mineral and ores. In the span of one decade, the state’s exports to China grew by 365 percent versus its export growth rate to the rest of the globe of 148 percent.

South Carolina is another state that has experienced an outsized boost from exporting to China. From 2005 through 2014, its exports to China skyrocketed from $590 million to $4.2 billion. One of the popular exports to China is BMW cars and SUVs made at its Greer, South Carolina plant. BMW, a German automaker, last year announced that it would be investing another $1 billion in the Greer plant and add 800 additional workers, boosting total employment at the plant to 8,800 workers. South Carolina is also home to a sprawling Boeing campus in North Charleston where the 787 Dreamliner is made. In 2014, $2.8 billion of South Carolina’s exports to China were in the category of transportation equipment.

As foreign currencies decline in value to the U.S. Dollar, the ability of U.S. exporters to compete against foreign domestic goods priced in the cheaper currency becomes more difficult. An additional and serious risk to the U.S. economy is that these currency wars, which are actually trade wars to sustain or grab market share (think Saudi Arabia and oil) lead to a pricing war race to the bottom with the inevitable outcome of the U.S. importing deflation.

Read more

Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy.  It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer as time passed.

My best guess: it was the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of graduate school where I had been studying to become a China scholar and was then working as a “movement” printer — that is, in a print shop that produced radical literature, strike posters, and other materials for activists.  It was, of course, “the Sixties,” though I didn’t know it then.  Still, I had somehow been swept into a new world remarkably unrelated to my expected life trajectory — and a large part of the reason for that was the Vietnam War.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t particularly early to protest it. I think I signed my first antiwar petition in 1965 while still in college, but as late as 1968 — people forget the confusion of that era — while I had become firmly antiwar, I still wanted to serve my country abroad. Being a diplomat had been a dream of mine, the kind of citizenly duty I had been taught to admire, and the urge to act in such a fashion, to be of service, was deeply embedded in me. (That I was already doing so in protesting the grim war my government was prosecuting in Southeast Asia didn’t cross my mind.) I actually applied to the State Department, but it turned out to have no dreams of Tom Engelhardt.  On the other hand, the U.S. Information Agency, a propaganda outfit, couldn’t have been more interested.

Only one problem: they weren’t about to guarantee that they wouldn’t send a guy who had studied Chinese, knew something of Asia, and could read French to Saigon.  However, by the time they had vetted me — it took government-issue months and months to do so — I had grown far angrier about the war, so when they offered me a job, I didn’t think twice about saying no.

Somewhere in that same year, 1968, I joined a group called the Resistance and in an elaborate public ceremony turned in my draft card to protest the war.  For several years, I had been increasingly involved in antiwar activism, had marched on the Pentagon in the giant 1967 processional that Norman Mailer so famously recorded in Armies of the Night, and returned again a year or two later when, for the first time in my life, I got tear-gassed.

For a while, I had also been working as a draft counselor with a group whose initials, BDRG, I remember. A quick check of Google tells me that the acronym stood for the Boston Draft Resistance Group.  Somewhere in that period, I helped set up an organization whose initials I also recall well: the CCAS. Though hardly an inspired moniker, it stood for the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. (That “concern” — in case it’s not clear so many years later — involved the same war that wouldn’t end.) With a friend, I designed and produced its bulletin.  As one of those “concerned scholars,” I also helped write a group antiwar book, The Indochina Story, which would be put out by a mainstream publishing house.

Of course, there’s much that I’ve forgotten and I can’t claim that all of the above is in perfect order.  Even at the time, life was a blur of activism.  Nearly half a century later, I’m a failing archive of my own life and so much seems irretrievable.

My intention here, however, is simply to offer a sense of how so many lives came, in part or in whole, to revolve around that war, while other things went by the wayside.  It’s true that our government hadn’t mobilized us, but we had mobilized ourselves.  Though much has been written about “dropping out” in the 1960s, this antiwar form of it has been far less attended to.

Images of War

So much of what I’m describing must seem utterly alien today.  At a time when America’s endless wars might as well be millions of miles from our shores (and the national security state desperately needs a few “lone-wolf” Islamic terror types to drive home how crucial it is to our protection), it’s hard to remember how large the Vietnam War once loomed in our national life.  In this age in which Americans have been demobilized from the wars fought in our name, who recalls how many people took to the streets how repeatedly in those Vietnam years, or how much the actions of our government were passionately debated from Congress to kitchens, or how deeply plagued and unnerved two American presidents were by the uproar and fuss?  Who remembers how little the antiwar movement of that moment was a weekend operation and how central throwing some kind of monkey wrench into that war became to so many lives?

Much of the tenacious antiwar opposition of that era, when thought about now, is automatically attributed to the draft, to the fact that young men like me were subject to being called up and sent thousands of miles from home to fight in a conflict that looked more brutal, despicable, and even criminal by the second.  And there is, of course, some truth to that explanation, but it’s a very partial, dismissive truth, one that, for instance, doesn’t explain the vast number of young women who mobilized against the war in those years.

While the draft was a factor in the growth of war consciousness, it was hardly the only one.  It’s easy to forget that a generation raised in the Golden Fifties believed the American system would work for them and that, if it didn’t, it was the obligation of the citizen to try to fix it.  Those young people were convinced that, if you spoke up loudly enough and in large enough numbers, presidents would listen.  They also believed that you, as an American, had an obligation to step forward, to represent the best in your country, to serve.  Hence my urge to join the State Department.  In other words, I came from a generation primed — in part by the successes of the Civil Rights Movement (when it seemed that presidents were listening) — to believe that, in a democratic country, protest worked.

Of course, by the time the antiwar movement took off, it was hardly stylish to admit to suchsentiments of service, but that didn’t make them less real.  They were crucial to a passionate protest that began mainly with students but grew to include everyone from clergy to businessmen, and that, in its later years, would be led by disillusioned military veterans home from the country’s Southeast Asian battlefields.

The importance of an antiwar movement that refused to stand down, that — while two administrations continually escalated the killing in Vietnam and spread it to Laos and Cambodia — never packed up its tents and went home, can’t be emphasized too strongly.  Its refusal to shut up brought Vietnam, both literally and figuratively, to America’s doorstep.  It made that grim war a living (and dying) presence in American lives — and no less important was what it made present.

Somehow, from so many thousands of miles away, we were turned into witnesses to repeated horrors on a staggering scale in a small, largely peasant land: free-fire zones, the body count, torture, assassination, war crimes, the taking of trophy body parts, and above all the feeling that a spectacle of slaughter was occurring and we were responsible for it.  We here at home had a growing sense of what it meant for the U.S. military to fight a war against guerilla forces (which, at least on the left, came — unlike the Islamic insurgents of the twenty-first century — to look ever more heroic and sympathetic), with every means available short of nuclear weapons.  That included bombing campaigns that, in the end, would outdo in tonnagethose of World War II.

The images of that time still remain with me, including Ron Haeberle’s horrific photos of the My Lai massacre, which appeared in LIFE magazine in December 1969, and Associated Press photographer Nick Ut’s iconic 1972 shot of a young Vietnamese girl napalmed by a South Vietnamese plane and caught in pain and terror running naked down a road.

If you were in the antiwar movement in those years, you couldn’t help coming across testimony by American soldiers who had been in Vietnam and were ready to paint a nightmarish picture of what they and their companions had seen or done there.  In the growing alternative or (as it was romantically termed then) “underground” press of those pre-Internet days, snapshots of unbearable atrocities were soon circulating.  These undoubtedly came directly from soldiers who had snapped them, or knew those who had, or were like the servicemen — stirred to action by a growing military antiwar movement — who appeared at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971.  There, they essentially testified against themselves on the commission of war crimes.  Others similarly moved handed such photos over to alternative publications.

I’ve never forgotten, for instance, a trophy shot I saw in those years, of an American soldier proudly holding up a severed Vietnamese head by the hair.  (If you want to imagine the impact such photos had, click here to see one that circulated in the alternative press at that time.)

In those years, thanks to the efforts of the antiwar movement, the Vietnamese — the dead, the wounded, the mistreated, as well as “the enemy” (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF Is Gonna Win!”) — seemed to come ever closer to us until, though I was living in quiet Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sometimes had the eerie feeling that Vietnamese were dying right outside my window.  In the post-9/11 American world, that sounds both ludicrous and histrionic.  You’ll have to take my word for it that I’m not exaggerating and that the sensation was visceral indeed.

A Spectacle of Slaughter

Which finally brings me to that clunky television set.  At some point in 1968 or 1969, I got an old black-and-white TV.  I have no idea whether I bought it or someone gave it to me.  I do remember one thing about it, though.  In that era before remote controls, the dial you turned by hand to change channels was broken, so I used a pair of pliers.  Sometimes, I had it running on my desk while I worked; sometimes, it was propped on a chair, just an arm’s reach from my bed.  (Remember those pliers!)  And in the off hours when old movies filled schedules on secondary channels, I began to re-watch the westerns, adventure films, and war movies of my childhood.

I no longer know what possessed me to do so, but it became an almost obsessional activity.  I watched at least 30 to 40 of them, no small feat in the era before you could find anything you wanted online at a moment’s notice.  Keep in mind that those films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s — grade B-westerns, John Wayne-style World War II movies, and the like — were for me the definition of entertainment sunny side up.  I had only the fondest memories of such films, in part because they were bedrock to the American way of life as I understood it.

You always knew what to expect: the Indians (or Mexicans, or Japanese) would fall in vast numbers, the cavalry would ride to the rescue in the nick of time, the Marines — it hardly needed to be said — would advance triumphantly before the movie ended, the West would be won, victory assured.  It was how it was and how it should be.

Add in a more personal factor: my father had been in World War II in the Pacific.  It wasn’t something he generally cared to talk about.  (In fact, it made him angry.)  But he often took me to such films and when we sat together in silence in some movie theater watching Americans fight his war (or cowboys and blue shirts fight the Indian wars), I felt close to him.  In that shared silence, I felt his stamp of approval on what we were watching.  If he and his generation were far more conflicted and less talkative about their war experiences than we now like to remember, they really didn’t need to say much in those days.  After all, we kids knew what they had done; we had seen it sitting beside them at the movies.

Imagine my shock, on looking at those films again so many years later — with that visceral sense of Vietnamese dying in my neighborhood — when I realized that the sunniest part of my childhood had been based on a spectacle of slaughter.  The “Vietnamese” had always been the ones to fall in staggering numbers just before the moment of victory, or when the wagon train again advanced into the West, or the cowboy got the girl.

Consider this my own tiny version of the disillusionment so many experienced with the previously all-American in those years.  Our country’s triumphs, I suddenly realized, had been built on conquest and on piles of nonwhite bodies.

Believe me, looking back on one of the sunniest parts of my childhood from that antiwar moment was a shock and it led me to produce “Ambush at Kamikaze Pass,” the first critical essay of my life, for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.  “Anyone who thinks the body count is a creation of the recent Indochinese war,” I wrote then, “should look at the movies he saw as a kid.  It was the implicit rule of those films that no less than ten Indian (Japanese, Chinese…) warriors should fall for each white, expendable secondary character.”  Almost a quarter century later, it would become the heart of my book The End of Victory Culture.

The Spectacle of Slaughter Updated

In 2015, the spectacle of slaughter is still with us.  These days, however, few Americans have that sense that it might be happening right down the street.  War is no longer a part of our collective lives.  It’s been professionalized and outsourced.  And here’s the wonder of it all: since 9/11, this country has engaged in a military-first foreign policy across much of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, launching an unending string of failed wars, conflicts, raids, kidnappings, acts of torture, and drone assassination programs, and yet Americans have remained remarkably unengaged with any of it.

This is not happenstance.  There is, of course, no draft.  President Richard Nixon ended it in 1973 with the demobilizing of the antiwar movement in mind.  Similarly, the military high command never again wanted to experience a citizen’s army reaching an almost mutinous state and voting with its feet or its antiwar testimony or its medals.  Ever since Vietnam, the urge of successive administrations and an ever-expanding national security state has been to fight wars without the involvement of the American people (or the antiwar version of democratic oversight).  Hence, the rise of the warrior corporation and the privatization of war.

Especially after 9/11, a kind of helplessness settled over Americans left out in the cold when it came to the wars being fought in their name.  In some sense, most of us accepted our newly assigned role as a surveilled and protected populace whose order of the day was don’t get involved.

In other words, amid all the military failures of this era, there was a single hardly mentioned but striking victory: no antiwar movement of any significance proved to have staying power in this country.  Osama bin Laden can, at least in part, be thanked for that.  The 9/11 attacks, the shock of the apocalyptic-looking collapse of those towers in New York, and the loss of almost 3,000 innocent civilians inoculated America’s second Afghan War — launched in October 2001 and still ongoing — against serious protest.

The invasion of Iraq would prove another matter entirely.  That act of Bush administration hubris, based on kited intelligence and a full-scale White House propaganda campaign filled with misinformation, brought briefly to life something unique to our era: a massive antiwar movement that preceded the launching of the war it was protesting.  Those prewar demonstrations, which stretched worldwide, ran into the hundreds of thousands and were impressive enough that the New York Times front-paged “public opinion” as the other “superpower” in a post-Cold War world.

But as soon as the Bush administration launched its much-desired invasion, the domestic movement against it began to crumble.  Within a couple of years — with the exception ofsmall groups of antiwar veterans — it was essentially dead.  In the end, Americans would generally live through their twenty-first-century wars as if they weren’t happening.  There would neither be an everyday antiwar movement into which anyone could “drop out,” nor a population eager to be swept into it.  Its lack would be a modest tragedy for American politics and our waning democracy; it would prove far more so for Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and others.

For the spectacle of slaughter itself continued, even if few in this country were tuning in.  Don’t consider it a fluke that the war culture hero of the period — on the bestseller lists and inHollywood — was an American sniper whose claim to fame was that he had created his own singular body count: 160 “confirmed” dead Iraqis.  Skip the unknown number of casualties of every sort (ranging from Iraq Body Count’s 219,000 up to a million dead) that resulted from the invasion of Iraq and the chaos of the occupation that followed or the tens of thousands of civilian dead in Afghanistan (some at the hands of the Taliban and their roadside bombs, some thanks to U.S. efforts).  Consider instead the slaughter that can be connected to this country’s much-vaunted “precision” air weaponry, which — so the claim has gone — can strike without causing what’s politely termed significant “collateral damage.”

Start with the drone, a robotic machine that guarantees one thing in the ongoing spectacle of slaughter: no American combatant will ever die in its operations, no matter how many Afghans, or Yemenis, or Iraqis, or Syrians, or Pakistanis, or Libyans, or Somalis may die when it releases its aptly named Hellfire missiles.  From that heroic investigative crew, theBureau of Investigative Journalism, we have an approximation of the casualties on the ground from Washington’s drone assassination campaigns across the Greater Middle East, and they run into the thousands (including hundreds of children) and lots of what might be called the mistaken dead.  Keep in mind that the most basic drone attack of Washington’s wars in the Greater Middle East has been the “signature strike,” as it’s euphemistically known.  These target not specific individuals, but groups on the ground that seem to fit certain behavioral patterns suspected of being telltale marks of terror outfits — particularly young men with weapons (in regions in which young men are likely to be armed, whatever their affiliations).

Or consider U.S. air strikes targeting the Islamic State’s forces in Iraq and Syria.  Again, with the grim exception of one Jordanian pilot, there have, as far as we know, been no casualties among American and allied combatants.  That shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Islamic State (like just about every group the U.S. Air Force has faced in the twenty-first century) is incapable of bringing down a fighter jet.  In the last year, according to a recent report, the U.S. and its allies have launched more than 5,700 strikes against Islamic State operations, claiming at least 15,000 dead militants. (Such figures, impossible to confirm on the ground under the circumstances, are undoubtedly fantasies.)  The Pentagon has acknowledged only two civilian deaths from all these strikes, but a new study by Airwars of what can be known about just some of them indicates that hundreds of civilians have died, including more than 100 children.

To offer one more example, since December 2001 U.S. air power has obliterated at least eight wedding parties in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen).  According to my count (and as far as I know there are no others), just under 300 people died in these eight strikes, including brides, grooms, and celebrants of every sort.  Each of these incidents was reported in the western media, but none had the slightest impact here.  They went essentially unnoticed.  To put this in perspective, imagine for a moment the media uproar, the shock, the scandal, the 24/7 coverage, if anyone or any group were to knock off a single wedding party in this country.

And this just scratches the surface of Washington’s long “global war on terror.”  Yet without an antiwar movement, the spectacle of mayhem and slaughter that has been at the heart of that war has passed largely unnoticed here.  Unlike in the Vietnam years, it’s never really come home.  In an era in which successes have been in short supply for two administrations, consider this a major one.  War without an antiwar movement turns out to mean war without pause, war without end.

Admittedly, American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century equivalents of the movies of my childhood.  Such films couldn’t be made.  After all, few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines advancing amid a pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the horizon, or the cowboy galloping off on his horse with his girl.  Think of this as onscreen evidence of American imperial decline.

In the badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of slaughter never ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes unnerved drone video analysts.  Could there be a sadder tale of a demobilized citizenry than that?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa urged supporters to defend the nation’s democracy and political progress achieved under its Citizens’ Revolution – an initiative implemented during his tenure.

On Monday, he said “(t)hey want to provoke the political divisions of the past, but they do not have the political legitimacy or strength to do so.”

A Thursday planned strike “will be a challenge not to the government, but to the entire country. Will we allow these remnants of the past to continue hurting our country or will we overcome them once and for all,” he asked?

Various trade unions and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) called for a nationwide strike for August 13. Other social and indigenous organizations reject it.

They called for national dialogue, announced a permanent vigil to defend Ecuadorian democracy, and expressed support for Correa’s policies.

National Secretary of Strategic Panning Pabel Munoz said thousands of people from hundreds of organizations participated in workshops discussing poverty reduction, increasing production and stimulating public and private investment.

Correa called for national dialogue after proposing inheritance and capital tax increases affecting wealthy Ecuadorians alone (a tiny fraction of the population) – to more fairly redistribute income to the nation’s less fortunate.

Coordinator of Social Movements – a coalition of around 100 organizations – oppose Thursday’s strike. CIA and other dark elements operating out of Washington’s Quito embassy actively try influencing indigenous groups to oppose Correa’s government with mixed results.

He warned of US meddling in Latin American countries it doesn’t control. He called on Ecuador’s police and military to prepare for strike action destabilization efforts.

“We need to be ready to confront them with the weapons of the law and the Constitution,” he said. He reminded them to obey orders from the “only legitimate power – the one that emanates from the sovereign people.”

“The maximum representative of this legitimate power is the president of the Republic” – not disruptive street crowds manipulated by internal and external dark forces for their own self-interest.

“They resort to violence and try to create financial terror,” he said. “The past of strikes, stones, blocked roads will not come back. Everyone to the streets to defend our roads, our progress, which has cost us so much….”

Disruptive elements “do not have the support, nor the legality, nor the legitimacy to destabilize one of the most popular (Ecuadorian) governments of history. That’s why they resort to violence and try to create financial terror,” he explained.

We will reply with more work and love of the homeland, but everyone go demonstrate democratically that we reject” disruptive dark forces. We are more, many more!

Former Ecuadorian indigenous leader/Conaie co-founder Miguel Lluco said “(t)he indigenous uprising is the highest level of protest that exists. If they going to use that, concurring with the right, it is because they have sold out the dignity of the nationalities and indigenous people of Ecuador to the right, and a consequence that is very grave and history will have to judge them.”

Lluco strongly criticized current Conaie president Jorge Herrera, elected in 2014. He “aligned himself with the interests of Ecuador’s right-wing” betraying indigenous Ecudorians he represents.

Lluco urged Ecuadorians to “close ranks…to defend the (nation’s) political process…to defend the interests of the great majority Ecuadorians, to defend the interests of the poor who have been excluded.”

Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorean Coast (INEC) president Olinda Nastacuaz believes Herrera and likeminded Conaie officials are tools of anti-populist dark forces.

INEC opposes Thursday’s strike action. “We are not going to act as a stepping stone for the right,” he said. Conaie leaders “lost their way.” Their vision is wrongheaded. They risk losing credibility altogether.

Shuar nation leader Maria Clara Sharupi says there’s little grassroots support for anti-government actions. “Wherever we find ourselves, we are going to say ‘no’ to this uprising and this mobilization. An indigenous uprising is sacred.”

What’s planned is being imposed by elements aligned with bankers and other elitist interests, she explained.

“I want to tell the bankers, the right, the opposition, those who seek to destabilize this country, the Amazon and the indigenous peoples, in this case the Shuar men and women, we are not your property,” she stressed.

National Confederation of Campesino, Indigenous, and Black Organizations official Franklin Columbia said “(o)ur bases gave us a clear mandate in last year’s assembly to continue supporting the political process of the Ecuadorian people led by the president of the republic.

Strike action is scheduled to begin on August 13. It remains to be seen if it gains traction – or whether pro-government strength renders it ineffective.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

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

 

A massive destruction of the Ottoman (Orthodox Christian) Armenian population in 1915−1916 is among the greatest atrocities committed during the WWI and for sure a first 20^th century case of the genocide as up to 1.500.000 ethnic Armenians were executed by the Ottoman authorities  and their collaborators. 

As a consequence, the survivors are scattered across the globe. Today it is already a century old event, but the issue of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is undoubtedly still alive and divisive political issue firstly between the Armenians and the Turks[1] but also and among the western “liberal democracies” on the question of their responsibility in the genocide[2] similarly to the question of the western indirect participation in the WWII Jewish holocaust.

Introduction

The Ottoman Empire, as all other empires in the world history, was multiethnic, multiconfessional, multilingual and multicultural state. At the eve of the WWI it was being located at three continents (Asia, Africa and Europe) with approximately two million Christian Armenians who have been living in historical-ethnogeographic Armenia, Istanbul and other towns within the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman empire committed genocide on the ethnic Christian Armenians, organized and realized a century ago, was one of the most comprehensive examples of ethnic cleansing ever happened and recorded. It started on April 24^th, 1915 in the Ottoman capital Istanbul (a Greek Constantinople) and soon was spread over the whole empire when thousands of well-known and well-to-do Armenians were firstly arrested and detained and later tortured and murdered. The organized genocide was over in August 1916 when its second phase happened (March−August 1916) with a massive killings of the Armenians who were at that time deportees in the Syrian Desert, in or around Del el-Zor. It is today estimated that the genocide cost up to 1.500.000 Armenian lives[3] what practically means that after the WWI left only a minority of the pre-war Armenian population (one quarter). In our days, as a direct consequence of the genocide from 1915−1916, for instance, it is very hard to find the Armenians living in the interior of Asia Minor (Anatolia, a word of the Greek origin that means the East).

Ideological background of the Armenian genocide

As all genocides, the 1915−1916 Arminian Genocide had its own ideological background.[4] In principle, if the mass killing is not based on certain ideology it is considered to be “just” the mass killing but not either the ethnic cleansing or the genocide.[5] Of course, every genocide ideology has its own historical background.[6]

The rapid process of decline of the Ottoman Empire (Sultanate) started with the Serb (1804−1815) national revolution and the Greek War of Independence (1821−1829) against the Ottoman yoke. Prior to the WWI the Ottoman authorities lost almost all their European possessions followed by the establishing of the French, British and Italian protectorates (colonies) in the Ottoman North Africa from 1830 to 1912. What concerns the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire; they had very important economic and financial influence before 1915. The Ottoman government throughout the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century was allowing to the Armenian financial and industrial elite to develop their businesses. The Armenians became even responsible for the Ottoman state’s mint, having in their hands cannon and shipbuilding industries and above all the Ottoman Armenians dominated trade in the country. Especially the Armenian businesses located in Istanbul were well known in Europe. Such economic prosperity of the Ottoman Armenian higher social strata gave a foundation for the Armenian national-cultural revival in the 19^th century and at the beginning of the 20^th century. The Armenian economic superiority can be seen the best perhaps from the very fact that there were 32 Armenian bankers out of total 37 throughout the Ottoman Empire.[7] However, the Armenian elite did not possess any political power in the Ottoman Empire for the very common reason and rules as this area of activity was reserved exclusively for the Muslim believers regardless on their ethnolinguistic origin.

Nevertheless, the year of 1889 is one of the most important turning points in the history of the Late Ottoman Empire as it was established illegal the Committee of Union and Progress (the CUP)[8] by a group of well-educated civil servants and military cadets with the ultimate political-national goal to stop further declination of the state which could bring the Ottoman Empire to the end of its existence. More immediate goal was to restore the 1878 Constitution which was proclaimed as a consequence of the 1877−1878 Russo-Ottoman War and the 1878 Berlin Congress. The establishers of the CUP were the Young Turks, the Turkish intellectuals imbued by the West European nationalistic theories, of whom majority have been living in Paris where they were spreading propaganda against the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876−1909). The CUP party’s leaders were Mehmed Talaat, Major Ismail Enver Pasha and Dr Bahaeddin Shakir – all three of them later became mostly responsible for the Armenian genocide in 1915−1916.

When the Young Turks took power in Istanbul in 1908 by the revolution their party’s ideology became more crystallized and threefold divided into the Ottomanism, Islamism and Turkism. The main ideological point developed by the CUP was that all Ottoman citizens have to accept the Turkish nationalism as the crucial ideological principle of the Ottoman state and society. Therefore, the policy of Turkification of the whole Ottoman Empire was unavoidable in the areas of language, confession, culture and ethics. However, as the Turks were the Muslims, a policy of Turkification in practice meant the Islamization of non-Muslim segments of the Ottoman society. Being already in power, the CUP government expressed open hostility towards non-Turkish and subsequently non-Muslim Ottoman population – a hostility that became the foundation of the Armenian genocide. A fact was that simultaneously with the declination of the state the party’s ideology, based on profoundly ethnic Turkish nationalism, was becoming more and more radicalized with, according to David Kushner, anti-Armenianism as one of the most radical issues.[9]

Three factors as the main causes of the Armenian genocide

There were three factors which mostly influenced the Ottoman instigated genocide of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915−1916:

1. The Ottoman loss of the First Balkan War and as a consequence the loss of almost all Ottoman land possessions in Europe in 1912−1913.
2. The putsch by the Young Turks of January 23^rd, 1913 during the First Balkan War.
3. The beginning of the WWI.
4. The First Balkan War started in October 1912 with the war declaration to the Ottoman Empire by Montenegro, Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria (the Balkan Alliance) for the sake to expel the Ottoman state from the Balkans and to share its Balkan possessions between themselves. Regardless to the German help in the improvement of the Ottoman military under the Young Turks the Ottoman army was in general not enough prepared and ill-equipped to successfully fight especially after the exhausting Italo-Ottoman War, 1911−1912 over the province of Libya. The Treaty of London signed between the Balkan Orthodox Christian states and the Ottoman Empire on May 30^th, 1913 left to the Ottoman state in Europe only a strip of land around Istanbul and as an aftermath it had a very deep traumatic impact on the Muslim segment of the Ottoman society. After the Balkan Wars of 1912−1913 the Armenians and Greeks became two largest Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire. As both the Orthodox Christians, it was only a question of time when both of them will experience the Muslim Ottoman revenge: the Armenians in 1915−1916 and the Anatolian Greeks in 1922−1923. After the Balkan Wars the Ottoman society, culture and even identity suffered a heavy blow that brought an idea of revenge including and an option of genocide as the most radical instrument of its realization. The CUP’s leadership well understood that after 1913 a project of the Ottoman identity was over as unrealistic and unacceptable by all non-Muslim subjects of the empire. However, the most important impact of the Balkan Wars to the Muslims of the Ottoman society, especially to its ethnic Turkish segment, was the creation of a mental schizophrenia of a “knife in the back” by the Christians of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP’s MPs openly were accusing in the parliament the Ottoman Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians for the state’s treason during the Balkan Wars.[10]
5. A new putsch by the Young Turks, who never have been elected to power, committed on January 23^rd, 1913 was the second factor of the main causes of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide. After the 1913 Coup a CUP’s dictatorship (Talaat-Enver) was established (1913−1918) that was followed by the restriction of a free-speech in the Parliament and terrorizing the members of the opposition. The final result of the putsch was a complete concentration of power in the hands of the CUP which started a policy of transformation of the Ottoman multiethnic society into a homogenous national state of the ethnolinguistic Turks. Such policy required either assimilation or extermination of non-ethnic Turkish Ottoman population. In addition, the course of the Armenian genocide was strongly influenced by the internal rivalry within the CUP’s dictatorship between Enver Pasha as the Ottoman military commander and Mehmed Talaat who was the civil leader of the empire.
6. Nevertheless, the beginning of the WWI was the crucial factor of the causes of the Armenian genocide. From the very start of the WWI it was clear which side the Ottoman Empire is going to support as the Ottoman government signed an agreement with Germany on close bilateral cooperation on August 2^nd, 1914 including and the issue of mobilization. The Ottoman army’s commander-in-chief Enver Pasha became directly responsible for the start of military operations against the Entente as he ordered to the Ottoman navy to bomb the Russian sea coast on October 29^th, 1914 without official proclamation of war. That was reason for the Entente to declare war on the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, the Armenian position became very delicate as the Armenians were living on the very border with Russia and as such they were seen by the Young Turk’s regime as a potential collaborators with the Entente and even as a dangerous “fifth column” in the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, from September 1914 the CUP’s government started with persecution of the Armenians by different means as, for instance, arbitrary war requisitions, arrests, closing the Armenian-language schools, banning Armenian political-national parties and societies, etc. The Ottoman Empire became officially at war with the Entente on November 11^th, 1914. For the Young Turks’ government the Ottoman participation in the WWI was a good opportunity for both recovering the empire and implementation of radical solutions to the acute internal cluster of problems. One of the crucial motifs for the participation in the war was territorial expansion of the empire that was possible only in the East, i.e. at the expense of Russia. However, on the very border with Russia there were the Armenians who were in principle supporting the Russian Empire as a potential liberator of them from the Ottoman yoke. Nevertheless, the Ottoman army suffered heavy losses as a number of the Ottoman invasions finished with catastrophic results. But the crucial point was that Enver Pasha accused exactly the Armenians for these abortive military campaigns as a nation who betrayed the Ottoman national interest. The Turkish propaganda openly accused the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire of state’s treason, calling the Turks and other Muslims to boycott all Armenian businesses and even it was spreading stories about alleged crimes against the Turks committed by the Armenian nationals. As a consequence, Mehmed Talaat Pasha on December 26^th, 1914 ordered the resignation of all government’s officers of the Armenian origin and arresting of all who defy these measures. From January 1915, more radical anti-Armenian policy was implemented as the Armenian-language newspapers are shut down and some of prominent Armenians, especially in Istanbul, have been arrested and later murdered.

A course of the Armenian genocide

The Armenian genocide was a deliberate action of systematic destructions, executions, dispossessions, deportations, forced assimilation, induced famine, ethnic cleansing and annihilation of material signs of the Armenian culture and national existence on the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Originally, the genocide started with the massive killings of the economic, religious, political and intellectual elite of the Armenian society in Istanbul on April 24^th, 1915, but it soon became a pattern for whole-range genocide on all segments of the Ottoman Armenian national elite throughout the empire who were arrested, imprisoned, terrorized and ultimately exterminated. The entire higher social and national strata of the Armenians became eliminated during only several weeks up to June 1915.[11] The executions of the Armenian dignitaries have been organized even on the public squares of the towns according to preserved documentary material (photos) in Armenian National Institute and Armenian Genocide Museum Institute in Yerevan.

The next and real genocide’s phase started when Mehmed Talaat Pasha as a Minister of Internal Affairs issued on May 23^rd, 1915 the official order for the ultimate deportation of all Armenian population. The CPU’s government of the Young Turks introduced new provisional Law of Deportation on May 29^th, 1915 which gave a legal provision for the beginning of the mass deportation of the ethnic Armenians to very inhospitable Syrian Desert’s city of Der el-Zor and its vicinity. This law was followed on June 10^th, 1915 by new law that was providing a legal ground for appropriation of the Armenian properties in business and trade. More precisely, it was a law on establishing of the Abandoned Property Commission[12] with the only task to organize collection of the Armenian properties after their deportation or killings. That was a final blow to the Arminian economy as all Arminian property simply became legally transferred to the Ottoman government and put to its disposition. The administration for the deportation of the Armenians was given to the Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants that was under direct authority of the Ottoman army. It is known that a Minister of Internal Affairs was all the time well informed about the course of deportation by telegraph correspondence and other means.[13] For the matter of illustration, for instance, there is a report by the German consul in Erzurum on deportation from Erzurum when around 40.000 Armenians living in the city were sent by force to Der el-Zor. According to the report, that was “an absolute extermination” of the Armenian city’s population.[14] During the march the Armenians were tortured and killed and their bodies are thrown to the Euphrates River. Finally, only about 200 Armenians from Erzurum succeeded to reach a city of Der el-Zor. In the other words, a destruction rate was in this case almost 100 percent.[15]

Very quickly after the start of the “Final Solution” of the Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire the Armenians were uprooted and bound for the Syrian Desert (by mid-July 1915). In many cases the Armenians had to travel around 1.000 km. throughout inhospitable territories during the hot summer time and constantly tortured by the Ottoman army who was escorting them to the final destination to which overwhelming majority never came. The essence of the whole issue is that the members of the Young Turks’ government in Istanbul knew very well that chances to survive on the road to the region of Der el-Zor are basically zero especially for the children, pregnant woman and elderly people. In fact, that was a “March of the Death”. Nevertheless, those survivors of the death march found simply nothing to be arranged for them. The bad living conditions in Der el-Zor caused a terrible famine at the beginning of 1916 to prolong a progress of genocide. Moreover, Talaat Pasha’s decision in the summer of 1916 was that too many Armenians survived the march to Der el-Zor, and consequently gave an order to the local city’s authorities to collect the Armenians into the surrounding caves and to exterminate them.

The forced loss of authentic ethnolinguistic, cultural or confessional identity is a part of the genocide definition accepted by the contemporary post-1945 international law. That was exactly implied to the Armenians in 1915 and after by the Young Turks’ regime as a part of the “Final Solution”. More precisely, the Armenians, especially children and women, had to renounce their original Christian (Orthodox) religion and identity and to be converted into Islam. The Armenian orphan children were placed in the Muslim orphanages (like in Konya or Beirut) where they became converted into Islam, allowed to speak only Turkish language and changed their original names into the Turkish according to the Ottoman pattern of “devshirme” (“taxation in blood” of non-Muslim subjects) from the 14^th to the mid-17^th centuries.[16] Therefore, many Armenian survivors of the march through the desert lost their collective national identity and original cultural-linguistic characteristics.

Material culture of the Armenians became destroyed or transformed into different purposes. The Armenian churches have been systematically destroyed and inscriptions in the Armenian language removed from the buildings. The purpose of such policy of genocide was clear and successful: to as much as eliminate cultural-national traces and roots of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Knowing that, it is “understandable” why the Turks destroyed a number of Armenian medieval churches and monasteries. As the Armenians have been understood as the first nation to accept Christianity, a destruction of their medieval Christian shrines by the Muslim Turks and Kurds had the feature of the “Clash of Civilizations”.[17] The destruction of Armenian material culture and private property, as in all similar cases of the genocide and ethnic cleansing, had at least a dual aim:

1. To make an impression that the Armenians as a nation never existed on certain territories.
2. To ensure that the Armenian survivors will never return back to their original places of living.

The cardinal perpetrators directly involved in the Armenian genocide have been the Turks and the Kurds (both Muslims) composed by almost all social strata. The main force taking open actions in the murdering of the Armenians were the Muslim bands of violent convicts who were at the beginning of the WWI released from the prisons to fight against the Russian troops. When the Armenian genocide started their new task has been to eliminate the Armenian population.[18] The main engineer of the genocide was Mehmed Tallaat Pasha as a Minister of Internal Affairs who created a propaganda framework of it by accusing all Armenians as a collective national body of high treason, disloyalty and practical sabotage actions against the Ottoman army and state. It is clear from his conversations with the German consul that his government has to use the war situation to get rid of all internal enemies of the empire but on the first place of all indigenous Christians. More precisely, the Turkification of the Asia Minor by ethnic cleansing of all Armenians was a prime goal of such policy. However, Dr Bahaeddin Shakir, as one of the most prominent CPU’s members, had a crucial role in the process of practical implementation of the genocide which had its second stage in 1916 from March to August when were the massive killings of the Armenian deportees in Syrian Desert and in vicinity of Der el-Zor.

Consequences

The Armenian genocide is one of the most important and influential instances of ethnic cleansing, people’s transfer and economic dispossession in the history of modern times. As the first 20^th century’s genocide, the Armenian genocide has to be, and is, taken into consideration as an example and pattern for subsequent genocides in the coming decades. As such, it is of cardinal historical significance, and it is critically important that today’s generations can properly understand this case study of inhumanity.

Before the act of genocide, the Ottoman Armenian community possessed around 2.600 churches, 450 monasteries and 2.000 schools. However, after the WWI around 3.000 Armenian settlements were depopulated. Today, the Armenian population in Turkey can be practically found only in Istanbul. Present day Armenian community in Turkey has only six churches and no single school or monastery.[19]

The evidences and records of genocide are numerous[20] but probably the most valuable archival material are gone forever when on November 2^nd, 1918 the ultra right wing members of the CUP burned documents before the government’s top politicians and main organizers of the genocide escaped the country in a German submarine to Odessa. A new liberal government of the Ottoman Empire on February 5^th, 1919 established a special tribunal in Istanbul for the war crimes which officially accused the previous Young Turks’ government of “deportation and massacre” but only after the British pressure. As a final result of a court procedure, the CUP’s government in April 1919 was sentenced to death[21] and the court proclaimed that:

“The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body… and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body”.[22]

However, probably and unfortunately, the cardinal consequence of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is a fact that this unpunished crime became a pattern for the other genocides in the 20^th century. It is clear at least in two cases:

1)  The Jewish holocaust during the WWII committed by the Nazi Germany’s NSDAP regime in occupied Europe.

2)  The Serb holocaust on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, 1941−1945 committed by the Ustashi Croat regime.

Namely, in both of these holocaust cases, a cardinal motif for the genocide was the fact that exactly the Armenian genocide became absolutely forgotten, no spoken and unpunished by the international community.[23] In the other words, if very soon after the genocide the world was not remembering the Armenians and not punishing the perpetrators of the genocide it can be very likely to be the same with the Jews and Serbs or with any other nation in the coming future.

Notes

Judas SYRIZA officials already agreed to perhaps the most severe neoliberal harshness measures ever imposed on a country other than conquered ones raped and pillaged by war.

Not enough says German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble. He demands more. The Financial Times said his ministry sent Eurozone counterparts a paper outlining his objections.

They’re scheduled to meet on Friday to decide whether to accept or reject already agreed on bailout terms. Germany’s finance ministry “denied that it was rejecting the deal and said it was only raising ‘some open questions that need to be addressed in the euro group,’ “ said the FT.

They include “delays in planned reforms, debt sustainability and the role of the International Monetary Fund…” Schauble is especially concerned about an agreed on 50 billion euro privatization scheme to be administered by German bank KfW he runs – as well as Greece’s ability to service its impossible to repay 320 billion euro foreign debt.

The FT quoted his paper saying “(f)inancing needs are higher than expected; debt sustainability is one of the most important open issues.”

Future IMF participation is uncertain. “Does (it) fully subscribe to the conditionality” terms – requiring greater austerity and other predatory measures for Greece to qualify for bailout disbursements and their timing?

“(L)egal documents…being prepared (to disburse funds) might have to finance ‘up to’ the whole package, depending on the IMF’s” involvement, said the FT.

Angela Merkel’s spokesman said it’s “important for us that the IMF remains on board.” It agreed to be part of the new bailout deal, but won’t decide until fall whether and how much it’ll contribute.

Schauble’s criticism leaves up for grabs whether a Fridayscheduled meeting of all Eurozone finance ministers will finalize already agreed on terms and begin bailout disbursements – in spaced out tranches, not all at once.

The FT indicated a “memorandum of understanding” underscores how hard it’ll be for SYRIZA to fully comply with agreed on terms – especially with splits in its government and overwhelming public opposition.

Terms imposed are “hard-nosed,” said the FT. Schauble wants them hardened. No matter how much he gets, he wants more.

Greece already is a Troika-controlled puppet state. Its sovereignty no longer exists. Social justice is disappearing altogether. Labor rights are gone.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said bailout terms agreed on won’t work. Schauble knows it. So do other Eurozone finance ministers, he explained.

“The International Monetary Fund…is throwing up its hands collectively despairing at a program that is simply founded on unsustainable debt…and yet this is a program that everybody is working towards implementing,” he added.

“Ask anyone who knows anything about Greece’s finances and they will tell you this deal is not going to work.”

It’s just a matter of time before it’s apparent to everyone. Then what? In the meantime, ordinary Greeks are victims of monied interests’ rapaciousness.

UK-based Global Justice Now director Nick Deaden called demands imposed on Greece the harshest he ever saw.

“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 programs imposed on Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1980s,” he explained.

It puts “Greece…up for sale, and its workers, farmers, and small business” owners have to pay the price.

Troika bandits declared financial war on Greek society. Greater than ever hardships for ordinary people lie ahead.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

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

Sweden will announce whether it will drop the majority of its preliminary investigation against Julian Assange, who has not been charged with a crime. Assange has been detained for nearly five years without charge.

If the case drops, Assange will still not be able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has remained for over three years under protection of asylum. The United Kingdom says it will arrest Assange anyway even if the Swedish case drops. Ecuador granted Assange asylum because of the US attempts to prosecuteAssange and WikiLeaks, a publishing organization, for espionage.

A US federal court confirmed in March that there are “active and ongoing” attempts to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks. The national security investigation involves espionage, conspiracy, and computer fraud, in response to WikiLeaks’ publishing activities since 2010. Last year, over fifty free speech and human rights organizations condemned the US Justice Department for its pending prosecution of WikiLeaks. The groups warn that prosecuting WikiLeaks sets a dangerous precedent that “could criminalize the newsgathering process and put all editors and journalists at risk of prosecution.”

“Assange has been detained for five years while the United States builds its case against Assange and WikiLeaks, and continues to threaten publishers and whistleblowers,” says First Amendment attorney Carey Shenkman, who represents Assange and WikiLeaks with Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

The United States cannot claim to protect First Amendment freedoms while prosecuting WikiLeaks. Prosecuting a publisher for exposing government abuses simply cuts the heart out of the First Amendment.

This year, it was revealed that the US government seized the e-mail accounts of WikiLeaks staff and numerous individuals associated with WikiLeaks, including US security expert and activist Jacob Appelbaum.

“At this point everyone wants the case in Sweden to go away,” said Shenkman.

“The UK and Ecuador want it to go away. The claimant in the case wants it to go away. Sweden did nothing for five years while multiple countries, dozens of international organizations, and countless legal experts slammed Sweden’s unjustified delays. This has happened to unacceptable cost to Assange’s health and family. Nobody deserves that in a civilized legal system.”

The China Threat continues to remain the plate du jour on the menu of American security commentators. It is also very much at the forefront of political chatter. But explicit statements of China as power monger, hungering to challenge US primacy, tend to be rarer. Hypocritical discretion is the think tank’s watchword.

Carly Fiorina’s comments on Wednesday were more explicit than most. Smelling the primaries and the need to latch on to a jingoist platform, the Republican presidential hopeful found targeting Beijing hard to resist. (She would seem to be capitalising on her performances at the last Republican debate.)

As always, she labours her experience on dealing with business and political leaders as a textbook example of probity, carefully avoiding any mention of her actual corporate record. This enables her to get a sense about the inner workings of Chinese behaviour, even if she seems somewhat short on the historical and cultural front.

Throw in a generous dash of ignorance, and we have the Fiorina world view on China, which seems very much that of an aggrieved American CEO, which is what she was, rather abysmally, when she was at Hewlett-Packard.

Earlier this year, she explained to the blog Caffeinated Thoughts that the US education system should not take China as a good model to mimic. As well as Chinese students had done relative to their lagging US counterparts in areas such as mathematics, they suffered one vital drawback. “I have been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate.”

US students, it would follow, do poorly at their exams but have skills in innovation. It doesn’t seem to Fiorina that these might go hand in hand – one can perform superbly in both exams and the realm of innovation. What the GOP presidential contender is seemingly against is the idea that a standardised education system is somehow fundamentally wicked.

Unevenness in delivering education is the name of the game, a recipe that lodges the entrepreneurial model into a floundering school system. “I agree that we must compete,” she explains in her inflated screed Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey (2015), “but we will not win by becoming more centralised and standardised in our education methods.”

Such a view enables her to then explain China’s insatiable appetite for acquiring intellectual property (of course, the US, busy powerhouse of innovation, would never do that sort of thing). “They are not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial, they don’t innovate, that is why they are stealing our intellectual property.”[1] For all of that, one wonder’s why the Chinese could even be a credible threat.

On Wednesday, the views about the Chinese system, and the Beijing agenda, were given a more generous airing. China, she argued on CBS This Morning had “made a bargain with their people” which involve economic gains in exchange for a “repressive totalitarian regime”.

In an odd way, Fiorina is describing a social contract, something which should be lauded given the similarly artificial agreement forged between the Founding Fathers and America’s citizenry. The sovereign will of the people has always been a fanciful, if brilliant notion arrived at by the cerebral workings of James Madison. It led to the US becoming a business empire run by set interests and elites ensconced in sinecures of wealth. That bargain has duly frittered away the Republic, which is similarly labouring under various mechanisms of less overt repression.

China as threat means that Fiorina is happy to provide advice, notably to President Barack Obama. If she was the one meeting China’s Xi Jinping next month, she would give the premier the proverbial finger of defiance. The US stance against Chinese territorial ambitions would be shored up. The “new Chinese aggression” would be combated with the assistance of regional allies.

I would say first that we are going to be more aggressive in helping our allies in that region push back against new Chinese aggression, whether those allies are Australia or Japan or the Philippines.

She insists on striking while the iron is hot – China’s wobbly economy means that a US show of strength is warranted. “I would be conducting, actually now, at a moment when China’s economy is wavering a bit, I would be conducting more flyovers on the South China Sea.”

In the true language of trade, finance and war, Fiorina is throwing down the gauntlet of a power in dire straits. While a weaker Chinese economy is not in Washington’s interest, the language suggests otherwise. The beast is wounded, and needs to be reminded about that fact. “We cannot permit China to control a trade route which passes $5 trillion worth of goods and services every year.”

There is no better recipe for war than those who keep belittling the virtues of peace while claiming they are preparing for conflict. Fiorina’s agenda against China is well and truly out of the closet, though it is only fitting to also note her own distinct inability to innovate when in positions of responsibility. Just ask the HP board on that score.

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

Notes

[1] http://time.com/3897081/carly-fiorina-china-innovation/

 

If one was only to read mainstream news in the West, you would probably be inculcated with the myth that Islamic State (ISIS) appeared almost out of thin air and many governments in the Western world have been completely shocked by the rise of this terror group. Perhaps you would correctly blame the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq as a major reason why such extreme groups gained power in the region, in addition to blaming certain governments for supposedly marginalizing Sunni’s.

But what most mainstream readers will be miserably ignorant of is the fact that one of the main opposition groups fighting the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria has been itself, a group that has been trained, funded, aided and armed by NATO countries in collusion with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel (to name a few). This reality has been completely omitted in numerous corporate media publications, once again demonstrating the inept and deceptive nature of mainstream news.

Some Western news outlets are still peddling the fallacy that the Obama administration misjudged the threat of , and was taken by surprise by the groups rise. Obama himself claimed in 2014 when responding to a question asking whether the US underestimated ISIS: “That their advance, their movement, over the last several months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the expectations of policy makers both inside and outside of Iraq.”

This narrative runs in stark contrast to a recently declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document from 2012 which was released by Judicial Watch after the watchdog group filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The DIA document warned:

ISI [the Islamic State of Iraq] could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria.” (p.5)

In a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera, the former head of the DIA, Michael T. Flynn, reiterates that the Obama administration was warned about the potential of extreme groups gaining influence in the region but instead of halting the support for the Syrian opposition, the administration took the “wilful decision” to support the rebels anyway:

Hasan (Interviewer) (From 11.15 onwards into the interview): “In 2012, your agency was saying, quote: “The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda in Iraq [(which ISIS arose out of)], are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” In 2012, the US was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups. Why did you not stop that if you’re worried about the rise of Islamic extremism?”

Flynn: “Well I hate to say it’s not my job, but… my job was to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be, and I will tell you, it goes before 2012. When we were in Iraq, and we still had decisions to be made before there was a decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011, it was very clear what we were going to face.”

Hasan (Interviewer): You are basically saying that even in government at the time, you knew those groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?”

Flynn: “I think the administration.”

Hasan (Interviewer): “So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?”

Flynn: “I don’t know if they turned a blind eye. I think it was a decision, a willful decision.”

Hasan (Interviewer): “A wilful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?”

Flynn: “A wilful decision to do what they’re doing… You have to really ask the President what is it that he actually is doing with the policy that is in place, because it is very, very confusing.”

It is quite obvious that NATO countries in conjunction with regional allies have been funding, arming and training an array of rebel bandits to overthrow the secular Syrian government for years now, although they have been unable to force regime change in Damascus so far.

In the 2012 declassified report from the DIA, the document reveals that the powers supporting the Syrian opposition – “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” – wanted to create a “Salafist principality in Eastern Syria in order to isolate the Syrian regime”:

Opposition forces are trying to control the Eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to the Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar), in addition to neighbouring Turkish borders. Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts… If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), 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). (p.5)

Shipping Weapons from Libya to the Syrian Rebels

Numerous reports in 2012 alleged that the US was sending heavy weapons from the military stockpiles of the former Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, to the Syrian rebels. Another formerly classified document released by Judicial Watch from the US Department of Defense (DOD) reveals that the White House was at least aware of arms shipments from Libya to Syria, although the document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons:

Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles… The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.] (DOD Document)

This is all part of a long term strategy by the West to overthrow regimes that are not subservient to Western interests. NATO’s 2011 war in Libya has already forced regime change in the North African country, with the West still working on bringing down the Syrian regime. Both countries were listed as enemies of the US by the neoconservative thinktank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in their 2000 report, long before the illegal 2011 war in Libya and the ongoing proxy war in Syria. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were also onPNAC’s hit list.

Further illustrating the fact that many of the wars and proxy wars we have witnessed in recent years were premeditated operations by imperial powers, the former French minister of Foreign Affairs, Roland Dumas, revealed that the war in Syria was “prepared, preconceived and planned” at least “two years before the violence” erupted. Dumas said he was approached in the UK by “top British officials” to see if he would participate in “organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria”, a proposal Dumas refused, but it is clear that many others within the Western establishment did not.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, he is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and is known for a number of high-profile cases involving human rights and war crimes, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Yuval Diskin, the former Shin Bet head, wrote with bitter irony in a Facebook post over the weekend that Israel was becoming an apartheid regime, or, in his words, “a state based on Jewish halachic law in which a divided Jewish minority rules the Palestinian majority in its midst by force.” According to Diskin, instead of establishing a Palestinian state in the territories conquered in 1967, “a ’state of Judea’ has been established there, controlled by anarchist ideologies opposed to the state, violent and racist.” The man who headed the security agency from 2005 to 2011 stressed that Jewish terrorism — “a cancer in the body of the state” — has been developing for years before the very eyes of the top political, judicial and defense echelons. He diagnosed a lack of leadership and direction as the main cause of this dangerous malady.

And, indeed, Israel is experiencing an acute deficiency of leadership. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have successfully run a public relations agency. He may find a way to douse the fires set by that “state of Judea” that burn people in their sleep, damage mosques and destroy fields. But putting out fires is not leadership. Spreading lies about the Arab minority to delegitimize it (on election day, Netanyahu said, “They are heading to the polling stations in droves”) and boasting of superior Jewish morality (“We deplore and condemn these murderers. We will pursue them to the end.”) versus the murderous Palestinians (“They name public squares after murderers of children.”) are all, at best, a dead end, and in the worst case, these roads lead to a precipice.

Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip, where a military achievement was turned into a diplomatic failure, clearly illustrates the price of the absence of leadership and lack of strategic direction. Soon after the operation, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said that Hamas found itself in diplomatic and strategic distress. Quite right. But the question is what Israel gained from this distress. Ya’alon went on to boast that the organization “has lost touch with the Muslim Brotherhood and with Syria and Iran.” Too true. But one should examine how Israel took advantage of the enemy’s diplomatic isolation.

A year after the operation, it now seems that Israel is the one finding itself in diplomatic and strategic distress, the likes of which it has not known for years. Its government has weakened the special relationship it maintained with much of the world. The Israeli Cabinet itself unanimously declared that the six strongest states on Earth had signed a “bad deal” with Iran, the entity considered in Jerusalem to be an existential threat to the Jewish state. Criticism of the occupation keeps mounting, and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is gaining momentum. Internal tensions in Israeli society, especially between right and left and between Jews and Arabs, are growing stronger.

On the other hand, Hamas, which lost out on the battlefield, is racking up achievements in the diplomatic arena. In contrast to Israel, the organization has learned its lessons from the latest conflict and is putting them to good use. While the Israeli leadership is bogged down in its all-or-nothing quagmire,Hamas is adopting a pragmatic approach. The extent of the change can be gauged from a new article on the official Hamas website written by Yousef Rizka, the former minister of information in the Hamas government and a close adviser to former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Matti Steinberg of the Israel Democracy Institute told Al-Monitor that Rizka’s lengthy article, published in Hamas’ electronic library, reflects a dramatic change in the movement’s political thinking. The writer states that the organization’s charter (which calls for the destruction of the “Jewish entity”) is no longer relevant to its diplomatic conduct.

Steinberg stresses that this provides Hamas with room to maneuver, enabling it to adopt more flexible postures without changing its ideological doctrine. Thus, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, was able to travel to Meccalast month and sit beside King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. This is the same Saudi Arabia that Israel views as a partner in the struggle against the Iran nuclear deal. This is the same Saudi Arabia that bears the standard of the Arab Peace Initiative, which offers Israel recognition of its 1967 borders and normalization of ties with the Arab world. To top it all off, Meshaal has also beeninvited to visit Moscow. From Egypt, where the organization has been outlawed, newer, more temperate winds are blowing toward Hamas. At the same time, Hamas is giving Iran a bit of a cold shoulder. The deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzouk, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the relationship between the organization and Iran has not thawed to the point of normalization.

As part of the conclusions it is drawing and the renewed planning for extricating itself from its distressing predicament, first and foremost from the blockade of Gaza, Hamas is offering Israel a long-term truce. Though it is not saying so publicly, calm on the Israeli front will allow the organization to block the infiltration of the Islamic State into the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, a quiet southern arena could help restore calm in the West Bank and prepare the ground for a diplomatic thaw in relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA). As Uri Savir wrote for Al-Monitor, citing sources in the PA, if a Palestinian state is not established within two years, on the 50th anniversary of the occupation, there will apparently be no stopping a violent eruption. Palestinian and Jewish zealots will grab each other by the throat and not rest until they light a fire under the Temple Mount and set the Middle East ablaze.

The Jewish terrorists who burned to death the toddler Ali Dawabsheh and his father are the successors of Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer who killed Muslim worshipers during prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Following that, in February 1994, late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin missed an opportunity to display his commitment to ending the occupation and to confront the “Kingdom of Judea” with determination. Instead of taking advantage of the shock and disgust among the Israeli public at the murder of 30 Palestinians and evacuating Hebron’s Jewish Quarter, Rabin sealed off the area to the Palestinians. The message to the Palestinians was that domestic peace with the settlers was more important to Israel than peace with its neighbors.

Instead of trying to catch the deadly mosquitos with administrative detention nets and hollow war cries, Netanyahu should learn the lesson of the 1994 massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Instead of continuing to wallow in the swamp where the mosquitos fester, he must dry it up. One can start with the evacuation of a half-dozen illegal West Bank outposts. Diskin signed off his prophecy of rage, “One must wait until things get worse, in order for things to maybe get better. … Only then will we start to understand that we must save this incredible Zionist enterprise called the State of Israel, which is growing farther and farther away from the vision of the founding fathers.”

Translated by Ruti Sinai.

Gambit I was the start of false accusations by the then Bush Administration in 2007 that Iran was preparing a nuclear weapon, when in fact Iran had no such ambitions at all, but a plan to open an Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) in Teheran, an international hydrocarbon exchange, where all countries, hydrocarbon producers or not, could trade this (still) principal energy source in euros, as an alternative to the US dollar. This would have devastated the dollar as a hegemonic fiat currency – still used on false trust as the main world reserve currency

(see http://www.globalresearch.ca/dollar-hegemony-and-the-iran-nuclear-issue-the-story-behind-the-story/5441966).

When Saddam Hussein had a similar plan in 2000, to sell Iraq’s hydrocarbons in euros as soon as the illegal US imposed UN oil embargo ended, Iraq was bombed to ashes. After the Shock and Awe attack in March 2003, Iraq was turned into a gigantic, chaotic mess of CIA and US military guided civil strife, mass suicide bombings and a battlefield without frontiers that to this day claimed more than one and a half million lives – and mounting. Shock and Awe is a military doctrine, written in 1996 by Harlan Ullman and James Wade, two military strategists, as a tool to achieving rapid dominance, the product of the National Defense University – applicable at any time again, if and when the Pentagon pressed by the military industrial complex deems it necessary. Shock and Awe is also the leading strategy for a ‘preventive first strike attack’, a euphemism to justify any Washington / Pentagon aggression.

But Iran is not Iraq. As a prelude to full dominance, both countries were terribly weakened by the Washington instigated Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, the longest conventional war of the 20^th Century, where the US participated on both sides through proxies and weapon deliveries, as usual when universal destruction of both sides is sought. US funded militias of Kurdistan were siding with Iran, and Iranian Mujahidins also supported by Washington, were fighting with Ba’athist Iraq. More than a million people died in that war – and countless more were injured and made homeless. While the borders of the two countries remained intact, both countries’ infrastructure and military capacity was devastated. Exactly the way Washington wanted it. Because Pax Americana, the precursor to the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century), both thought out, written and strategized on behalf of the US State Department, by Washington Zionist think-tanks (sic), already then foresaw that both states had to fall in order to allow the tandem, the wagging tail – Israel – and the barking dog – the US of A – to become the hegemon of the Middle East, stealing its resources and destroying Israel’s imaginary enemies, the Islamic nations that surrounded it.

Iran’s fake and invented ‘nuclear threat’ was a perfect pretext for the US succumbing to Israel’s pressure in 2007, pressure exerted by the all-powerful AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) in the US Congress. This was then; I call it Gambit I.

In the meantime, most of the same US intelligence agencies that assured the US government in 2003 that Iraq had no WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), declared also that Iran had no intentions to develop nuclear weapons. Under pressure from Israel, these intelligence reports were ignored by the Zionist owned and directed Anglo-Saxon mass media covering 90% of news propagated to the west. Instead, the world was manipulated to believe that Iran is a threat not only to Israel and the Middle East, but to the world at large.

At the initiative of the US, the UN Security Council in 2006 passed Resolution 1936 imposing sanctions affecting mostly Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemical sectors, other commercial dealings and confiscation of Iranian assets abroad. The pretense was that Iran refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program which the West was made to believe would serve in developing nuclear arms. Iran assured they wanted to use enriched uranium for energetic and medical purposes.

Initially even the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that there was no evidence that Iran pursued manufacturing an atomic bomb. In fact, the IAEA asserted that Iran’s enrichment process reached a mere 20%, far from the 97% necessary for a nuclear bomb, for which at least another 7-10 years were needed. But as all international agencies have to bend to the bidding of the naked emperor, the IAEA also changed its discourse.

Under a barrage of propaganda and lies, Iran had to be made a pariah state. The so-called leaders of the West (sic) know of course better. They know that the only threats to the Middle East and the world are the two rogue states, Israel with more than 200 nuclear warheads and the US with a nuclear power that could destroy the planet several times over. But nobody dares talking about it. Especially Israel can never be critically mentioned. Faced with Israeli-Zionist atrocities, the public has to shut-up, lest it will be accused of anti-Semitism.

To the detriment of the Iranian population, their country was put under a strict sanctions program in the hope that people would stage a coup, overturning their elected government, so that yet again, Washington could place its puppet at the helm of this proud and impressive Islamic nation, like in 1953, after the CIA overdrew and assassinated the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Only in 2013 – 60 years later – the CIA admitted their involvement in the coup.

As a coup did not happen – enters Gambit II. By now the western world is convinced that Iran has to be put on her knees; that she constitutes a nuclear threat to the world. So-called negotiations of the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, UK and the US + Germany) for the elimination of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, took place several times in Geneva. On each occasion Iran was utterly humiliated by John Kerry, the personification of US arrogance. Finally on 2 April 2015, meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, the P5+1 and Iran reached a provisional framework agreement which was expected to lead eventually lifting most of the sanctions, against severe limits to Iran’s nuclear agenda. In fact so severe, that Iran’s peaceful nuclear research program is devastated. While the agreement is hailed as an Iranian success – it represents loss and humiliation – in return for the lifting of western sanctions – maybe.

Now that the deal is ready to be voted on by Congress in September 2015, Netanyahu is all out viciously campaigning in the US Congress – yes you read correctly, in the Congress of another sovereign state – against the deal – a deal which as it stands is a mere slap in the face of Iran.

AIPAC is spending millions in propaganda and lie campaigns – and in literally buying US Congressmen to vote against the pact.

In a recent Huffpost, David Bromwich wrote “Benjamin Netanyahu is laying siege to the Congress of the United States, not for the first time. He has thrown his voice and channeled his influence into the arena of American legislative politics, to abort the P5+1 nuclear settlement with Iran…” – Bromwich goes on referring to a strategic document called a “Clean Break”, written largely by Zionist neocon war-monger Richard Perle. The memorandum calls for Israel to break free from diplomacy, once and for all; i.e. no more negotiations with Palestine – not even the resemblance of negotiations – towards the creation of a separate state. The memorandum propagates the idea of Israel, with the help of Washington, becoming the dominant power of the Middle East. That means that three countries had to fall or to be messed up into chaos – Iraq, Syria and Iran. They also happen to be countries singled out for destruction by the PNAC – and so far the plan is by and large on schedule.

Israel / AIPAC bullying goes even further. AIPAC has fully financed a trip to Israel for 58 members of the US Congress from 4 – 10 August. These lawmakers were commanded by Netanyahu directly – if they wanted to continue receiving (financial) support in the future of prominent Jewish donors. The servile Congressmen accepted to fly to Israel, rather than to visit their home constituency, as is tradition in Congress’s summer break.

There is hardly anything that beats such stark corruption – openly committed by the state of Israel and obviously in full consent with the Charter of the US Congress. Corruption is rampant and there seems to be no US law against it. And the US public, the constituents of the corruptees? – They close their eyes, or don’t even know what’s happening.

Now Obama, a lame duck, in his last year of Presidency, is coming out accusing Netanyahu and his gang that they are intending to derail the Iran deal. Obama appears to be angry at Israel’s influencing the US Congress. He says “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war. Those are — those are the options.”

As if Obama didn’t know before that his make-believe nemesis, Netanyahu, would never approve of any deal with Iran, no matter how devastating and humiliating it is for Iran. Netanyahu wants the outright destruction of the Islamic Republic of Iran, hence it was written in the PNAC and in Richard Perle’s “Clean Break”.

If Obama, who boasts of being involved in 7 (seven) wars around the world, was serious about reigning in Israel, he could have done that years ago and could still do it today. How? – by simply withholding the US$ 3 billion annual US tax payers ‘grant’ Israel receives from Washington in the form of budget subsidies and weapons – still as a result of the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt, brokered in 1978 by then President Carter.

The Gambit II is crystal clear; Obama attempts to make the world believe that he laments Israel’s boycotting the P5+1 Iran agreements, when in fact he knew from the very beginning that Israel strives, as does Washington, for regional and world subjugation. He would have the power to control Israel through many different means, including withholding of the US$ 3 billion US tax payers allocation, as well as declaring Israel / AIPC’s corrupting of the US Congress as illegal. But with the US-Israeli joint objective of world dominance in mind, countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria are not allowed to regain their national sovereignty. To achieve this any means are accepted. These countries have to be subdued under whatever pretext. So – Netanyahu is doing Obama a great favor. – Never mind the brainwashed European and American public, Russia and China, both interested in a free and peaceful Middle East will surely not fall for this latest abject Washingtonian scam.

In the face of some rather worrying indicators in recent months, we have got to the point of asking ourselves the question of the likelihood of a return of European wars looking out to 2020. Actually, it’s not because our team continues to see the crisis’ exit tracks falling into place, that it doesn’t keep watch over the remaining obstacles on the path to these exits; obstacles which to us seem to be of two kinds essentially :

• first, the efforts of the world before’s masters to keep control, anachronistic conflicts and rooted in the past, caused by increasingly isolated, but also increasingly aggressive powers, amongst whose number there remains especially, but not only, the US military ;
• second, what are the « natural » sparks, likely to give birth to enormous friction between tectonic plates, the best image evoking the geopolitical rebalancing underway.

Summary of the article :

1. Perspectives : NATO, the IMF, divisions, Grexit… Looking out to 2020: the return of European wars ?
2. Telescope : 2015-2020 – The wide-reaching isolation of « hard line America »
3. Focus : Greek crisis : the temptation to close the door on the IMF

Our team has decided this month to make public the chapter called : “Greek crisis : the temptation to close the door on the IMF”

Greek crisis : the temptation to close the door on the IMF

To believe our media, it would seem that the whole world is hanging onto the Greek agreement sought by the EU, the ECB and the IMF. Between sudden developments and stalemate the tension is rising and from now on a Greek payment default isn’t excluded[1]. Cataclysm or opportunity?

Greece will stay in the Eurozone

As we have always said, and continue to say, Greece will stay in the Eurozone. It’s strange that, until just recently, all the media associated default and Grexit. This time has passed : the two problems are henceforth clearly separated, as they should be, and it’s a sign that Greece will keep the single currency. Whether it defaults is a possibility on the other hand. And if it’s the case, this will be a deliberate default, organized and even planned, between Europeans. The Greek case hasn’t been under the global microscope for the last six years for the outcome of the crisis to happen in an unexpected fashion.

Besides we are seeing the Eurozone being taken in hand politically, with Merkel and Hollande who want a “strengthening of the Eurozone” [2] with Juncker who is breathing life into a new political energy and, with Sigmar Gabriel (the German Vice Chancellor) and Emmanuel Macron (the French Minister of the Economy) who are demanding a “radical integration” of the Eurozone[3]. Clearly, all this isn’t very compatible with a disorderly Greek exit from the Eurozone. Neither Juncker nor Tsipras, who have been struggling for months to get an agreement, expect a Grexit. A Grexit which is only a fantasy of the financial markets and the media.

The IMF : a thorn in the European Foot

Certainly, this Grexit had been sought, deliberately or not, by some players in the poker game currently being played, and particularly the Washington player. Everyone knows the IMF’s historical position as regards managing sovereign debt. The Greek case is no exception : of the three members of the troika, the IMF is by far the most ideologically exacting in its requests as regards Greece[4].

If the Greek tragedy has lasted so long, it’s not the size of the problem which is in question. To be sure it was necessary to inject around 240 billion€ into the Greek economy – or rather into the Greek banks and financial system, so that they didn’t collapse (which would have risked dragging down the whole European system). An amount which only represents a quarter of the ECB’s QE, for example, or a small part of the European recovery and bank support plans.

No, if the Greek tragedy has lasted for so long it’s because there is another reason. The Germans don’t want to pay ? They are not the only ones to pay (they only represent 22% of funds lent), and they have always done so up until now, without too much fuss in the end. Rather go and look for the reason at the IMF, its excessive demands and far too neoliberal for the European continent. An “ally” imposed by Washington in 2010 but which represents less than 20% in aid (of which more than half has now been repaid); a troublesome ally which Europe would like to get rid of so as to manage its problem alone, without US interference. Especially since it has finally created the means of resolving this problem, thanks particularly to the EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility), then its successor the ESM (European Stability Mechanism).

The ideal opportunity to get rid of the IMF

The outcome of the Greek problem is therefore intimately linked to the resolution of the IMF one. A problem which is worth “no more than” 21 billion Euros.

Many sources are skeptical that Greece has the amount demanded by the IMF as that 30 June (1.6 billion Euros) and the Interior Minister himself has ruled out an IMF repayment without outside help[5].

To believe the Minister of the Economy, Yanis Varoufakis[6] (who laments the method used and would have liked to negotiate directly with the European Member States), the troika has actually never really negotiated and satisfies itself with imposing its requirements. One way to play poker by betting that Greece would fold its hand ? Perhaps. But especially a technocratic management of a Greek crisis with clear political implications… and a very risky game because the messages sent by the Greek government to the European people (whether it be Tsipras’ platform or Varouflakis’ interviews in the European newspapers) are clear and our finishing by bearing fruit : who doesn’t understand that they are right[7] and that they have, moreover, put in an extraordinary willingness to continue negotiations without using their decisive argument – default and Eurozone exit ?

This is the idea that we have supported for several months already, that there is a tacit agreement between Greece and the Eurogroup, where the Tsipras government has been sent into battle against the IMF and its unreasonable demands.

Will European leaders have the courage to take on an outright payment default by Greece ? Probably not because the consequences are quite unpredictable[8]. But another normal solution exists, as Varoufakis mentions : that the ESM (which was created for this) advance the money that Greece owes to the IMF[9]. No payment default, European solidarity and an ousting of the IMF (since the latter would be fully reimbursed) : there are many advantages to this solution. This would even suit the IMF, because it clearly understands that everyone is now in the same boat and that it’s better to be repaid by Europe than to continue pouring oil on the flames and risk the whole financial system exploding. And then, let’s imagine for a second the message a refusal of Greek reimbursement to the IMF would send towards all this institution’s debtors. Does the IMF really envisage going to the end of reason ? Or isn’t this, as we have thought for several months, only a piece of showmanship between players who all have an interest in change and for that need a situation of extreme tension to justify their moves ?

The Varoufakis solution is undoubtedly the right compromise. But if it really can’t be applied, there is another one, more violent and unpredictable but with the same potential for ending the crisis.

Payment default in the Eurozone : dream or nightmare ?

In reality, at the point where the negotiations are, the other most credible alternative now is the most violent : let Greece default partially. A priori this would require far more political courage than our leaders are capable of – unless European procrastination pushes Tsipras to the limit (one mustn’t forget that here he has a big card up his sleeve). According to our team this option is, therefore, unlikely. That said it would have interesting consequences and increasingly less taboo.

Actually, it would require an examination of Eurozone debts from all sides (and possibly global). Because why relieve Greece of part of its debt when Spain, Italy, Portugal or France, for example, are also struggling with their debt ? This would have the merit of launching some thought on the subject[10], with the possibility of purely and simply wiping off a portion of public debt[11].

Private debt has been changed into sovereign debt which is crushing the states, and not only Greece, henceforth incapable of the least action of economic revitalization. A forced cleansing through a partial and thought out default would certainly have disagreeable consequences for some parasite financial establishments, but it would finally be a way of balancing the system – this balancing which is the key to exiting the global systemic crisis.

Therefore, it’s a great temptation to organize a non-reimbursement of certain creditors or the IMF and initiate a debt cancellation process, especially in a context of rising interest rates which are about to undo all the austerity efforts made by indebted countries

The whole negotiation around the emblematic Greek case is undoubtedly, above all and especially, a good time for thought and preparation of the application of a final solution which could, after all why not, entail pushing the Greeks to trigger the large bomb cancelling the debts which are crushing the planet.

But our prognosis is, all the same, the choice of a “reasonable” solution of transferring debt to the Eurozone marking the resumption of the continent’s financial independence…

 

Notes

[1] Source : Le Monde, 13/06/2015.

[2] Source : Reuters, 26/05/2015.

[3] Source : The Guardian, 03/06/2015.

[4] “The IMF still taking a hard line”; “The IMF more demanding than the Commission”… Source : Le Monde, 27/05/2015.

[5] Source : RT, 25/05/2015.

[6] Read this very clear interview: Tagesspiegel, 09/06/2015.

[7] A recent example concerns a remark by Varoufakis pleading not guilty over the government’s incapacity to deal with the tax evasion question taking account of the fact that the country’s legal system was at a halt through lack of money (see the previous link). How to reply to that ?

[8] The stakes are well summarized here : Bloomberg, 25/05/2015.

[9] Another solution : that ECB QE finally benefits Greece

[10] Some have already begun : 60% of French public debt would be “illegitimate”. From there to clearing it is only one step. Source : The Guardian, 09/06/2014.

[11] At a minimum, clearing the debt held by other European States can’t hurt, but the amounts aren’t very high.

With a bounty on his head for complicity that led to a million or more deaths an invasion based on lies and a dossier full of allegations of conflict of interest, Tony Blair declared guilty as a war criminal by the People’s Court has arrived in Sri Lanka for 2 weeks. More than suspicious having browsed through the portfolio of side-dealings associated with Blair ever since he left office in 2007. Not motivated by money, he says read on to understand how he represents the imperial agenda that is now slowly descending on Asia having destroyed the Middle East and neutralized the American public into a nation suffering the ills of Western liberalism.

If Iraq was an invasion based on lies it means that everything that followed were also lies. What about the highly classified program of secret detention and ‘extraordinary rendition’ of terrorist suspects who were seized and secretly flown across national borders to be interrogated by foreign governments that used torture, or by the CIA itself in clandestine “black sites” using torture techniques. Ranil Wickremasinghe PM in 2002 collaborated with the US torture/rendition program and allowed CIA to use the international airport as a transit point. These tortures were violations of international humanitarian law & Geneva Conventions.

In inquiry into Britains role in Iraq was ordered by PM Gordon Brown in 15 June 2009 and headed by Sir John Chilcot. That report is unlikely to be released on account of the damaging contents and the implications to the UK Govt and Tony Blair in particular.

Why Tony Blair is a War Criminal

• Blair committed a crime against peace under Nuremberg Principles “planning, preparing, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”. Iraq war was a crime of aggression and violated Article 33 and Article 51 of the UN Charter
• Blair knowingly broke international law – 8 months before Iraq invasion Lord Goldsmith senior legal advisor in the British Government informed Blair that attacking Iraq would be a breach of international law/UN Charter. Lord Goldsmith stated that Britain could not use ‘self defense’ because Iraq had not threatened Britain. Blair ignored Goldsmith’s letter and banned him from attending cabinet meetings and denied him going public.
• Blair ignored his own Cabinet – Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s advice that Britain had no legal conditions for war were ignored.
• Blair lied that the UN Security Council Resolution 1441 authorized war. This resolution passed on 8 Nov 2002 gave Iraq a final opportunity to comply with disarmament obligations but the Resolution did not authorize war.
• Blair lied, deceived and mislead the British to hype a false threat from Iraq to justify war.
  • Example 1: In April 2002 Blair claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical & biological weapons (inspite of British intelligence saying the contrary a month before)
  • Example 2: Blair claimed publicly that Iraq posed a regional threat. The previous month a cabinet paper says Saddam was not a serious threat to neighbors.
  • Example 3: Bush and Blair in a joint press conference quoted IAEA to claim Iraq was 6 months away from developing a nuclear weapon. IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky denied the agency issued such a report.
  • Example 4: Blair claimed in September 2002 that Iraq had “existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons which could be activated within 45 minutes” Another lie.
• Documents released by the US have revealed that thousands of pounds worth of gifts had been exchanged between George Bush and Tony Blair all of which were not declared. Mr Blair received undeclared gifts worth £2,700.

Blairs lies & illegal war on Iraq has resulted in

• At least 108,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (Iraq Body Count Project) following the 2003 March invasion
• Tens and thousands of Iraqis are wounded, traumatized and millions are displaced.
• Lies & an illegal war has left 5000 military personnel dead
• The environment of Iraq is destroyed having dropped banned chemicals
• Children are born deformed, water is polluted, there is no end to bombing.
• Iraq is being divided using imperialist agents the ISIS to create a buffer zone for the West, advertisements selling property to Westerners are a clue of what is in store.
• The whole nation of Iraq has been destroyed following a meticulous plan by a handful of people whose sadism and greed knows no bounds.

Tony Blair the Imperialist :

• UK Telegragh Jun 2015 article discloses Blairs business empire
• UK taxpayer is paying upto £16,000 a week to help the former prime minister who travels round the world with police bodyguards, flying private sets and staying in 5-start hotels to build his business empire (conflict of interest in joining private and official trips) Tony Blair Inc spent £57m in four years
• Blair had visited 5 countries a week costing the public between £14,000 and £16,000
• Blair secured a £1.1 million private consultancy contract (through his firm Tony Blair Associates) with the World Bank the same Bank he works with as Middle East envoy representing UN, US, EU & Russia. While negotiating as envoy for funding for Palestine he is also involved in personal commercial deals. At times official assistance is solicited for personal business interests including briefs on countries! Blurring the lines between official and commercial activities has become a hallmark of Blair
• Blair is also friends with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia
• Blairs 2 companies Windrush Ventures Limited and Windrush Ventures No.1 Limited is said to pay money for Blair’s Government Advisory Practice.
• In 2007 Blair charges £200,000 to give a speech to businessmen & government officials in China & is criticized by local media for his fees.
• Blair created charity African Governance Initiative (AGI) begins advising Rwandan and Sierra Leone Government as well as Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson. In Dec 2011 he starts advising the Guinea government to improve image after mass civil unrest. In August 2012 his AGI starts advising Malawi President. His next stop was Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• In January 2008 it was reported that Blair was earning around £2million annually from Wall Street bank JP Morgan for strategic advice on global poltiical issues! he visited Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan in his capacity as paid adviser to JP Morgan
• In 2008 for £5million annually a Swiss financial company says they signed up Blair to advise on developments and trends in the international political environment.
• Also in 2008 Blair signs up with South Korea’s UI Energy Corporation to advise it on oil in US & Iraq.
• In 2009 Blair visits Gaddafi in Libya meeting him 6 times in 3 years since 2007. Blair flies on a private jet paid by Gaddafi. Blair sets up Firerush Ventures Limited and thereafter Firerush Ventures No.1 Limited to advise on sovereign wealth funds
• Tony Blair Associates announces in July 2009 its deal to advise Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala worth more than £44billion.
• Tony Blair Associates secures contract with PetroSaudi oil for £41,000 a month and a two per cent commission on any of the deals he helps broker
• Blair also strikes a deal with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev to advise him (Nov 2011) and to manage his image after slaughter of unarmed civilians
• In Dec 2011 Blair begins advising Guinea government
• Blairs role in Vietnam was to provide a team of consultants to work in Vietnam funded by UAE (Islamization of Vietnam!)
• Blair also struck a deal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to advise Peru on public-private partnerships (PPP) – which may be one reason why he’s in Sri Lanka!
• Blair says his involvement in Myanmar is pro-bono.
• In 2013 Blair begins contract with Mongolia – perfect time as Mongolia just discovered copper and gold!
• Blair Associates also begins advising Albania, Blair’s wife Cherie’s law firm, Omnia Strategy also gets appointed to act on behalf of Albania in a £250 million legal dispute
• Blair is also involved in Colombo where a deal enables his firm to monitor redistribution of billions earned by Colombia’s mining.
• Blair began advising Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta through his African Government Initative (AGI). Incidentally Kenyatta has been indicted by the ICC for killings in 2007 but later cleared.
• Blairs work in Serbia was funded by UAE
• In May 2015 Blair stepped down as Quartet representative after criticism about his diplomatic role being compromised with his lucrative consultancy work/business deals with governments around the world.
• Between May 2010-Oct 2012 Blair has visited Argentina, the USA, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Oman, Jordan, Israel, Qatar, China, Kazakhstan, and Burma
• USAID awards $625,965 (£405,000) to Cherie Blair’s charity Foundation for Women
• USAID awarded Blairs African Government Intiaitve £550,000 in 2011
• Tony Blair is facing accusations that his multifaith charity has links to an Islamic extremist group – The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which was established in 2008 to help combat extremism, is being advised by a Muslim leader who is alleged to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood
• The level that Tony Blair can stoop to can be understood by reading thishttps://thenewlibyareport.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/41/
• Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to Washington between 1997 and 2003 described Mr Blair as “more evangelical than the American Christian Right”.

To cap off lies that led to a destruction of a nation, the sophisticated network of dealings is Blair’s promiscuity having made headlines by headlines around the world last year following sensational allegations he had an affair with Wendi Deng wife of Rupert Murdock, which prompted the billionaire media mogul to divorce her. What is incredible is that Murdock had been paying Blair $100,000 to his Faith Foundation through Murdocks’ News Corp! Blair repays the thanks by going to bed with the Bible and Murdocks wife! http://gawker.com/rupert-murdoch-gave-tony-blair-100-000-then-blair-fuc-1531707995
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2879924/Blair-loses-cool-Wendi-grilling-says-never-reveal-truth-relationship-Murdoch-s-ex-wife.html#ixzz3ibcf4Cik
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Arrest Blair

A website http://www.arrestblair.org/performing-a-citizens-arrest has put a bounty on the arrest of Tony Blair and even advises people who to make a citizens arrest. Six such attempts have been made so far. The first in 2010 by Grace McCann as Blair was leaving the Chilcot Inquiry. The next by David Cronin who approached Blair who did get close enough to say ‘this is a citizens arrest’.

In 2012 Tom Grundy attempted to arrest Tony Blair while he was speaking at Hong Kong University. Then came Twiggy Garcia’s attempt in 2014 while Blair came to the pub. Therefore, it goes to show that the people are very angry with Tony Blair for his role in totally ruining a nation.

Hiding behind a pretentious FAITH foundation, war criminal Blair is aligned with Saudi and allies to arm and fund Islamic extremists the world over while helping spread Wahhabi Islam which helps Western imperialists use their ‘intervention’ to invade, occupy and take over nations while changing the demography using their Evangelical organizations now cleverly linked as NGOs to Western Government funds and posing as bogus ‘civil society’ agents.

In viewing the manner Blair has nicely set himself up as an agent of a global imperial agenda his 2 week visit to Sri Lanka is no holiday and it would be good for the Muslim journalists of Sri Lanka to seek an interview with Blair and question him on the lies that destroyed a fellow Muslim nation and led to the destabling of the entire Middle East as well.

Shenali D Waduge

Further reference:

• Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1262174/Web-companies-hides-Tony-Blair-millions.html
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11668401/tony-blair-global-business-empire-taxpayers-money.html
• http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-devastating-dossier-on-abuse-by-uk-forces-in-iraq-goes-to-international-criminal-court-9053735.html

Zionist power engenders “fear, silence and acquiescence” in every sphere of U.S. political life, making a mockery of freedom of speech and hallowed notions of professional ethics. Just ask Steven Salaita, a renowned Palestinian academic who discovered that, in U.S. academia, anti-Zionists have no rights that universities are bound to respect.

Steven Salaita is a renowned academic in the field of Native American Studies. That is why the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) hired him in 2013 as a tenured associate professor in the American Indian Studies Program. Salaita resigned from his previous position and had every reason to believe that he was on his way to Illinois. However he was terminated on August 1, 2014.

In the summer of 2014 Israel was in the midst of a murderous campaign in Gaza which killed more than 2,000 people, including 500 children. Steven Salaita is a Palestinian-American and like millions of people he vented anger and outrage as the horrific war crime continued. His posts on twitter garnered the attention of the administration and donors at the University of Illinois and he was fired before he even began working.

From the beginning Salaita waged a courageous fight to prove that he was in fact already an employee and to see that the university paid a price for mocking academic freedom, ruining his career and upending his personal life. He has succeeded in some of those efforts. The university experienced nearly universal condemnation and was censured by the American Association of University Professors for violating the principles of academic freedom. In addition, prominent persons such as Cornel West are boycotting the University of Illinois and have cancelled appearances in support of Salaita’s struggle.

UIUC has been on the losing end of the court battle, with one judge ordering the university to release emails related to the case and another ruling that Salaita’s lawsuit can proceed. That decision renders as patently false the university’s claim that he was not yet an employee. Salaita is enjoying legal victories and has secured a temporary position at the American University in Beirut, but his difficult experience points out that in America speech isn’t so free if powerful interests are taken to task.

Criticism of Israel is the third rail in American life. Politicians dutifully toe the line and either praise Israel without question or say nothing and hope to be unnoticed. Even local elected officials who have no role in foreign policy secure campaign funds and protection from political challengers if they support Zionism. They may face defeat should they do otherwise.

The Salaita case shows the insidious nature of the censorship that is imposed from without which inevitably creates self-censorship for millions of people. Even as Israel wages a very public campaign against congressional approval of the P5+1 nuclear energy agreement with Iran, the president still gives words of support to a country which boldly and blatantly interferes with his policy agenda.

Not only did president Obama praise Israel even after he was publicly humiliated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he claimed an equivalence between that country’s apartheid system and the black American struggle for freedom. Among the many shameful things he has said in his political life that is among the worst.

Taking on Israel in a public forum is a daunting task. The rules may be unwritten but they are real and Salaita’s experience is not lost on others. There is no other issue that engenders so much fear, silence and acquiescence. So great was the fear of retribution that the university’s trustees and administration made a decision which they should have known would come back to haunt them. Such incompetence only happens in an institution operating in a state of corrosive group think, outside pressure and systemic rot.

The university has spent more than $843,000 in public money to defend its losing cause. The soon to be former chancellor and other staff tried to hide their dirty work by using personal email addresses and not just in regards to the Salaita case. This inherently unethical behavior was meant to thwart any search for public information but shoes have begun to drop as more wrong doing comes to light. Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who orchestrated the firing, recently resigned but she will still have a $300,000 faculty salary and receive a $400,000 golden parachute.

When Salaita chose to fight for his right to work and to speak freely he revealed a lot more about the rotten state of academia and its connections with wealthy donors. Even public institutions are beholden to big money and live in fear of losing favor and funding. In an era of triumphant neo-liberalism everything is a commodity, including higher education.

Salaita could have condemned any country other than Israel using the same language and would not have lost his job. Such is the power of Zionism and its defenders. They have what amounts to a gangster protection racket, enforced not with guns but with money and positions for those who go along. Those who don’t are made to suffer.

The right to speak freely does not extend to everyone in this country, but then again it never did. Because of people like Steven Salaita some of that injustice is out in the open for all to see. American politicians, the corporate media, and big universities may still genuflect in Israel’s direction but that obedience shouldn’t extend to every citizen. Salaita is fighting not just for himself, but for true democracy for everyone.

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

US-based multinational RE/MAX is marketing properties in illegal Jews-only settlements built on stolen Palestinian land such as Ariel, near Salfit in the West Bank. Keren Manor/ActiveStills

Agents working for the US-headquartered real estate giant RE/MAX are promoting themselves as specialists in property built in Israel’s settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

The Colorado-based corporation which says it operates in nearly 100 countries was identified as responsible by a 2013 United Nations’ probe for how its Israeli franchises sell houses and apartments in the occupied West Bank.

Despite that criticism, many RE/MAX representatives are continuing to handle such property.

Shlomo Benzaquen, a RE/MAX agent, states on a website run by the company that his “area of expertise” includes a number of Israeli settlements.

He particularly recommends Kokhav Yaakov, Tel Zion and Adam (also known as Geva Binyamin) as “communities” which “offer tremendous value to young families and investors looking for high returns.”

In fact, all of these “communities” are Israeli settlements inside the West Bank and are illegal under international law. Their construction and growth violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into a territory that it occupies.

The Electronic Intifada contacted Benzaquen by telephone, asking him why he is selling property built on illegally occupied land in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank.

“I don’t know what illegally occupied is,” he said. “I deal with Jerusalem. I’m not sure what you mean by East Jerusalem.”

Asked if he was familiar with the Fourth Geneva Convention, Benzaquen replied “I’m not getting into politics” before hanging up.

His colleague Hillel Weinschneider, meanwhile, says on a RE/MAX website that his “area of expertise” is Ramat Eshkol and Givat Hamivtar.

Both of those settlements are in occupied East Jerusalem, which Israel claims to have annexed in direct violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

High prices

Scores of properties in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) are currently listed as for sale on RE/MAX websites.

Some of them are on the market for high prices. RE/MAX is trying to sell a three-bedroom house in Jerusalem’s Old City for $1.7 million. According to RE/MAX, the house was “built over 600 years ago by the Turks.”

A video for the same property posted to YouTube by Benzaquen, states that the “light train is just nearby.” That is a reference to a tram network which connects Israel’s settlements in East Jerusalem to other parts of the city.

The French corporation Veolia has faced years of criticism and activist campaigns for its large-scale involvement in building the Jerusalem light rail, which Palestinians see as a means of tightening Israel’s grip on their city.

RE/MAX’s Colorado headquarters did not reply to requests for comment.

Illegal

The firm has generally kept silent when its activities have been highlighted by Palestine solidarity activists. It did, however, issue a terse statement last year.

The statement tried to distance the firm’s headquarters from its Israeli franchise and noted that RE/MAX had reduced the number of its offices in the West Bank.

It failed to acknowledge that many of the agents handling property in East Jerusalem and the wider West Bank are working from offices in West Jerusalem.

But the company seems to be sensitive to activist criticism that it is involved in selling homes in illegal settlements within the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Searches on the RE/MAX Israel website suggest the company may be engaging in deliberate obfuscation of its West Bank settlement listings.

An interactive map of present-day Israel and the occupied West Bank displays red dots showing where RE/MAX-marketed properties are located. This map conveys the impression that it does little or no business in the West Bank.

However, if one searches for the names of individual West Bank settlements, the true story becomes clear.

For instance, a search for “Ariel” results in a listing of 12 properties in that settlement in the northern occupied West Bank near Nablus. However, switch through to the “map view” of the same search result, and the red dots over Ariel have been removed.

Similar obfuscation is evident while searching for properties in the settlements of Maaleh Adumim, Gilo andFrench Hill.

The map is a key online marketing tool for RE/MAX Israel. Those who search for a property handled by RE/MAX Israel are immediately taken to this map.

RE/MAX still has agents based in Maaleh Adumim, one of Israel’s largest settlements in the West Bank.

The anti-war group Codepink has set up a campaign targeting RE/MAX over its property sales in Israeli settlements.

Jodie Evans, a founder of Codepink, argued that it was dishonest for RE/MAX to claim that its Israeli franchise was unconnected to the Colorado headquarters.

Bernard Raskin, director of RE/MAX Israel, attended the parent company’s annual convention in Las Vegasduring March.

Raskin was faced by protesters but he “was not backing down and stood his ground the entire time we were in Vegas,” said Evans.

“We can also say they lied in trying to distance themselves, because he had a huge presence and major influence in Vegas,” Evans added. “He was bossing the hotel security around.”

Additional reporting by David Cronin.

Ben Norton is a freelance journalist and writer based in New York City. His work has been featured in a variety of publications. Website: BenNorton.com. Twitter: @BenjaminNorton.

Male fertility is declining, and for years researchers have been trying to figure out why. The numbers may seem shocking, but between 60-80 million couples around the world are having a difficult time conceiving, and there is a likely culprit, especially considering evidence arising from the latest study published at Science Direct.

Titled, “Potential pathways of pesticide action on erectile function – A contributory factor in male infertility,” the study shows that along with heavy metals, radioactivity, and poisonous fumes of organic chemicals, pesticides are largely contributing to erectile dysfunction and the downfall of male fertility. Of course there are numerous “psychological, physiological, pathological, social, environmental, and nutritional factors (plus others), at play.

It is estimated in some studies that as much as 52% of men over 40 are suffering from erectile dysfunction. How is this possible when in times past such a phenomenon was rare? The numbers of birth defects we are observing as a planet are also on the rise. Is this any surprise, though, when Syngenta covers up how their pesticide, Atrazine, was causing frogs to change genders and have serious fertility issues? Or when Monsanto lies about the true effects of their herbicide, glyphosate, on fertility?

To whit, in the April 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

“…University of California, Berkeley, developmental endocrinologist Tyrone B. Hayes, associate professor of integrative biology, and his colleagues report that Atrazine at levels often found in the environment demasculinizes tadpoles and turns them into hermaphrodites – creatures with both male and female sexual characteristics. The herbicide also lowers levels of the male hormone testosterone in sexually mature male frogs by a factor of 10, to levels lower than those in normal female frogs.”

Or how about this little ditty published in the Journal of Reproductive Toxicology, titled “Glyphosate impairs male offspring reproductive development by disrupting gonadotropin expression:”

“This study shows, for the first time, the effects on the reproductive development of male offspring from dams treated with glyphosate only in the perinatal period. We conclude that the exposure promotes behavioral changes and histological and endocrine problems in reproductive parameters and these changes are reflected by a hyperse-cretion of androgens and increased gonadal activity, sperm production and libido.”

With evidence like this preceding the latest study proving that pesticides are causing erectile dysfunction, you have to wonder exactly why these chemicals are running rampant in the U.S.? And let’s be clear: there are MANY other problems arising from our gross pesticide use.

Why Pesticides are a “Major Cause” of Male Infertility

The authors call pesticides “A MAJOR CAUSE OF MALE INFERTILITY.” This happens for several reasons:

1. Pesticides are responsible for decreasing testosterone concentration either by inhibiting release of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) or luteinizing hormone (LH) [62]. Pesticides are also responsible for “apoptosis of leydig cells and hence decreasing overall concentration testosterone.” What’s more, pesticides cause increase secretion of hypothalamic corticotrophin-releasing hormone which stimulates the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and cortisol [63]. High cortisol level inhibit gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH). The result? LH and testosterone decrease.

2.  Pesticides inhibit acetylcholine esterase, an important chemical that interacts with neurotransmitters in the brain to cause an erection in men.

3.  They cause severe oxidative stress.

4.  They cause apoptosis and necrosis of cells – a scientific way of saying cells die and shrivel up.

5.  Pesticides are endocrine disruptors, which means the hormones which regulate a man’s sexual expression are inhibited or demasculinized.

6.  They effect leydig cells which are responsible for creating testosterone and without proper functioning, low sperm count. Glyphosate alone decreases testosterone levels by as much as 37%!

7.  Pesticides mess with neurotransmitters that are responsible for creating an erection.

8.  They also negatively affect the tunica albuginea, which is the tough fibrous envelope of connective tissue that surrounds the corpora cavernosa of the penis. It consists of approximately 5% elastin, an extensible tissue that is primarily made up of the amino acids glycine, valine, alanine, and proline. The majority of the remaining tissue is collagen, which is made up of lysine, proline, glycine, alanine, and other amino acids [117].

It almost reads as if pesticides were specifically designed to cause infertility.

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Last week it was reported that defense contractors across the board are increasing their lobbying budgets to ensure their weapons continue to flow to the U.S. military. The news coincided with reports that many of the recent strikes against ISIS have killed hundreds of civilians.

According to a report published in TIME Magazine by the Center for Public Integrity, the top 50 defense contractors spent $58.5 million combined on lobbying in the second quarter of 2015. The figure is a 28% increase from the $45.7 million spent in the second quarter of last year.

The report also indicated that the infamous National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was one of the main bills these contractors collectively lobbied to pass.

Another report released this week showed that U.S. military efforts are not doing anything to protect America. In fact, they are killing hundreds of civilians in the war against ISIS.

The report, published by the activist group Airwars, documented airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria. According to the data, somewhere between 459 and 591 civilians were killed in 52 different bombings carried out by U.S. and NATO forces.

If it is the government that decides when there is peace and when there is war, then isn’t it an obvious conflict of interest for it to be in bed with the people selling bombs? It is not rare for a high-ranking member of the government to sit at the head of one of these companies and act as chairman or CEO (thinkDick Cheney/Halliburton). Their paychecks and bonuses are a direct reflection of whether or not the country is at war, and the bonuses are usually enough to drown out the dissent of the American public.

Although corruption within the military-industrial complex is open and documented, it is rarely discussed. If the public was actually aware of how this industry worked, there would be little support for perpetual, senseless wars. People across the world must realize that our enemies are the people building destructive weapons and instigating wars — not the people on the front lines who are dying as a result of their “leaders’” ignorance.

Most people on Earth are naturally opposed to war. It is only a small percentage that keeps this cycle going. The average citizen of every country wants peace, yet it is the average citizen on the front lines. Soldiers are torn away from family and friends to risk their lives for someone else’s gain. Every single time there is a war, the people are lied to and manipulated into fighting for land, natural resources, or strategic advancement that only benefits those in power. Our brothers and sisters who die in war are merely pawns to the ruling class; and, just like in a game of chess, the pawns are sent by the crown to die with little concern for their well-being.

John Vibes writes for TheAntiMedia.org. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos:[email protected].

John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter-culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work he organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has been compelled to turn over the private email server that she used as the Obama administration’s secretary of state, her campaign revealed Tuesday.

The handover represents a reversal of her previous refusal to surrender the server to federal investigators probing whether its use included the improper storing of unsecured classified information.

Previously, Clinton had insisted that she had fulfilled her responsibilities by turning over approximately one half of the 62,320 email messages she sent or received as secretary of state. The rest, she and her lawyers claimed, concerned private matters and not official business.

Possession of the server could allow the FBI to recover deleted emails that Clinton claimed were private.

The sudden reversal came on the same day that the inspector general for the intelligence community, I. Charles McCullough III, sent a letter to leaders of a congressional oversight committee indicating that at least some of the emails received via the server, which was kept at Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, contained top secret information.

McCullough’s office reviewed a sample of 40 Clinton emails and reportedly found that at least four of them contained classified information, while two more included top secret material. Most of the classified information originated with the CIA.

A State Department spokesman said that the emails had not been designated as top secret at the time they were sent and have previously circulated on unsecured department servers.

Clinton’s campaign spokesman refused to say whether or not the FBI had ordered the handover of the server, the Washington Post reported.

Turned over to the FBI along with the server was a thumb drive containing copies of the emails that Clinton previously designated as official and gave to the State Department last December. The State Department had previously refused to give the same emails to the intelligence inspector general’s office.

In his letter to congressional leaders, McCullough reported that he found two emails from a separate group of 296 that contained classified material related to the September 11, 2012 attacks on the US consulate and a secret CIA station in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. The US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in these attacks, which were staged by an Islamist militia.

Republican congressional leaders have accused Clinton of lax security policies and an alleged cover-up of the facts surrounding the Benghazi attacks, a ploy designed to derail her presidential campaign by branding both Clinton and the Obama administration generally as “soft on terrorism.”

Congressional investigations of the Benghazi events have carefully steered clear of the real roots of the attacks, which lay in Washington’s policy—backed by both major parties—of arming and supporting Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias in the US-orchestrated wars for regime change in both Libya and Syria.

Republicans have also preferred to concentrate on the trumped-up allegations concerning security and cover-up over Benghazi rather than pursue the ample indications that the activities of the Clinton Foundation and the exceedingly lucrative speaking engagements of her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, likely involved Hillary Clinton in influence peddling. The issue of self-enrichment through political office and connections is a sensitive topic for both Democrats and Republicans.

Clinton’s about-face on surrendering her server to the FBI will undoubtedly prolong and deepen the controversy surrounding her use of private email as secretary of state. This came as polls showed her trailing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders by a margin of 44 percent to 37 percent in the early primary state of New Hampshire.

The latest polls have also shown that nearly six out of ten US voters believe Clinton is neither honest nor trustworthy, roughly the same rating the polls give for the billionaire real estate developer and reality TV host Donald Trump, who has been leading the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls

Financial markets around the world were in turmoil Wednesday as investors, speculators, analysts and pundits tried to assess the significance and implications of the devaluation of the Chinese currency and the establishment of a new mechanism to determine its daily rate. After a 2 percent decline on Tuesday, the renminbi (also known as the yuan) fell a further 1.6 percent yesterday.

Markets were down across Asia as some currencies dropped to their lowest levels since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. The Malaysian ringgit fell by 2 percent to its lowest level since 1998, while the Indonesian rupiah dropped by 1.4 percent, taking it to a 17-year low. The Singapore and Taiwan dollars were also down, while the Vietnamese currency fell by 1 percent after financial authorities widened the band within which it can trade to 2 percent from a previous limit of 1 percent.

Stock markets across Europe were also down significantly, reflecting fears that the devaluation may signify that the slowdown in the Chinese economy is more severe than previously thought and that a fall in the Chinese currency will add to deflationary pressures in the global economy.

The FTSE Eurofirst 300 index fell by 2.7 percent following the downward trend in Asian markets, a shift that was reflected in other indexes. The pan-European Stoxx Europe 600 index dropped by 2.7 percent, while Germany’s trade-sensitive DAX index plunged 3.3 percent amid concerns that the Chinese decision, which cheapens its goods, will make for tougher conditions in already highly competitive export markets.

Wall Street began the day by following this trend, with the Dow down by as much as 277 points following its 212-point decline the previous day. It rallied in the latter part of the afternoon to finish unchanged for the day.

The motivations behind the decision of Chinese authorities to devalue are based on a complex of factors. There is no question that a significant issue is the attempt to provide a boost to exports following the downward trend in recent months—exports contracted by 8.3 percent for the month of July—and to ease the pressure on Chinese companies caused by the rise in the value of the renminbi. This year, the Chinese currency has increased by more than 10 percent as it followed the upward trend in the value of the US dollar.

Another factor is the government’s efforts to have the renminbi included in a basket of currencies used by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to set the value of its special drawing rights. But one of the conditions for such inclusion, which would strengthen the international role of the renminbi, is that its value be determined by market forces rather than by regulation.

To that end, the People’s Bank of China sought to present the devaluation as a move to increase the influence of the market. Announcing the decision, it said that henceforth the mid-point of the 2 percent band within which the currency can move on any single day would be the lowest point it had reached during the previous day’s trading. In addition, the daily starting rate would be set in line with “demand and supply conditions in foreign exchange markets and the movement of major currencies.”

The IMF is generally thought to be on board with a move to include the renminbi as a global reserve currency, but the final decision will not be made until later this year and will require support from the United States.

Significant sections of the Democratic Party leadership have voiced their opposition. Senior Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who attacked the devaluation as soon as it was announced, was joined yesterday by Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. He claimed that China had a history of devaluing its currency to gain an unfair export advantage and declared that its latest actions raised “serious concerns.” “There is reason to be sceptical…that the largest devaluation of the Chinese currency in over two decades is merely about moving to a market-based exchange rate,” he said.

If opposition in the US leads to the exclusion of the renminbi from the IMF’s basket of currencies, it will heighten tensions between the two countries following the strenuous, but ultimately unsuccessful, American effort to block some of its close allies from signing up to the Chinese-backed Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank earlier this year.

While there has been some commentary to the effect that China’s decision amounts to a stepping up of global currency wars, in which countries seek to boost their exports by cutting the value of their currencies, the overall assessment is that this is not the aim of the Chinese government. However, the move could have unintended consequences.

Writing in the Financial Times, George Magnus, the senior economic adviser to UBS, described the claim that China had opened a new front in the currency wars as an “exaggeration, especially in the light of more dramatic policy measures taken in both advanced and emerging economies in the past.”

China, he noted, would want to lower its exchange rate slowly, both out of fear that too rapid a fall would spark large capital outflows and because it would not want to risk opposition from the IMF, the US Treasury and other governments and financial authorities.

“Yet China has created a risky precedent,” he continued. “This is unlikely to be a one-off move and the new currency regime will surely be tested by more uncertainty on currency markets.”

The risk of a surprise turn of events was well illustrated by the recent Chinese stock market crash, when an intervention by the government to curb margin lending on share prices and take some air out of a developing financial bubble set off a market plunge that the government managed to halt only after a major intervention.

So far, the Chinese government appears to have won some support from both the Obama administration and the IMF. The US Treasury said Tuesday that the decision was in line with efforts to make the exchange rate more “market-determined.” It was joined yesterday by the IMF, which said that the new regime was “a welcome step as it should allow market forces to have a greater role in determining the exchange rate.”

However, like the US Treasury, the IMF reserved final judgement, saying that the “exact impact will depend on how the new mechanism is implemented in practice.”

While government and financial authorities both in China and internationally are anxious to avoid doing anything that may set off a crisis, their efforts could be undermined at any point by the relentless and powerful recessionary trends in the world economy.

The Chinese economy is slowing rapidly, with considerable doubts that gross domestic product is increasing at anything like the official rate of 7 percent per annum. Key sectors of the economy, such as real estate and construction, are down, with reports emerging that some regional centres are actually experiencing not just slower growth, but an outright contraction.

In July, overall investment in fixed assets rose by 11.4 percent, the lowest increase in 15 years. Cement production dropped by 5 percent in volume last month, and plate glass production declined by 13.5 percent.

According to a Reuters report, crude steel production fell by 4.6 percent in July from a year ago. The report noted that lower demand caused by slowing Chinese growth “has pushed steel prices down by 26 percent so far this year, plunging many mills into the red and forcing them to cut output or ship more to overseas markets.”

On August 13th, 2015, Paris-plages (Paris-beaches) will become, for 12 hours,Tel Aviv-sur-Seine. A brilliant idea, and, let us not doubt, a very brave one on the part of the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. It is especially timely in that it commemorates the Israeli massacre in Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed, including 551 children, and while the ashes of the Palestinian baby Ali Dawabcheh, burned alive by Israeli settlers, are still smouldering. It is true that this time, it was not white phosphorus, but simple Molotov cocktails, and they caused only two victims: one must definitely be blind not to see that Israel is really committed to a sane process of moderation in its Palestinian policy.

According to official voices, it is not a case of whitewashing the Israeli regime or becoming a mouthpiece for its propaganda, on the contrary : Bruno Julliard, the glorious Deputy Mayor of Paris, warned against “amalgams between the brutal settlement policy of the Israeli government and the city of Tel Aviv which is a progressive city, a symbol of peace and tolerance.” Indeed, this project would be nothing short of an initiative for peace, highlighting Tel Aviv not as the internationally recognized capital of Israel, and thus archetypal symbol of its policy, but rather, according to the words of Anne Hidalgo, as “a city open to all minorities, including sexual” (yes, the Palestinians who are not shot down or incinerated are expropriated daily, but homosexuals around the world do come there to celebrate the Gay Pride, is it not so? …), and even nothing less than “the first opposition city in Israel… hated in Israel itself as such by all intolerants”, a statement as meaningless as it is grotesque. And it would be unfair, says Ms Hidalgo, to “make a city or population accountable to the policy of its government. It would be to scorn local democracy and thus democracy itself” – let us not mention the fact that more than 90% of the Israeli public supported the last operation against Gaza, or, in strictly rational terms, the very principle of international sanctions against a country, a supposedly democratic one to boot. Faced with such falsifications, such impudence, such contortionism and such abjection, words fail and nausea stirs in the heart. And from the elected officials, we can only find a semblance of refuge in this statement from Danielle Simonnet, Paris Councillor (Left Party), who denounced “the cynicism of the organization of such a day [that] reaches the heights of indecency”, calling for its cancellation or a radical modification of its program.

Apart from the appalling political sphere, a storm of voices in France have arisen to condemn this event, and social networks are running riot so that the day promises to be incredibly tense, and will certainly bring to Parisians an impression that is a little more faithful to the reality of life in occupied Palestine than the originally scheduled “festive atmosphere”. Because democracy requires it, no question of modifying a program meant to meet the desiderata of a tiny minority of the population at the expense of the vast majority of French who legitimately say they are shocked by such an event (over 90% according to a survey by RMC / BFM).

Everything has been said elsewhere about the ins and outs of this ignominious day, so for our part, we will ask this: does France disown itself by arbitrarily making its capital an auxiliary in the service of propaganda for Israel’s Zionist and terrorist regime, so as to polish up its bloodied image and to promote its sluggish tourism? Does France violate its traditions by becoming a vassal of the all-powerful Zionist lobby, not to say the gay lobby, two infinitesimal cliques who now dictate their most extravagant wishes to the “mother of arms, arts and laws of yesteryear and see it invariably bow to them? Certainly not. Two telling examples are enough to indicate that collaborationism is deeply rooted in a certain “republican” French elite, and that there would be room for talk of, beyond the famous Stockholm Syndrome, a veritable “Paris Syndrome” to describe this historical “French fin’amor” for foreign Occupants.

In 1870, after the debacle of Sedan and the fall of the Second Empire, the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris, to the great fear of the propertied. Despite the state of war and the presence of Prussian troops on national soil,  the French political and economic elite did not fear the outside enemy as much as the inside, fearing with a holy terror a victory of the French people in arms which could cause a disruption of economic and social structures. Thus the effort of the “Governmentof National Defence” which was formed by the Jules brotherhood –Favre, Simon, Ferry, capped by Trochu and (Adolphe) Thiers – consisted mainly of sabotaging all impulses of popular resistance and of seeking an armistice with Bismarck as quickly as possible and at any price. The loss of Alsace and Lorraine seemed very insignificant in comparison with “Social Defence”, of preservation of the privileges of the established order, and after the treason of Bazaine and the simulacrum of the Siege of Paris, it could finally be imposed on the Nation. It was then time, finally, to turn the French cannons against the real enemy, namely the suburbs of Paris, under the approving eye of Bismarck. The historianHenri Guillemin, [France’s Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein altogether] has demonstrated this in minute detail in his trilogy The Origins of the Commune (This curious war of 1870, The Heroic Defence of Paris andThe Surrender), synthesized in his series of eponymous conferences .

In 1940, it more or less went the same way. The French political and economic elites saw in Nazi Germany a danger infinitely less great than the socialist threat (at that time this doctrine had not been perverted and carried genuinely progressive values), and, more importantly, considered that a military “disaster” might enable France to reconnect with its reactionary traditions and repeal many heresies introduced by the Popular Front. This was in particular a special effort of Petain, who worked in that direction at least from 1936. And around him, many are they who opted for The choice of defeat, in the words of the historian Annie Lacroix-Riz. Again, Henri Guillemin has established these facts in his works Nationalists and Nationals (1870 – 1940) and The Truth About the Petain Case, condensed into his corresponding series of conferences .

In one case as in the other, Paris was occupied by the enemy, Bismarckian Prussia in 1871, Nazi Germany in 1940. It is difficult to talk about anything other than high treason by the French elites, although the political and historiographical tradition continues to praise most of its protagonists to the skies – except Petain, who some would like to rehabilitate:  they are right in the sense that Petain only perpetuated a tradition of collaborationism firmly rooted in the Republic, but by targeting the republican regime itself and the Jews, and not only the French proletariat. It cannot be otherwise, as our elites remain deeply engaged in these infamous ways.

But if it is established that the French elites, corrupt and stateless, have been constantly trampling the interests of the people and of the Nation at least since the Third Republic, then what about the French people? How did it welcome foreign Occupation in 1871 and in 1940?

Henri Guillemin reports that “The Prussians entered Paris on March 1st [1871], and Paris behaved in a very noble way. We must remember what happened at the entrance of the Allies – particularly the Cossacks – in Paris in 1815. There had been hideous scenes. When they had entered the working-class neighbourhoods, nothing moved, but when they arrived in the rich neighbourhoods, on major boulevards, there were ovations. Socialite women rode on the horses behind the Cossacks, who were the ‘Liberators’, the foreigners who came to bring back the King. On 1st March 1871, we see nothing of the kind, while this time, the Germans came through the chic districts of Paris – they came by Neuilly, the 16th and the 8th arrondissements, the Champs-Elysées. Everybody had closed the windows, all the shops were closed: they entered in a deathly silence.” Then, when the mystification of the pseudo-starvation – that would have imposed an armistice – and high treason of the elites were revealed to the people of Paris, there was a general outburst of indignation which culminated with the Commune, to which Parisians of all social classes committed themselves on the 26th of March 1871 by voting overwhelmingly for the “reds”: these had been crushed in the 1870 elections, but now triumphed as the only genuine defenders of the Fatherland.

In 1940, when even a small country like Holland, conquered and occupied by the Nazis, could boast of the appointment of the German Seyss-Inquart to lead them (Queen Wilhelmina proclaimed that “the red of shame would have come to our faces if the invader had chosen for this position someone of our nationality. At least we have been spared this ignominy.”), France did not have that luck. It was the only country to engage in the path of the most disgraceful surrender, collaboration and even frenzied collaborationism with the Occupation through its highest legal representative, what’s more a Marshal of France, crowned with a (false) aura as a hero of the First World War. He was followed by the great majority of the French, who cheered him until April 26th, 1944, during his last visit to Paris, while De Gaulle was long a marginal figure. Only a tiny minority of the French engaged in the fight against the Nazis. Two million French fled Paris before the Germans arrived, but the remaining million coexisted peacefully with the Occupying forces.

If Paris is, as coined by Louis Veuillot, “the cancer of France and the scandal of the world” in the eyes of “worthy people”, that is the propertied (Veuillot was then expressing his hatred for the Commune), it is for Parisians to return the title against their unworthy and corrupt elites who flout democracy and “ride” on the Zionist tanks, giving an “ovation” to the massacres of the Israeli Occupier. Will we go the way of De Gaulle, of Petain or of the majority of the wait-and-sees? It is everyone’s duty to expose as much as possible this new Occupation of Paris by an entity if not hostile, at least foreign, colonial and terrorist, whose most characteristic seal is infanticide. Today’s resistance certainly will not express itself using force or violence as was required in 1940, but if not by protest and civil disobedience, at least by withdrawal. Parisians must at the least, rather than answer to the call from Anna Hidalgo-Collabo to “come in great numbers”, boycott Paris-plages that day and meet this outrage with a “deathly silence”.

And for those in whom the flame of resistance and dignity is still burning, may they infiltrate and disrupt this event as much as possible, individually or in groups, at any time, from all sides, by any peaceful demonstration, making the voice of the French people and that of the Palestinian people heard – shouting, slogans (Israel Terrorist! Hidalgo Collabo! Gaza, Warsaw Ghetto, innocent children facing barbarism!…), leaflets and pictures, flags, banners, burned dolls in memory of Ali Dawabcheh, the Bakr children and the 547 other children killed in Gaza last summer, etc. Let them show inventiveness: the French people, and Paris in particular, have always had enough to spare. This has been shown again during summer 2014, when tens of thousands of Parisians defied the ban of the Paris Prefect of Police (the only one in the world!) to demonstrate in solidarity with Gaza.

I am Ali, 18 months, burned alive by a Jewish Israeli settler

Indeed, in this Charlie-pseudo-democracy, a little courage is also required, because we should expect to be bluntly arraigned by police – even beaten by the militiamen of the Jewish Defense League, considered as terrorist and banned in Israel and the United States, but having a storefront in France along with total impunity; anyone who wants to strike back for honour’s sake must make sure not to be dealing with police officers in civilian clothes, which won’t be easy – and then suffer up to 48 hours of police custody.

These can even be embellished with false charges of outrages, violence, etc., which will nevertheless be solemnly attested by sworn-in liars – I speak with experience: I have not been in prison or appeared before a judge because the lies were too big and contradictory, but I could well have done; we must know that we are dealing with unscrupulous people without honour (they handed over the Jews and hunted and tortured the Resistance fighters to please the occupier, if needed will do it again), but hardly shining lights… But Gaza does deserve that, and this is the price of dignity. I’ll be there, and I hope that many of us will make our voices heard.

Translated from French by Jenny Bright

Israel’s financial sector is preparing for the worst following European recommendations not to work with banks invested in the oPt.

Bank heads in Israel are “panicking” over recent recommendations by the European Council on Foreign Relations that the EU abide by its own laws and not work with Israeli banks invested in the occupied Palestinian territory, reports the Hebrew-language daily Ma’ariv.

“This is a mega-event and if it occurs, the economic implications for the banks and Israeli economy are huge,” a senior Israeli banking official told Ma’ariv. “It can bring us to very difficult places and this topic requires management of the highest levels,” he added.

Israeli analyst Ben Caspi states that the EU is positively considering these recommendations. The deterioration in relations between Israel and the United States over the Iran deal, according to diplomatic sources, means that the US is encouraging Europe to intensify actions against Israeli settlement policy.

“When products are labeled it can cause harm here and there in a market share”, said the senior official, “but when they label every credit given by an Israeli bank over the Green Line and boycott that bank, this means a receivership order for all the banks. The European banking and credit system is interconnected with the Israeli economy. No European bank will accompany projects in Israel, it will be impossible to receive credit in Europe and there will be nothing we can do against it.”

“’Credit labeling’” means that every Israeli bank which gives a mortgage for purchasing a flat in Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, parts of Modi’in etc., enters a black list”, he continued. “The Europeans also include Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Road 443 and parts of Road 1 in the definition of ‘occupied territory’. There is no Israeli bank not involved in these areas. Every provision of credit to a business, every mortgage, can endanger the bank with boycott.”

This means the imposition of a siege on the Israeli economy, a type of ‘shut down’. In such a situation we must organise and turn to the prime minister. Solutions to this issue can come only from the political field. It is much larger than a strictly financial topic.

The banks are reportedly working to formulate a coherent policy in this matter, and it is expected they will request a “credit and financial security net” from the government should this scenario take place.

“This is a mega-event which must be planned for and digested. This is what we are attempting to do now,” closed the official.

The Pentagon has produced its first Department of Defense-wide Law of War Manual and the results are not encouraging for journalists who, the documents states, may be treated as “unprivileged belligerents.” But the manual’s justification for categorizing journalists this way is not based on any specific case, law or treaty. Instead, the relevant passages have footnotes referring to either other parts of the document or matters not germane to this legal assertion. And the language used to attempt to justify this categorization is weak at best.

This broad and poorly defined category gives U.S. military commanders across all services the purported right to at least detain journalists without charge, and without any apparent need to show evidence or bring a suspect to trial. The Obama administration’s Defense Department appears to have taken the ill-defined practices begun under the Bush administration during the War on Terror and codified them to formally govern the way U.S. military forces treat journalists covering conflicts.

The manual’s impact overseas, especially in the short run, may be even worse. The language used to justify treating journalists as “unprivileged belligerents” comes at a time when international law for conflict is being flouted by armed groups–including government, militia, and insurgent forces–from Ukraine and Iraq to Nigeria and the Congo–and during a time in which CPJ has documented record numbers of journalists being imprisoned and killed. At a time when international leadership on human rights and press freedom is most needed, the Pentagon has produced a self-serving document that is unfortunately helping to lower the bar.

So far the manual has received little press, but both The Washington Times and Russia Today covered it. The Moscow-funded global news outlet Russia Todayquoted Chris Chambers, a Georgetown University undergraduate communications professor, saying that the manual gives U.S. military forces “license to attack” journalists.

At 1,180 pages long and with 6,196 footnotes, the manual includes vague and contradictory language about when and how the category of “unprivileged belligerents” might be applied to journalists. It ignores the most relevant cases where the U.S. military detained war correspondents and accused them of being–using the term coined by Pentagon officials in the 2000s–“unlawful combatants,” without producing evidence or bringing even one accused journalist to trial. The manual mentions international human rights treaties and declarations, but ignores the most important one, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which deals most clearly with the right to free expression and the press.

The Law of War manual is the Defense Department’s most ambitious endeavor of its kind to date. Yet its authority already seems in doubt. The last paragraph in the preface written by lead author and top Pentagon lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, is a disclaimer stating that, while the manual represents the views of the Defense Department, it does not necessarily represent the view of the government. Weeks after the document was released, Preston, who previously served as general counsel to the CIA, resigned quietly without any public notification. He could not be located for comment.

The manual devotes attention to “classes of persons” who “do not fit neatly within the dichotomy” between combatants and civilians, and replaces the term “unlawful combatants,” which U.S. officials used to refer to terrorist suspects held under extra-legal circumstances in the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks, with “unprivileged belligerent.”

“Unprivileged” means the suspect is not entitled to the rights afforded to prisoners of war under international law and can instead be held as a criminal suspect in a category that includes suspected spies, saboteurs, and guerrillas.

Prisoners of war are protected internationally with rights that include being treated humanely, having their status as prisoners reported to a neutral body such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and being held with the expectation of release once hostilities end. “Unprivileged belligerents,” however, like “spies, saboteurs and other persons engaging in similar acts behind enemy lines,” according to the Law of War Manual, may be subject to domestic laws. The domestic penalties for such suspects can include, for instance, the death penalty for those found guilty of spying.

“In general, journalists are civilians. However, journalists may be members of the armed forces, persons authorized to accompany the armed forces, or unprivileged belligerents,” reads the manual. While the document notes in other parts that journalists can work independently, in this section it fails to explain under what circumstances, or for what kinds of activities the category “unprivileged belligerents” could be applied to journalists.

A Pentagon spokesman offered a few examples. “The fact that a person is a journalist does not prevent that person from becoming an unprivileged belligerent,” U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Joe Sowers, of the Pentagon’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, told The Washington Times. Sowers pointed to the al-Qaeda publication Inspire, saying that propagandists for terrorist groups could be categorized as unprivileged belligerents. So could enemy spies who use journalism as a cover, he added.

But the language in the Pentagon manual seems to at least qualify one of the spokesman’s claims. In footnote 241, which refers to section 2.24.1 on independent journalists, the manual cites a U.N. report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. “Whether the media constitutes a legitimate target group is a debatable issue. If the media is used to incite crimes, as in Rwanda, then it is a legitimate target. If it is merely disseminating propaganda to generate support for the war effort, it is not a legitimate target,” it states.

The manual does not create new laws, Sowers told CPJ. Instead, it “provides a description” of existing laws-of-war rules for “informational purposes; it is not an authorization for any person to take any particular action related to journalists or anyone else.”

The U.S. military has taken action against journalists before. Bilal Hussein, whose photo of insurgents firing on U.S. soldiers in Fallujah in 2004 helped earn Associated Press photographers, including Hussein, the Pulitzer Prize, was detained by Marines in 2006 and held for two years. The U.S. military never provided evidence or an explanation for the detention of the AP photographer, who was presented with CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 2008.

Sami al-Haj, an Al-Jazeera cameraman, was detained in December 2001 by Pakistani forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border while covering a U.S.-led offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan. U.S. military forces accused the Sudanese cameraman of being a financial courier for armed groups and assisting al-Qaeda and extremist figures, but never provided evidence to support the claims,CPJ found in its 2006 report “Sami al-Haj: The Enemy?” Al-Haj, who is now is head of the human rights and public liberties department at Al-Jazeera, was held for six years at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Prior to releasing him, U.S. military officials tried to compel al-Haj to agree to spy on Al-Jazeera as a condition of his release, his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, told CPJ and media outlets.

One section of the Law of War Manual deals with “Mixed Cases” made up of “(1) certain personnel engaged in humanitarian duties; (2) certain authorized supporters of armed forces; and (3) unprivileged belligerents.” But journalists are not among the examples listed in this category, Sowers told CPJ, and the section that does deal with journalists treats them as “a factual category rather than a legal case.”

Factually speaking, the manual acknowledges “independent journalists” are “regarded as civilians.” But it also rightfully notes limits and cases that could lead a journalist to lose their legal status as a member of the press. For instance, “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.” The manual adds: “In some cases, the relaying of information (such as providing information of immediate use in combat operations) could constitute taking direct part in hostilities.”

U.S. military authorities made similar, unsubstantiated claims about AP’s Hussein and Al-Jazeera’s al-Haj, whose cases the manual ignores. Instead the manual offers its own perspective on how journalists covering conflict should operate.

“Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying. A journalist who acts as a spy may be subject to security measures and punished if captured,” it states. “To avoid being mistaken for spies, journalists should act openly and with the permission of relevant authorities. Presenting identification documents, such as the identification card issued to authorized war correspondents or other appropriate identification, may help journalists avoid being mistaken as spies.”

As any conflict reporter knows, the idea of finding relevant authorities and seeking permission to report on a battlefield would be as unlikely as it would be unwise. Who constitutes relevant authorities is often impossible to determine in shifting battle lines. Moreover, the manual’s language seems to weaken the point of other passages that affirm the right of independent reporters to be on the battlefield.

Finally, the language in paragraph 4.24.5 “Security Precautions and Journalists” simply contradicts the post-World War II norm of a free press. “States may need to censor journalists’ work or take other security measures so that journalists do not reveal sensitive information to the enemy. Under the law of war, there is no special right for journalists to enter a State’s territory without its consent or to access areas of military operations without the consent of the State conducting those operations,” it says.

To delay journalists who are embedded with the military from filing information that could be of use to an enemy for a reasonable period of time is one thing. But to flatly ban journalists from conflict areas, or to restrict or censor them from filing allegedly sensitive information, which the manual fails to specify or explain, would be a violation of international documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Under Article 19, the declaration affirms not only the right to free expression, but the right to “receive and impart information through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The manual ignores it, even though the declaration was conceived and sponsored by the U.S.

The manual addresses other human rights treaties and documents, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, noting that tension can indeed arise between them and the laws of war. But the manual continues to state that the rules of war trump human rights treaties on the battlefield. “These apparent conflicts may be resolved by the principle that the law of war is the lex specialis during situations of armed conflict, and, as such, is the controlling body of law with regard to the conduct of hostilities and the protection of war victims.”

Authors involved in some of the manual’s earlier drafts argued in The Weekly Standard that prior drafts were too deferential to human rights concerns due to the influence of Obama administration State Department political appointees and human rights activists on the National Security Council. The manual goes on to note that “human rights treaties would clearly be controlling with respect to matters that are within their scope of application and that are not addressed by the laws of war,” using language suggesting that a compromise may have been reached to try to find balance.

The manual states in its preface that it has built on antecedent manuals by U.S. military services, the most important of which was a U.S. Army manual on The Law of Land Warfare published in 1956. Military legal experts from the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia also had input, as did unspecified “distinguished scholars.”

The manual ignores many other scholars. While it includes 21 citations, for instance, to a 1923 Commission of Jurists to Consider and Report Upon the Revision of the Rules of Warfare, the manual arguably ignores more relevant documents, including a 2009 International Commission of Jurists report on the Eminent Jurists Panel on Terrorism, Counter-terrorism and Human Rights (to which I testified on behalf of CPJ about the U.S. treatment of journalists).

By giving approval for the military to detain journalists on vague national security grounds, the manual is sending a disturbing message to dictatorships and democracies alike. The same accusations of threats to national security are routinely used to put journalists behind bars in nations including China, Ethiopia, and Russia to name just a few.

The message the manual sends to U.S. forces may have serious repercussions for press freedom and conflict journalists for years to come. By simply declaring a journalist an “unprivileged belligerent,” military commanders may now well claim the right to be able hold journalists for long periods outside the normal laws of war.

Frank Smyth is CPJ’s senior adviser for journalist security. He has reported on armed conflicts, organized crime, and human rights from nations including El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba, Rwanda, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Jordan, and Iraq. Follow him on Twitter @JournoSecurity.

Pentagon manual calls for potentially treating journalists like ‘unprivileged belligerents.’

The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is a closed-loop system wired for aggressive warfare rather than defence and peace.

Evidence shows that “full spectrum dominance” [i] is the goal. Full spectrum dominance, as described by a U.S Department of Defense (DoD) news article,

“means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.”

If the recent destruction and carnage caused by the US/NATO invasion of Libya,[ii] the illegal coup and carnage in Ukraine,[iii] the on-going warfare in Iraq,[iv] and now the invasion of Syria[v] are a measure of the expression “full spectrum dominance”, then the DoD goal would more accurately be labelled “global military imperialism”, or, as Michel Chossudovsky describes in two books: “The Globalization of War” and “The Globalization of Poverty”.[vi]

The on-going pursuit of this goal is incompatible with the rule of law, and it is leaving a trail of carnage and misery throughout the world.

Clearly, given a choice, most people would prefer that tax dollars be spent domestically and for the common good.  Consequently, the machinations of the MIC occur largely beneath the public radar of awareness.

A web of interlocked agencies serves to manipulate and then capture the public with a view to engineering consent for the toxic military agenda of global domination.  Informed consent is increasingly negated while engineered consent is prevailing.

Private Intelligence Contractors (PICs) are an important component of the “perception management” branch of the machine.

Ostensibly, private intelligence contractors offer evidence-based “intelligence” that serves to inform policy-makers with a view to making sound decisions, but too often, these agencies manipulate intelligence for the benefit of a warmongering agenda, and an uninterrupted flow of lucrative, publicly-funded contracts.

Vested interests over-ride public interests at home and abroad, and the “War Machine”, as described by Peter Dale Scott in his book, “American War Machine/Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan” [vii] metastizes, largely beneath the public radar, as it sows death and destruction throughout the world.

Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) [viii] is likely the largest (and least known) PIC,  with a huge staff (about 40,000 in 2007, likely more now), and it is fully integrated into the War Machine.

Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele report in “Washington’s $ Billion Shadow”, that

SAIC’s friends in Washington are everywhere, and play on all sides; the connections are tightly interlocked. To cite just one example: Robert M. Gates, the new secretary of defense, whose confirmation hearings lasted all of a day, is a former member of SAIC’s board of directors…[ix]

In the same article, Bartlett and Steele also report that

SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission’s deputy director for review a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC’s sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA.

We now know that Washington chose to use these intelligence findings – and not the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNMOVIC) findings [x]  –as part of its rationale for waging the on-going war of aggression against Iraq.

The fact that SAICs board of directors is not only interlocked with Washington and governing agencies such as the DoD and Homeland Security but also with a myriad of powerful companies from the MIC, including Boeing, and Raytheon as examples, [xi] raises reasonable questions about its ability to provide “objective” intelligence.

But SAIC isn’t the only PIC.  Peter Dale Scott describes in “The Real Grand Chessboard And The Profiteers Of War”[xii] characteristics of another PIC:

“Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off:

Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31]

Yet another PIC, possibly better known, is SITE.  In “Disinformation Campaigns Have Blinded Us To Realities”[xiii] I explain the source of a screenshot depicting the beheading of Stephen Sotloff:

A private intelligence contractor called ‘Search for International Terrorist Entities’ (SITE) is the source of the image. Furthermore, according to journalist James F. Tracy in ‘Sotloff Family Spokesman Is Media Pundit,

One of SITE’s founders, Rita Katz, is a government insider with close connections to former terrorism czar Richard Clarke and his staff in the White House, as well as investigators in the Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to SourceWatch. Her father was executed in Iraq as an Israel spy, a fact that suggests a connection to Israeli intelligence.

Clearly there appears to be a conflict of interest here.  SITE, in collusion with the White House, is providing possibly fraudulent images to manipulate the collective mindset of the public, and to further a war agenda.

What emerges from this overview of a number of PICS is that there are reasonable grounds to argue that there is collusion between government polities and PICS, and that there are reasonable grounds to argue that there are conflicts of interest as well.

Are the PICS providing “objective” intelligence, or are they being used as a profitable arm of the MIC to advance a permanent war agenda? Evidence suggests the latter.

First appeared on Whatsupic

Notes

As commander-in-chief, I have not shied away from using force when necessary. I have ordered tens of thousands of young Americans into combat. …

I’ve ordered military action in seven countries.  Barack Obama

By “ordered military actions in seven countries,” what he means is that he has ordered bombs dropped, and he has extinguished the lives of thousands of innocent people, in seven different countries, all of which just so happen to be predominantly Muslim.

The list includes one country where he twice escalated a war that was being waged when he was inaugurated (Afghanistan), another where he withdrew troops to great fanfare only to then order a new bombing campaign (Iraq), two countries where he converted very rare bombings into a constant stream of American violence featuring cluster bombs and “signature strikes” (Pakistan and Yemen), one country where he continued the policy of bombing at will (Somalia), and one country where he started a brand new war even in the face of Congressional rejection of his authorization to do so, leaving it in tragic shambles (Libya). That doesn’t count the aggression by allies that he sanctioned and supported (in Gaza), nor the proxy wars he enabled (the current Saudi devastation of Yemen), nor the whole new front of cyberattacks he has launched, nor the multiple despots he has propped up, nor the clandestine bombings that he still has not confirmed (Philippines).

[As the military historian and former U.S. Army Col. Andrew Bacevich noted in the Washington Post after Obama began bombing Syria, “Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that’s just since 1980.” That is the fact that, by itself, renders tribalistic Westerners who obsessively harp on the violence of Muslims such obvious self-deluded jokes.]

The overall record of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate is one of violence, militarism and aggression that has left a pile of dead bodies of innocent people. That Obama feels the need (or desire) to boast about how many countries he’s bombed, and that the only mainstream criticisms of him in the Iran debate is that he is too unwilling to use more aggression and force, says a lot about Obama, but even more about U.S. political culture. And none of what it says is good.

Glenn Greenwald

Art by www.AnthonyFreda.com

Note

http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/11/the-obama-administrations-war-on-the-pre

The worth of gold in the world is growing by the day. That might seem like a paradox but it isn’t. The worth of gold is not fixed on the Comex futures exchange, or the trade in London or Zurich. True, most of the gold-trading public takes its cue today from the CME’s COMEX gold futures price where it does not at all look like the worth of a bar of gold is growing. Why can we then speak of gold’s worth rising?

On Comex the price of gold futures has gone from a high of $1896 in August 2011 to current lows of $1099, lows last seen six years ago, tendency downward. Here we come to the fallacy of composition where we extrapolate from one particular to the universal, when we assume that something is true of the whole just because it is true of some part of the whole.

The COMEX gold futures market in New York and the Over-the-Counter (OTC) trades cleared through the London Bullion Market Association do set prices which are followed most widely in the world. They are also markets dominated by a handful of huge players, the six London Bullion Market Association gold clearing banks–the corrupt JP MorganChase bank; the scandal-ridden UBS bank of Zurich; The Bank of Nova Scotia – ScotiaMocatta, the world’s oldest bullion bank which began as banker to the British East India Company, the group that ran the China Opium Wars; the scandal-ridden Deutsche Bank; the scandal-ridden Barclays Bank of London; HSBC of London, the house bank of the Mexican drug cartels; and the scandal and fraud-ridden Societe Generale of Paris.

Key central banks, notably the Federal Reserve and Bank of England, have been accused of colluding with the major clearing banks to artifically smash gold prices when, as they did in August 2011, gold threatened to get out of control and endanger the dollar’s role as world reserve currency primus. Organizations representing gold investors such as GATA have documented in detail for years how the manipulations of the gold price was carried out.

In short, the buying and selling of gold in London and New York is in questionable hands. There are even rumors that some of the top names in gold trading are involved in major criminal fraud using gold plating on tungsten bars to circulate fake gold bars. Confirmation is naturally extremely difficult but a sensible caveat emptor might be to drill a tiny hole through that next gold bar you buy before paying.

Western banks of late have also created gold ETFs or exchange-traded funds, gold derivative funds backed by gold but not paying out in gold. The trading of so-called paper gold–futures and other forms of speculative contracts where no physical gold is delivered–while it at one time had a rough connection to the buying and selling of real gold in the world, today is disconnected from it. It is a casino on to itself blissfully free to decide what gold prices we pay. We are left with a gold market where the price is manipulated, as with crude oil, by large banks and Western central banks who decide the ultimate price.

Building a new gold market

This disconnect clearly does not please major gold buyers such as China or Russia or others. Rather than scream and cry “fraud” at the owners of the COMEX/CME or the London Bullion Market Association Big Six clearing banks, these countries are involved in the genial move to create an entirely different gold market, one that not JP MorganChase or HSBC or Deutsche Bank control, but one that China, Russia and others of a like mind control. It fits nicely with the recent creation of the BRICS countries’ BRICS New Development Bank and the Shanghai-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

This past May, China announced it had set up a state-run Gold Investment Fund. The aim is to create a pool, initially of $16 billion, the world’s largest physical gold fund, to support gold mining projects along the new high-speed railway llines of President Xi’s New Economic Silk Road or One Road, One Belt as it is called. As China has expressed it, the aim is to enable the Eurasian countries along the Silk Road to increase the gold backing of their currencies. That sounds very much like some clear-thinking and far-sighted governments are thinking of creating a stable group of gold backed currencies that would facililtate orderly trade free from Washington currency wars. The countries along the Silk Road and within the BRICS happen to contain most of the world’s people and natural and human resources utterly independent of any the West has to offer.

At the end of May China’s Shanghai Gold Exchange formally established the “Silk Road Gold Fund.” To date the two main investors in the new fund are China’s two largest gold mining companies–Shandong Gold Group who bought 35% of the shares and Shaanxi Gold Group with 25%. The fund will invest in gold mining projects along the route of the Eurasian Silk Road railways, including in the vast under-explored parts of the Russian Federation.

The China gold mining cooperation extends to Russia, the closest partner of China since the foolish US and EU economic sanctions forced a definitive Russian strategic shift from seeking admission as a respected, full partner of the West–something incorporated in the Medvedev presidency–to a comprehensive strategic cooperation with China and Russia’s eastern Eurasian partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS–Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

On May 11, just before creation of China’s new gold fund, China National Gold Group Corporation signed an agreement with the Russian gold mining group, Polyus Gold, Russia’s largest gold mining group, and one of the top ten in the world. The two companies will explore the gold resources of what is to date Russia’as largest gold deposit at Natalka in the far eastern part of Magadan’s Kolyma District.

Russia is vigorously adding to its central bank gold reserves over the past several years. During the Yeltsin era in the early 1990’s, the Yeltsin mafia reportedly robbed the state of virtually all gold reserves. During the Soviet years gold backing for the Rouble was considered unnecessary in the command economy of central state planning.

As of official statistics, Russia’s official gold reserves stood at 1250.9 tons in June. In the first five months of 2015 Russia has increased its domestic gold mine production by a factor of more than six-fold. Gold is becoming of huge interest to President Putin and the Russian leadership. Some believe a gold-backed rouble is not far off and clearly China, in its push to make the renmenbi acceptable as a world reserve currency, will back its currency with gold, a lot of gold, to make it a credible alternative to the floundering dollar and Euro.

Russia’s vast eastern Siberia is known to hold huge untapped gold reserves. Russia is today the world’s third largest gold producer with some 245 metric tons produced in 2014. China, with over 450 tons a year, is today the world’s largest gold producer. South Africa, also a member of the BRICS along with China and Russia stands to add to the new energy surrounding a renaissance in gold as a support of solid, well-based currencies to replace the diluted and devalued dollar system. South Africa, which until 2006 was the world’s largest gold producer, today is number 7 with 150 tons and Uzbekistan, a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization along with Russia and China, is the world’s 8th largest gold producer in 29014 with 102 tons. On May 4 the Chinese ambassador to Uzbekistan announced that the country would be included in China’s “Silk Road Economic Belt” project.

Slowly and very systematically the outlines of a new gold-backed alternative to the inflated dollar system or the debt-strapped defective euro is emerging. The New Economic Silk Road, integrated with Russia’s new Eurasian Economic Union member countries and others, is far more than a simple railroad. It is becoming the central nervous system of what in three to five years at present pace will become the fastest-growing largest economic space on this Earth.

In combination with the China Silk Road rail infrastructure initiative and the new $16 billion China gold fund to support gold mining projects along the Silk Road path, Eurasia, led by China and Russia, are about to transform the Anglo-American grip on gold which has kept true market prices artificially manipulated and depressed for decades and has effectively blocked the natural flow of gold through the world economy. While most eyes are fixed on COMEX or the London Bullion Market Association listed daily gold price fix, the real worth of gold as a currency reserve and a standard of monetary soundness is growing in worth by the day. That no doubt gives people at the US Treasury and Federal Reserve and Wall Street some serious gas pains.

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

 

Moldova, a small country with strong ties to Russia, is an important component of the ongoing developments in Eastern Europe. Since the collapse of the USSR, the US and the European Union have been increasing their influence in Moldova by supporting political parties and social movements, encouraging Chisinau’s participation in their trade blocs, or boosting security cooperation with it in their military alliances.

Additionally, in 1992 Transnistria practically broke away from Moldova and has since administered itself as an independent territory. An important feature of the stability of the territory is a Russian peacekeeping mission located there. In this case Moldavian elites shifted between Russia and the West till 2009 to get the best terms for themselves.

The present stage in Moldovan history began in April 2009 when the results of a parliamentary election won by the Communist Party were disputed by the pro-Western opposition. The situation escalated into serious rioting in the capital, where opposition supporters stormed and set fire to the parliament building. The Moldavian oligarchs with the support of Western bureaucracy has favored the EU-integration. Although the police regained control, the government was destabilized and was unable to win enough support in the parliament to elect the country’s president. In subsequent elections in August 2009 the Communist Party again won the largest number of votes, but three pro-Western opposition parties gained together the greatest number of seats and governed the country through various coalition arrangements.

Since then the situation in Moldova has been polarized between the pro-EU right parties coalition and the eft parties, primarily Communist and Socialist, who agree on working for real national interests, – neutrality and multi-vector foreign policy. The pro-Western governments have nonetheless pursued a strongly pro-European course and in 2013 agreed to an Association Agreement with the EU, whose terms are very similar to those of the Association Agreement the EU has agreed with Ukraine. Also, Moldova, like Ukraine, has failed to prosper economically since independence, going from being one of the more prosperous Soviet republics to being possibly the poorest country in Europe.

The disillusionment is growing in Moldova with the pro-Western course its government is taking. Support for EU membership has fallen from 70% in 2007 to just 40%, with one opinion poll apparently putting it as low as 32%, in contrast to the 50% who support membership of the Russian-led Eurasian Union. Furthermore, in the last parliamentary elections, held on 30th November 2014, the largest number of votes (20.51%) were won by anti-EU Socialist party.

Three pro-Western parties together gained 45.63%. But the certain leader of the election race anti-EU party «Patria» – was illegally withdrawn from the election for 70 hours before the event. The Communist Party came third with 17.48% and after a little while the party leader Voronin came over to pro-oligarch side, betrayed their electorate. Pro-oligarch forces get Parliament under control again.

Chișinau’s government and oligarchs headed by well-known Moldavian oligarch and the first-vice president of the Democratic Party of Moldova Vladimir Plahotniuc grind only their own axe by selling off the country’s resources and driving the revenue from the European Union under the cover of the liberal rhetoric. The result is Moldova’s economy has sharply depreciated in recent years, causing hardship for people. On account of this, Moldovan authorities have started to conduct an internal political tension and repress any signs of dissent.

The situation of political turmoil and fighting against so-called hand of Moscow allows them to justify and defend total corruption and explain the lack of success in the economy. An example of this approach could be the actions of ex-prime minister Lurie Leancă. His government has given about 1 billion dollars in credits to 3 banks: Banca de Economii, Banca Sociala and UNIBANK for 3 months.

A large part of this money originally was the EU public loan. Credits weren’t surrendered. Leancă helped oligarchs Ilan Shor and Vladimir Plahotniuc to steal the money of National Bank of Moldova through these banks. Thus, oligarchs have been turning Moldova into a feudal state where about 50 percent of male population works in foreign states while their families are almost hostages in Moldova. The corrupt system of the oligarch dictatorship prevents the situation when people could improve their walfare inside the system or overcome such a system. But a number of people try to do it…

On June 24, when civic activists headed by honorary member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Grigory Petrenko established the Tent city of the Freedom at the house of Vladimir Plahotniuc to protest against the decision to raise the electricity tax 37 percent and the gas tax 15 percent by the National Energy Regulatory Agency. This was decided without any debate with the civil society, an independent audit and under cover of night, 1:00 local time, to avoid massive protests.

The activists associate Vladimir Plahotniuc with the corruptionists and illegal schemes which became the cause of the growth of tariffs. On July 31, armed servicemen of the police and Plahotniuc private security firms disrupted tent city of Freedom. The private security forces were especially brutal, and many people including women were injured. Several activists were arrested. Vlad Filat, chair of the Liberal Democratic Party, part of the government coalition, justified the use of the force and stated that the rate-hike protesters as destabilizing the situation in the country strongly aimed on the way of Eurointegration. However, protests have continued since the repression in Chișinău.

On August 1, the Union of Veterans and Council of Elders held a protest meeting in the city of Chadyr-Lunga and called for a mass action on August 8. Hundreds turned out in Vulcanesti on August 3. The government was forced to take a step back on August 5, when a meeting of the Supreme Security Council decided to make categorical recommendations for revision of the tariff on natural gas. It was meant to sooth public discontent while the regime prepares repression against protest leaders, but people didn’t stop. We are not going to stop protesters leader Grigory Petrenko stated. Our protests will continue. We will spend time working with initiative groups that have begun protests around the country against the tariff increase. We will gather all the forces into a single fist for nationwide protests in Chișinău in the near future.

Another important feature of Moldova is the role of Romania, member of NATO and EU, which makes no secret of its intention to reacquire Moldova and reunite it with itself. Union with Moldova has become a fixation for some Romanian politicians, notably former President Traian Basescu. Though opinion polls consistently show most Moldovans oppose union with Romania, there is a significant minority who support it, and they can call on Romania for financial and political help. Therefore, Moldova’s growing financial and political weaknesses and Romania’s will to use this in own interests will be one of the key factors in the region. Oligarchs will never really support the joining to Romania because they dont want to lose the ground where they are in power. But they use Romanian radicals and nationalists as a force to keep Moldovian people in fear.

The collapse of the Gaburici government, along with the disputes among Moldova’s pro-EU parties, has been an important factor in the Socialist party’s and the Red Blocks growing popularity. The prolonged instability within Moldova and the European Union’s enlargement fatigue have made EU accession for the country a distant possibility. The Moldavian oligarchs and their government are continuing to cry to the EU about the situation in the country to get more financial aid which will be apparently stolen. Nonetheless, the EU cannot refuse because it is scared by idea of losing the region to Russia.

Pro-Western factions, facing a loss of support try to make up for it by radicalizing the population through armed conflict, then there is in Transnistria ample opportunity for them to do so. Latest indications, as appointment of Mikheil Saakashvili in Odessa, suggest that, Kiev government will help them in this. However, If violence explodes in Transnistria then it is unlikely that it will be confined there. There is a serious risk it might spread to the rest of Moldova and could merge with the conflict in Ukraine, of which it would in effect at that point become involved. As result of this approach, Moldova will face the raise of radicalism and nationalism. Left and parties out of power will be threatened or banned. A new government will instill fears and phobias, denounce non-bloc status and, if it will be needed, turn Moldova into chaos.

Al-Qaeda (Arabic for “The Base”) grew out of and became identical with the Arab-Afghan Legion, those terrorists recruited by the United States of America, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Originally sent to Afghanistan, they fought the USSR’s army and air force following the Soviet Union’s intervention of that country. Later, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, the Agency) directed them to cross the border and destabilize the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. Still later, the American government moved them into the Balkans to destroy Yugoslavia, and then similarly to Iraq, followed by Libya and Syria.

They received visas to travel to the United States, usually from Saudi Arabia, for training, debriefing, and other purposes. In enabling their passage, American government officials violated the Immigration and Nationality Act as well as the State Department’s regulations, codified in its Foreign Affairs Manual.

I know. I was there. I issued the visas, and I objected to gross violations of law and regulation. As a result, as happens to nearly all whistle-blowers, I was fired.

Since then, I have had inordinate problems with sending and receiving e-mails, being bombarded with more spam than Monty Python could handle, periodic difficulties with telephone service, mysterious computer crashes, and daily robocalls in violation of the FCC’s Do Not Call List. And the Arab-Afghan Legion is still marching.

Why Did I Write This Book?

Simple. It’s past time to expose murder, war crimes, and human rights violations by the United States of America and its “intelligence” services. Using the dubious claim of “national security,” the United States, through the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency (NSA), has engaged in and/or organized coups and other destabilization efforts around the world, most notably in the Middle East. From Libya to Iran, governments have been overthrown, politicians assassinated, and everyday citizens murdered—all with the knowledge of not only the president of the United States and the executive branch, but the legislative and judicial ones as well.

The “mainstream” news media will not report on these activities to expose them for what they are. In fact, TV, radio, and newspapers flat out support them. Instead of checking power, the media, print or electronic, commonly act as government agents, parroting the “company line” and attacking (or ignoring) reports and sources that expose injustice or illegal policies.

I know about unlawful government plots for a fact. As a career official with both the Commerce and State departments, I saw these plots close up during my nine years as a diplomat. First, I was an economic/commercial officer in Stuttgart (1977–1980), then a commercial attaché in New Delhi (1980–1982). Later I was a visa officer in Jeddah (1987–1989), a political/economic officer in Stuttgart (1989–1991), and, finally, an economic analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (1991).

For nearly a quarter of a century, I have been speaking Truth both to Power and the Public. Some people have read my articles, others have heard me speak. My published critiques on the Visas for Terrorists Program, my writings about the deliberate destruction of Iraq, and my speaking out in many venues about what amounts, in my opinion, to treason by many public officials have not made me invisible. Nonetheless, from what I’ve seen, many progressives, such as Stephen Zunes, Peter Kuznick, and Phyllis Bennis, have yet to come to grips with even part of the problem. Our past still remains obscure. That’s one reason for writing this book.

Now, after more than twenty years of aggravation in dealing with the State Department’s bumbling, stumbling Foreign Service officers, corrupt federal judges, and unethical US attorneys, I have decided it is finally time to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about US government support for terrorism and relate it to the global picture.

I would like to give you, the Esteemed Reader, some background on this situation, particularly about the kind of people the US government hires to formulate and manage its imperialist foreign policy. I am providing my personal narrative to illustrate just how American foreign policy is really created and implemented, especially in terms of what I call the Arab-Afghan Legion, who are terrorists recruited and trained by the United States. This book will serve to illuminate the dark and ugly corners of the State Department and its handmaiden, the Central Intelligence Agency and will help you understand how they have destabilized a major portion of the world.

This tale is a sordid sketch of backstabbing, disloyalty, double crosses, faithlessness, falsity, perfidy, sellouts, treachery, and betrayal. All of this is in addition to the stupidity and incompetence normally manifested by the State Department and the intelligence services.

In the first half of the twentieth century, US foreign policy was already a record of disaster: grievous policy mistakes leading both to World War I and World War II and their aftermath, as well as our questionable intervention in, invasion of, and occupation of several countries in the Caribbean, Central America, and elsewhere. In the second half of that century, after the so-called “professionalization” of the Foreign Service and its merger with the Central Intelligence Agency (and its not-very-Clandestine Service), American foreign policy became a record of unmitigated disaster: Israel, Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, and Argentina, are but some of the catastrophes brought into the world by our government.

My story shows how things really work. Inept, degenerate government officials and career-obsessed idiots created the climate for what I call the Arab-Afghan Legion, and others known as “al-Qaeda,” or “ISIS/ISIL.” My story also shows why the quality of American government has gone from bad to worse. This opus demonstrates how and why the United States has so deeply embroiled itself in South and Southwest Asia, North Africa, and the Balkans.

Throughout this book, bear in mind the credo of the Association of National Security Alumni:

…covert actions are counterproductive and damaging to the national interest of the United States. They are inimical to the operation of an effective national intelligence system, corruptive of civil liberties, including the functioning of the judiciary and a free press. More importantly, they contradict the principles of democracy, national self-determination and international law to which the United States is publicly committed.[1]

Note

US and British special forces are actively preparing Kiev’s military for escalated combat. UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Britain will double the number of Ukrainian troops it’s training by yearend. He called conflict in Donbass “red hot” – heading toward getting hotter.

Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) Contact Group envoy Vladislav Deinego said Kiev violated every Minsk ceasefire term since agreeing to observe them in February.

Conflict never stopped. Dozens of shellings occur daily – including against residential and public areas. Obama wants war, not peace – using Kiev proxies to do his dirty work.

Deinego denounced junta authorities “reluctance to bring closer the peaceful settlement of the” conflict. It authorized $250 million in extra spending for greater military buildup in Donbass despite its economy teetering toward collapse – funds desperately needed for constructive purposes earmarked for escalated war.

On August 10, Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) military spokesman Eduard Basurin said

“(a)fter two hours of massive artillery preparation from large-caliber guns, Grad multiple rocket launchers, tanks and mortars near the Petrovskoye, Novaya Laspa and the Belaya Kamenka populated localities, the enemy used six armoured vehicles and six tanks to launch an offensive in the direction of Starognatovka and Belaya Kamenka.”

It was repelled, but shelling continued.

“(T)he Ukrainian military committed (more) gross violation(s) of the Minsk agreements. They knew that we had lived up to our commitment to withdraw all heavy weapons, including with a caliber under 100mm (from the disengagement line), and decided to take advantage of the situation to move deep into the DPR’s territory.”

“We are calling on the OSCE SMM and the Joint Control and Coordination Centre to carry out immediate and detailed investigation into the attack. We also want the world community to be informed about” continuing Kiev aggression.

On August 12, Russian REN TV personnel came under fire near Donetsk airport. A statement said “(t)he Ukrainian military opened fire at the REN TV crew today when our correspondents were working near the Donetsk airport, which is one of the (area’s) biggest flash points.”

“Shooting has been under way in the village of Oktyabrsky, one kilometer away from Donetsk airport, for days.” Numbers killed and wounded aren’t known.

DPR’s Contact Group envoy Denis Pushilin said daily Kiev shelling risks “full-scale military action…at any moment.”

“These concerns are strengthened by military equipment drawn to the contact line by Ukrainian forces, as well as by shellings of residential areas.” Kiev ignores Minsk terms. Its actions show it wants continued war heading toward full-blown like earlier.

The reliable Colonel Cassad site lists the following major threats risking escalation:

DPR and LPR forces “were put on high alert” after Kiev forces shelled Gorlovka on August 9.

Since August 11, they’ve been using Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) – earlier just sporadically. On Tuesday night, militias responded to junta shelling.

After Donbass forces unilaterally withdrew heavy weapons near front line positions, they had to redeploy them to counter junta artillery, tanks and equipment in restricted areas attacking its cities, towns and other areas.

(J)unta (forces) officially renounced any restrictions on the withdrawal of artillery” and other heavy weapons – continuing to breach Minsk terms flagrantly.

DPR and LPR forces “are now actively strengthening their positions at the front in anticipation of (a Ukrainian) offensive.

On Wednesday, Donetsk workers “were released…early because they fear massive shelling.” DPR “is preparing bomb shelters, and notably, talking about the possibility of air strikes.”

Donbass officials say escalated fighting “can erupt at any time.” Minsk is dead.

If diplomacy can’t find a way to stop things, full-scale fighting can resume any time.

“(A)ctivity (indicates) the possibility of a return to massive bloodletting in the coming days, rather than continuation of the (April – July) trench warfare…”

With Washington and Britain readying its troops for combat, Kiev could resume full-scale aggression any time. It remains to be seen if implementation follows and when. Mass slaughter and destruction may be greater than earlier.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

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

Is California becoming a medical police state?

Health Impact News Editor Comments

In a brazen act of medical tyranny, California recently became the first state in the U.S. where lawmakers removed religious exemptions to those opposing vaccines for their children. The bill now signed into law, SB277, faces legal hurdles in court next.

Now, legislators in California want to pass the “first US adult vaccine mandate with NO personal exemptions and CRIMINAL penalties for failure to comply.” SB 792, would eliminate an adult’s right to exempt themselves from one, some, or all vaccines, a risk-laden medical procedure.

Will California soon become a medical police state?

URGENT ACTION ALERT Monday July 13, 2015

SB792- The first US adult vaccine mandate with NO personal exemptions (only medical exemptions approved by a doctor and defined by the bill) and CRIMINAL penalties for failure to comply will be heard in the California Assembly Human Services Committee this Tuesday July 14th at 1:30 in Room 437.

SB 792 would eliminate an adult’s right to exempt themselves from one, some, or all vaccines, a risk-laden medical procedure. This bill would make California the first state to require mandated vaccinations for all childcare workers, including all private and public school early childhood education programs (Headstart, Private preK and preschools), family daycares, and daycare centers.

Commencing September 1, 2016, a person shall not be employed at a family day care home if he or she has not been immunized against influenza, pertussis, and measles. An employee shall receive an influenza vaccination between August 1 and December 1 of each year.

This bill eliminates medical autonomy, crushes religious freedom, undermines personal freedom, and burdens quality providers with a non-optional series of medical interventions in the form of mandated vaccines that are not even 100% effective.

Bill SB 792 excerpt:

This bill, commencing September 1, 2016, would prohibit a day care center or a family day care home from employing any person who has not been immunized in accordance with the schedule for routine adult immunizations, prescribed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The bill would specify circumstances under which a person would be exempt from the immunization requirement, based on medical safety and current immunity, as specified. The bill would make conforming changes to provisions that set forth qualifications for day care center teachers and applicants for licensure as a family day care center. Because the bill would extend the application of a crime under the act, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.

Read the entire bill here.

CALL – FAX – EMAIL – TWEET — URGE a NO VOTE TODAY

Assembly Human Services Committee: http://ahum.assembly.ca.gov/hearings 
(916) 319-2089 – Fax (916) 319-2189 

Kansen Chu (Chair) (D) – 25 (Abstain on 277)
P.O. Box 942849, Room 5175, Sacramento, CA 94249-0025 
(916) 319-2025 Fax: (916) 319-2125

Chad Mayes (Vice Chair) (R) – 42 (No on 277)
P.O. Box 942849, Room 4144, Sacramento, CA 94249-0042 
(916) 319-2042 Fax: (916) 319-2142

Ian C. Calderon (D) – 57 (Yes on 277)
P.O. Box 942849, Room 2148, Sacramento, CA 94249-0057; 
(916) 319-2057 Fax: (916) 319-2157

Patty López (D) – 39 (No on 277)
P.O. Box 942849, Room 4126, Sacramento, CA 94249-0039 
(916) 319-2039 Fax: (916) 319-2139

Brian Maienschein (R) – 77 (No on 277)
P.O. Box 942849, Room 4139, Sacramento, CA 94249-0077
(916) 319-2077 Fax: (916) 319-2177

Mark Stone (D) – 29 (Yes on 277)
P.O. Box 942849, Room 5155, Sacramento, CA 94249-0029
(916) 319-2029 Fax: (916) 319-2129

Tony Thurmond (D) – 15 (Yes on 277)
P.O. Box 942849, Room 5150, Sacramento, CA 94249-0015
(916) 319-2015 Fax: (916) 319-2115

EMAIL: 
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected]
[email protected],
[email protected]

TWEET: 
@MrTonyMendoza 
@TonyThurmond 
@AsmMarkStone 
@BMaienschein 
@ChadMayesCA 
@kansenchu 
@PattyLopez_D_39 
@IanCalderon 
@IanAD57

Also contact YOUR Assembly Member to urge a NO VOTE! http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/

SB792: Assembly Health Committee Hearing, June 30, 2015

Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced?

One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.”

However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines.

The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary.

Image: Lawrence Lessig, Source: Ed Schipul (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Last month, a massive vehicle recall from automaker Fiat-Chrysler shocked many who were still unaware at the ease of hacking modern-day vehicles. The research covered what is called a “zero-day exploit” hack, which enabled a test vehicle to be fully hijacked simply from obtaining knowledge of the vehicle’s IP address.

The main culprit that was addressed by Fiat-Chrysler, which led to the voluntary recall of 1.4 million vehicles, was any car that came equipped with 8.4-inch touchscreens as part of the vehicle’s audio/video system.

Wired writer Andy Greenberg is back today with more information from security researchers who were able to show an even easier method to cause a potentially fatal crash in their Corvette test vehicle.

It appears that today’s interconnected smart gadgets and modern computing applications are making cars one of the more vulnerable everyday items open to life-changing hacks. Like cutting the brakes….

As you’ll see in this video, it only takes a smartphone for an outside operator to take full remote control.

As Greenberg reports:

At the Usenix security conference today, a group of researchers from the University of California at San Diego plan to reveal a technique they could have used to wirelessly hack into any of thousands of vehicles through a tiny commercial device: A 2-inch-square gadget that’s designed to be plugged into cars’ and trucks’ dashboards and used by insurance firms and trucking fleets to monitor vehicles’ location, speed and efficiency. By sending carefully crafted SMS messages to one of those cheap dongles connected to the dashboard of a Corvette, the researchers were able to transmit commands to the car’s CAN bus—the internal network that controls its physical driving components—turning on the Corvette’s windshield wipers and even enabling or disabling its brakes.

[…]The device that the UCSD researchers exploited for those attacks was a so-called OBD2 dongle built by the France-based firm Mobile Devices, but distributed by corporate customers like the San Francisco-based insurance startup Metromile. Metromile, the only one of those corporate distributors whose devices the researchers fully analyzed, is an insurance company that gives its customers the cellular-enabled devices, branded as the Metromile Pulse, to plug into a port on their dashboards as a means of tracking cars and charging drivers on a per-mile basis. The company has even partnered with Uber to offer the devices to its contract drivers as part of a discount insurance program. (emphasis added)

Similar to the response by Chrysler-Fiat, the researchers said that once alerted to the problem, the company quickly offered a security patch. However, according to the statements above, Metromile clearly isn’t the only distributor. They also used the same deflection as Chrysler-Fiat by saying that no one had reported the issue out in the field. But why wouldn’t these companies be properly testing in advance for these vulnerabilities? This is where the problem still remains according to researchers:

…the larger problem of wirelessly hackable dongles plugged into cars’ networks is far from solved. They say they also notified Mobile Devices of its hardware’s insecurity, and were told that the latest versions of the company’s dongles weren’t vulnerable to their attack. But the researchers nonetheless found in scans of the Internet using the search tool Shodan that in addition to the Metromile device, thousands of still-hackable Mobile Devices dongles were visible, mostly in Spain—possibly those used by the Spanish fleet management firm and Mobile Devices customer Coordina. Mobile Devices hasn’t responded to WIRED’s request for comment or for a list of its main customers.

[…]the problem is hardly limited to Metromile, Coordina, or even their device supplier Mobile Devices. The insurance company Progressive also offers so-called “telematics-based insurance” using a similar OBD2 plug-in it calls the Snapshot. Earlier this year security researcher Corey Thuen found that the Progressive Snapshot device had its own serious vulnerabilities, though Thuen didn’t demonstrate a proof-of-concept attack. And researchers at the cybersecurity firm Argus found that the Zubie, an OBD2 device for personal tracking of driving efficiency, had hackable flaws, too. (emphasis added)

And for those who might feel comfortable that this appears not to be a potentially widespread problem contained with other autos, Wired was quick to point out that it wasn’t a Corvette vulnerability, nor something only used in commercial transit:

…UCSD researchers say they could have hijacked the steering or brakes of just about any modern vehicle with the Mobile Devices dongle plugged into its dash. “It’s not just this car that’s vulnerable,” says UCSD researcher Karl Koscher. He points to the work of researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, who revealed and published the code for a wide array of attacks on a Toyota Prius and Ford Escape in 2013 that required only access to a vehicle’s OBD2 port. “If you put this into a Prius, there are libraries of attacks ready to use online.” (emphasis added)

Hackers are often maligned by media and governments as anarcho-terrorists who aim to bring nothing but disorder and destruction to the world, but fortunately some of them are doing the work that our supposedly trusted corporations should be doing.

This is a story worth paying attention to; it is most assuredly just the tip of the iceberg. It is also a useful topic to offer to those who would knee-jerk shout “conspiracy theory!” when presented with the strange events surrounding the fatal car crash of journalist Michael Hastings, for example.

Perhaps we can now start taking a much closer look at boats, planes, GPS-driven munitions, unmanned vehicles and even smart homes that also can be taken over via remote control.

And let us take another look back to 2012 when DARPA itself went on record with these very same concerns:

Image Credit: C3 Group, appearing on Forbes

Did you know that for just $26 and an 8th-grade education you can hack a voting machine? This has actually been common knowledge for years, since a study at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois developed a hack to manipulate voting machines just before the 2012 elections.

The researchers who developed the hack were actually able to hijack a Diebold Accuvote TS electronic voting machine, one of the most popular voting systems at the time.

Two of the lead researchers in the study were able to demonstrate a number of different ways that voting machines could be hacked. They used a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8, along with a $15 remote control.

They demonstrated that the cheap hack worked from over a half-mile away.

“When the voter hits the ‘vote now’ button to register his votes, we can blank the screen and then go back and vote differently and the voter will be unaware that this has happened. Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock, you don’t have to have state-of-the-art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in,” Johnson said.

As far as how easy the hack is, Johnson told Popsci that “I’ve been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects.”

Watch the documentary “Hacking Democracy” for an in-depth look at the flawed voting machines the U.S. uses in the electoral process.

Even if your vote is actually counted (it probably isn’t), it still won’t matter who wins in the end, anyway—they are all going to carry out the exact same policies with just slightly different rhetoric behind them. It should be obvious by now that this system is not only inherently corrupt, but also failing miserably and in the midst of collapse.

(cc photo: Gage Skidmore)

Everyone has heard about Donald Trump’s soaring poll numbers as the current leader in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Many have also heard the explanation that he appeals to those who feel left behind by the economy. Unfortunately, the way the media often tell this story has little to do with reality.

We got a great example of creative analysis in the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog section. It tells us:

Non-college grads have struggled since the turn of the century: Economist Robert Shapiro estimates that incomes stagnated or declined from 2002 to 2013 for American households headed by workers without a degree, a marked departure from prior decades.

Both parts of this are seriously misleading. First, it is not just non-college grads who have struggled since the turn of the century. Most college grads have seen little or no wage gains since then. The second part is wrong also, since wages for non-college grads had also been stagnant since 1980, so for them the experience of the last 15 years has not been “a marked departure from prior decades.”

Later, the piece doubles down on this misleading picture:

Trump is selling an economic message that unifies growing concerns among liberals and conservatives alike, “which is that growing GDP doesn’t necessarily help people on the bottom,” said Mickey Kaus, the author of the Kausfiles blog.

The data clearly show that most people have been seeing little or none of the gains from economic growth over the last decade, not just people on the bottom.

Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (8/6/15).

Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at [email protected], or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

The Study finds farmers driven to suicide from increased costs of not being able to save seeds and increased chemical inputs, coupled with inadequate access to agronomic information Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji

The Study finds farmers driven to suicide from increased costs of not being able to save seeds and increased chemical inputs, coupled with inadequate access to agronomic information Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji

Image: Robert Conquest, Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

E. H. Carr suggested in his lectures that formed What is History? that one can only really understand history through understanding the historian. To understand the historian, one then casts an eye towards circumstances, the background of gestation, product and ultimate shaping behind that process.

Robert Conquest, accomplished poet and historian who died on August 3, was the great example of the historian as process. He gathered his material with what amounted to an almost penitent objective (many historians do, feeling that the truth is beavering its way to the pen of revelation). Such histories do become political weapons, furnishings for furious assaults against opponents and positions. They form dossiers of conviction and documents of condemnation.

Conservative historians and commentators would see in Conquest an example of relentless exposure of the Soviet project, taking the form of over 20 books. In the US, he was awarded the presidential medal of freedom for fighting the Cold War with his pen, a point that does raise the curtains on the role of the historian.

Such awards tend to politicise analysis, lending weight to the illusory nonsense that it teaches us much at all. Conquest did, as a case in point, publicly support the botched US involvement in Vietnam, giving the impression that an abundant knowledge of the Soviet gulag justified the murderous stalemate in Indochina. Clear eyes are sometimes better reserved for the past.

“In 1968,” wrote George Will, “five years before the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West, Conquest published The Great Terror, a history of Joseph Stalin’s purges during the 1930s.”[1] Just as Conquest misread contemporary times, his critics, mainly on the left, refused to read the blood-stained record of an overly stacked ledger.Stalin’s corpse filled gulags were coming to light, the still fresh blood a subject of Conquest’s interest. This was Conquest as the arm of the anti-utopian brigade, puncturing holes in the Soviet edifice and, implicitly, the communist program. But he came later to the mission – he had himself been an enthusiast of Stalin, having paid a visit to Moscow in 1937. This was hardly surprising to those who believed that the communist mission transmogrified into the Soviet state was the only genuine show of change in town. Conservatism was in cynical decay; capitalism was in a Depression inflicted shambles, and fascism was making stomping gains on the European continent.

The denunciation of Stalinist terror would come from within, via the “secret speech” of Nikita Khrushchev. This had a disingenuous flavour to it – for all of Khrushchev’s anger, he had been a Stalinist product. But the change there involved a spring clean on the cult of personality. It was this cleansing that began what amounted to revisionism, with historical works forming the basis of expiation.

Conquest kept company with others who swayed from what was considered the hoodwinked left to a sober, steely reasoned right. There were the intellectual popularisers such as the polymath Arthur Koestler who were railing against such systems and grieving over the God that failed. The Cold War was being waged, not merely in the journals of the academy but the broadsheets and media outlets. The CIA also did its best to keep such individuals in leaf and clover. The central assumption here was that the Soviet system could not reform. Conservative authoritarianism, however, could.

Conquest was always best when sticking to history, rather than the flimsier notion of history as policy. His The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) was a grim account of the famine in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933, one which saw the death by starvation of at least 7 million people. This war against the kulaks packed quite a punch, bringing to light an event that had been dismissed as elaborate fabrication. Propaganda can prove to be Clio’s evil twin.

A vital, if gruesome feature of Conquest’s work was an extensive discussion of the deportation program that Stalin endorsed with monomanic conviction. It saw the removal of Crimean Tartars, the targeting of Chechens, the expulsion of the Volga Germans. Kazakhstan became the dumping ground of nationalities par excellence.

A conspicuous tendency to enlist Conquest into modern political struggles, unsheathing him to cut rivals and opponents, remains. His work, argues Will, is the precursor to understanding the Putin system. Putin is not merely an echo of what came before, but its product, the work of officials “thoroughly marinated in the morals of the regime Lenin founded”.

Similarly Stephen Schwartz, executive director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, contemporises such historical analysis, making that classic, and erroneous leap between past system and present policy. “Another Robert Conquest will be needed, sooner or later, to account for the new chapter in Russian imperialism.”[2] This is less history as ideological supposition. Differences matter less than similarities.

Conquest was himself, till his death, at the chopping coalface, refusing to give liberal education its due and riding the wave of the Thatcher revolution, becoming, in fact, its speech writer. The musty archive and the sanguinary record only made him cynical. The communist may have been criminally delusional, but the liberal was dangerously complicit in providing him truck. “Stalinism and Maoism may be dead,” he asserted in his 1999 essay Liberals and Totalitarianism, “but they still pollute the intellectual atmosphere.”[3]

Miseducation is the persistent theme, reflected by such dangerous notions as “peace studies” that are inflicted on “helpless teenagers” even if Conquest, along with his admirers, also had the habit of eviscerating ideologies of change they disliked while omitting errors within their own canon.

A final point on the issue of using Conquest to, as it were, conquer. Such history is on the look out for betrayers and sell outs, a form of vanguard McCarthyism. Will, to take a glaring example, is not even that bothered by Putin, whom he deems Lenin’s distant grand child. It is the apologist as true target, and here, Conquest becomes a weapon for Will to attack Bernie Sanders and his “moral obtuseness” which saw him spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988. This is no longer history but well worn agitprop.

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

Notes

[1] http://humanevents.com/2015/08/10/how-robert-conquests-history-book-made-history/

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schwartz/robert-conquest-stalinism_b_7963926.html

[3] http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/In-memoriam–Robert-Conquest–1917-2015-7830

 

Interview with NHK journalist Morley Robertson, by the Center for Remembering 3.11, published Jun 30, 2012 (emphasis added):

I begin with the radiation leakage. Radiation leakage exerts a long term effect on the environment. It contaminates our food chain, the groundwater and the ocean. And the contaminated seawater will circulate around the globe. We never know how much this will impact on the environment… We’ll never able to study such issues with empirical certainty… [Due to nuclear testing] we have already accumulated “hidden losses” of radiation damage… how much is the [Fukushima] cesium in relation to that?… I believe we should enjoy delicious food rather than worrying about the food. I enjoyed the town’s delicacy… I didn’t mind about how the beef was produced or where it came from. As long as it is tasty, it is no problem for me. With regard to radiation, I have become more optimistic. My hypothesis is that it’s no use worrying about radiation. For people in Fukushima, they have a lot to worry about their future, like damaged reputation… One reason why we have relied on nuclear plants is because we didn’t know about the facts… We need to face the facts… Rad-waste from the nuclear cycle is said to be unsolvable even after 2.5 million years.

Part II of Robertson’s Interview, published Jun 30, 2012:

In 1974, then PM Tanaka declared, “Let ‘s go nuclear!”… we were issued credit cards to buy electric goods to consume the extra electricity… It is OK to say that everything was just a lie… and 3/11 happened. So we must study everything. It is no longer about what to do with Onagawa nuclear power plant, Miyagi or Tohoku. This is about what to do with Japan. This has been revealed by our vulnerability to the accident… So when we talk about “disaster“, it’s like a huge wrapping cloth expanding everyday.

• NHK: Morley is a journalist… working in the fields of television, radio, and lecture meetings… he studied at the University of Tokyo and Harvard University.
• Robertson’s Wikipedia entry (translated  from Japanese by Microsoft): In 1968, because of father’s job moved to… Hiroshima [to work] on Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission [and] undertook study of atomic bomb patients.

TEPCO, updated Mar 10, 2015: Fukushima Daiichi Contaminated Water Issue FAQ

— Q1 Please explain the impact of the leaked radioactive materials on the sea. [Answer:] TEPCO announced that underground water including radioactive materials had leaked into the port… It has been implied that trillions of becquerels of radioactive materials are still flowing into the sea; however, the concentration of radioactive materials in the sea is at a level that meets the Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, except for some areas…

TEPCO, Apr 28, 2015:

Comprehensive risk review was implemented, considering all the possible risks that might have an impact outside the Fukushima Daiichi NPS site… The paths through which water could leak outside the site: …

• Sources of risk — Trenches… Pits… Tanks… Accumulated water inside reactor buildings… Contamination inside the port
• Leakage routes — Ground surface… Drainage channels… Underground (groundwater）
• Destination of the contaminated material… The Sea: Unit 1-4 water intake channel… Inside the port… Outside the port

Watch Robertson’s interview here (click ‘CC’ for English)

The martial law forces of Jade Helm are everywhere. In the United States, we are witnessing unprecedented troop movements. Some of the American people are becoming hyper vigilant as they know, from what they are seeing, that something is terribly wrong. The following is a small cross-section of what I receive everyday. The takeover of America well under way as the country sleeps its way through the major events and embraces the beginning of a new NFL season.

From Portland, Oregon to Portland Maine, Jade Helm Forces Are Preparing for the Final Crackdown

Slacker 614 sent me this original video of a massive shipment of medical, surveillance, equipment supply, and troop transport and mechanized fighting vehicles being transported through Union Station in Portland, Oregon.

This is typical of what is going on in our country on a daily basis. This is unprecedented, unwarranted, a drain on the American taxpayer and is ultimately very dangerous to the safety and security of every American.

From one Portland to another Portland, a local Maine newspaper details how Jade Helm military forces are training with local law enforcement in order to quell any “civil unrest”.

Jason Dewitt sent me publicly available information from Maine in which the police of Portland, Maine and the military police and local law enforcement will be training to prepare for civil unrest. Details were not available, but with what we already know about Jade Helm, details are not necessary.

I was also sent the following email regarding a train convoy near Logan, Utah.

Hi Dave,

I enjoyed your broadcast on 7/31 and related article on 8/1.  I’m former Intel Analyst.  My studies were based on cold war scenarios.  Russia advancing on European interests.

You may have already received this info.

Reported 3 hrs ago, a train loaded with tanks 7 miles north of Logan, Utah.

Regards,

JG

Even Alaska Is Not Outside the Reach of Jade Helm

In remote regions of Alaska, people are observing the placement of the future instruments of their oppression in even obscure and out of the way locations.

Hello Dave, I was just in Talkeetna, Alaska for vacation when I took
photos of strange military shipments at a shopping area near the main
highway.

Chris

More Disturbing News From Marlon Brock In the Midland-Big Spring, Texas Area

Many reader will recognize the name of Marlon Brock and remember that he has provided the readers of The Common Sense Show with irrefutable photographs demonstrating the subterfuge and nefarious activities connected to the Midland, TX. Walmart. Trouble seems to follow Marlon as he recently sent me the following email.

Dave,
At approximately 9:45pm, my wife and I were sitting outside enjoying the cooler weather when we heard an explosion.  It sounded like an oil well type explosion which happens occasionally here in west Texas, oil country.  When that occurs you always see flame or smoke.  We did not see either.  Then, we started hearing gunfire.  I recognized it immediately as military munitions.  I asked my wife to get your her ISPYPHONE 6 and record what we were hearing.  You hear walking in the direction of the gunfire.  At the 20 second mark in the MPEG4 audio you start to hear rapid gunfire.  Then at the 1:11 minute mark, the 1:36, and 2:50 minute marks you hear gunfire.  My weapons understanding is that this gunfire is either 50 cal or 30 cal.  Listen Dave, they are here.  We have never heard this before.  We live in Martin County Texas between Big Spring and Midland Texas….Marlon

Marlon Brock gunfire recording, please note the time frames listed in the above email.  (turn up the volume). 

Every Martial Law Contains Travel Restrictions

Consider what happened on the Rick Wiles show the other night when a listener called in and talked about the fact that there was a temporary roadblock for people traveling to Washington from Idaho. This information is discussed at the48:54 mark of the show.

Additionally, I received this email from a reader from Idaho who complained that his 68 year old aunt was traveling west from Idaho to Washington when she was detained and accosted by military forces.

Travel restrictions will be a part of this process.

Dear Dave,

My aunt and I read all of your articles and listen to your show every week. I never dreamed I would be writing to you. 

My 68 year old aunt was traveling from Idaho to Washington when she was stopped at a Border Patrol type checkpoint. But it was not the Border Patrol, it was the military with people that my aunt suspected of being foreign military. 

She was asked for her ID and she asked if she had done something wrong. The soldier said no but he had to see her ID. She asked if she was free to go and the soldier replied that she had to report to a side area and have her vehicle searched. She was told that she would consent to the search or she would be dragged from her vehicle and the car would be searched anyway.  

She began to call them communists and Nazis and this is America and they had no right to do this. They detained her for an hour. And then they released her. If this can happen to my aunt, it can happen to anyone. Thanks for all that you do. 

Jason

Ft. Hood

Dave,

You may already know about this, but here it is.   I have a employee who is in the Army Reserves, and he went to Ft. Hood Texas last weekend July 31- August 2 to qualify on the range.  He has been deployed 3X in the past, always out of Ft. Hood, so he knows the layout.  Usually when they are up there for the weekend training they stay in one of the barracks in “North” Ft. Hood, the area they use for deployments.  He normally stays in the barracks on his weekend training sessions, but this time they stayed in tents approx 1 mile away from the barracks because the barracks are full (of Jade Helm soldiers?).  The barracks he says are set up like row houses one after another.  Each one of the barracks NOW has its own 10 foot fence with razor wire (around each of the barracks individually). He could not figure why they would do that.  I asked if they had guard towers like you think of for concentration camps and he responded not yet, but that they are still building everywhere on the base. Said it was “creepy”, his words, as no one would tell then what was going on and why all the fence and wire. Said no one was talking.
Rick

Conclusion

This is just a small cross-section of what crosses my email every single day. The martial law take over of American is massive and it is proceeding at breakneck speed. The reports from each successive week or more disturbing that the reports from the previous week. These Jade Helm troops are emboldened and they are in violation of their sacred oath to enforce the Constitution.

I predict as we approach the Pope’s upcoming speech, we will see an increase in martial law troops and the scope of their mission as they prepare to enforce what is coming our way this fall.

Don’t forget to join us on The Common Sense Show, tonight from 8pm to 11pm (EST). Dave’s guests are Steve Quayle, Sheila Zilinsky and Joshua Coy.

Protests continued Monday night and early Tuesday morning in Ferguson, Missouri in defiance of St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger’s declaration of a state of emergency across St. Louis County earlier that day. Hundreds of peaceful protesters gathered in the evening, demanding justice for Michael Brown and an end to police brutality.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, who is overseeing the state of emergency, responded by sending out hundreds of police clad in riot gear and wielding assault rifles. Officers formed a human barricade spanning several blocks along West Florissant Avenue, the center of protests over the past year. When protesters refused to exit the street, police carrying riot shields rushed the crowd, and officers began violently arresting many. At one point, an officer showered military-grade pepper spray on all the protesters in his vicinity.

During the crackdown, police evidently targeted Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly, ripping off the press badge around his neck as he shouted “I’m media! I’m media!” Reilly and Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery were both charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer while in Ferguson last year. In reality, the two were unlawfully arrested, and an officer assaulted Lowery by slamming him into a soda machine at the McDonald’s where they were arrested.

Reilly and Lowery were both given their court summonses on Monday, two days before the statute of limitations would have expired. They face a potential $1,000 in fines and up to a year in county jail. The two were among over a dozen journalists arrested during the police suppression of protests in Ferguson over the past year.

In total, police arrested 22 protesters over the course of Monday night, according to a police spokesman Tuesday morning. This comes after 57 peaceful protesters were arrested Monday afternoon by officers from the Department of Homeland Security during a demonstration in front of the St. Louis County Federal Courthouse. On Monday afternoon, another 64 people were arrested for blocking traffic on Interstate 70 near Ferguson. In total, at least 150 people have been arrested since Sunday night alone, with more expected in the coming days.

The manner in which police have arrested protesters has been particularly brutal. When police arrived at Interstate 70, a man was jumping backward away from the crowd, waving his hands in the air, shouting, “This is what democracy looks like!” An officer approached him from behind, lifted him above shoulder height, and slammed him to the ground. Eight officers then pinned his body to the freeway in a dog pile with their knees to his back, handcuffing him.

Police also arrested a young girl, who told fellow protesters during her arrest that she was only 12 years old. Police claim that an ID card they later processed said she was 18. Numerous other protesters were arrested violently, with officers slamming them to the ground and jamming their knees into their backs.

Numerous aspects of the Sunday police shooting of 18-year-old Tyrone Harris remain unresolved, and the police story is still highly suspect. Harris was shot in the chest, back, arm, legs, liver and groin by four plainclothes officers who exited an unmarked car. He remains in critical condition at Barnes Jewish Hospital.

Harris’s family maintains that the youth is innocent, with his father, Tyrone Harris Sr., calling the police story “a bunch of lies.” Two witnesses told Harris Sr. that his son was unarmed and “running for his life” when police shot at him eight to 12 times, including at least once in the back.

Police Chief Belmar alleged Monday that Harris was armed and involved in an exchange of gunfire late Sunday evening near the protest. He alleged that Harris fled and then opened fire on the unmarked vehicle of the four plainclothes officers. The officers then chased Harris on foot and repeatedly shot him, allegedly after Harris shot at them again.

Late Tuesday afternoon, the St. Louis County Police released surveillance video purporting to show Harris draw a pistol during the initial exchange of gunfire. However, the footage does not clearly show Harris’s face, and the light color of his pants in the video does not match the dark red pants he was actually wearing, as shown in pictures taken by bystanders to the shooting.

St. Louis County prosecutors charged Harris with 10 felonies, including four counts of first-degree assault on a law enforcement officer, five counts of armed criminal action and one count of shooting a firearm at a motor vehicle. His bond has been set at $250,000.

At around 2am Tuesday morning, roughly a half-dozen members of the right-wing, militia-style organization Oath Keepers began roaming the streets of Ferguson. Wearing camouflage outfits and bulletproof vests, and armed with unconcealed pistols and military-style rifles, they were barely distinguishable from the militarized police forces, who in fact paid little attention to the Oath Keepers.

On their website, founder Stewart Rhodes urges the estimated 30,000 national members of Oath Keepers to “Go armed, at all times, as free men and women, and be ready to do sudden battle, anywhere, anytime, and with utter recklessness.”

Following the eruption of rioting last year, which itself came in response to the November 25 exoneration Darren Wilson, the Oath Keepers were hired by multiple business and property owners to protect their property from looting and arson. For this reason, the police see them as an ally in their effort to suppress working-class opposition to police violence and social inequality.

In a recent letter to US President Barack Obama, twelve Nobel Peace laureates declared their support for the long history of US elite violence against Native Americans and enslaved Africans, as well as the US imperial violence around the world that has butchered tens of millions of people over the past 200 years. See ‘US: An End to Torture: Twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates write to President Barack Obama asking the US to close the dark chapter on torture once and for all. Obama responds’. http://thecommunity.com/no-to-torture/

The letter to Obama was signed by ex-President José Ramos-Horta (Timor-Leste, prize recipient in 1996), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (South Africa, 1984), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia, 2011), Mohammad ElBaradei (Egypt, 2005), Jody Williams (USA, 1997), Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh, 2006), F.W. De Klerk (South Africa, 1993), John Hume (Northern Ireland, 1998), Oscar Arias Sanchez (Costa Rica, 1987), Bishop Carlos X. Belo (Timor-Leste, 1996), Adolfo Perez Esquivel (Argentina, 1980) and Betty Williams (Northern Ireland, 1976).

The letter, the response from Obama and a subsequent article written by Ramos-Horta – see ‘Obama: The Courage to Say “We Were Wrong”‘ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-ramoshorta/obama-the-courage-to-say-we-were-wrong_b_7934284.html – were a stark reminder to those of us who struggle to end the violence in our world of what genuine peace activists are up against.

It was also a stark reminder that the Nobel Peace Prize, founded in response to the will of Alfred Nobel following his death in 1896, to be awarded to a person ‘who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’ – see ‘The establishment of the Peace Prize’ http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/about_peaceprize/establishment/ – was corrupted beyond recognition a long time ago, as has been carefully documented by Fredrik S. Heffermehl in ‘The Nobel Peace Prize Watch’ http://www.nobelwill.org/ and again graphically illustrated by its recent award to a prominent perpetrator of violence like Barack Obama. See ‘Understanding Obama and Other People Who Kill’ http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1305/S00051/understanding-obama-and-other-people-who-kill.htm (In fairness, perhaps, it should be noted that Obama is not the most violent recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize: that title should no doubt go to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.)

Ostensibly written by the twelve laureates to ask Obama to end the extensive US torture program, the letter includes the following words:

‘The United States, born of the concept of the inherent equality of all before the law, has been since its inception a hallmark that would be emulated by countries and entire regions of the world. For more than two centuries, it has been the enlightened ideals of America’s founders that changed civilization on Earth for the better, and made the US a giant among nations.”

Given the systematic atrocities planned, organised, sponsored, financed and committed by the US government throughout its history, which have been carefully documented by one author after another, one can only presume that the authors of the letter are delusional, incredibly ignorant or utterly devoid of compassion for those who have suffered or are still suffering from the extraordinary violence inflicted by military and economic forces controlled by the United States elite.

In relation to the domestic history of the United States, perhaps they should read Howard Zinn’s book ‘A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present’

https://zinnedproject.org/materials/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-updated-and-expanded-edition/

or they might try a shorter, more recent book in which Professor Timothy Braatz noted that US society was organized around the violent dispossession of Native communities, the enslavement of blacks, the marginalization of women, the exploitation of working people and industrial warfare. See ‘Peace Lessons’.

http://www.amazon.com/Peace-Lessons-Timothy-Braatz/dp/0692303758/ref=sr_1_28?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429793285&sr=1-28&keywords=Peace+lessons

This seems a long way from the ‘enlightened ideals of America’s founders that changed civilization on Earth for the better’ to which our Noble peace laureates refer. And I’m sure that if they care to go out and ask a sample of Native Americans, African-Americans, women, working people and soldiers suffering from PTSD, they will get more insight into the accuracy of their claim as it stands today.

And what of the US impact on the rest of the world? Incredibly, in his article, Ramos-Horta says that ‘many of us on the other side of the world were touched forever when the Kennedys came out in support of the rights of Africans to rule themselves’. Is he naïve? A sycophant? Has he forgotten the vital role, extensively documented in the US National Security Archive, played by the US government in supporting the Indonesian occupation of his own country? See ‘A Quarter Century of U.S. Support for Occupation’ http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB174/

I wonder what Desmond Tutu thinks of Ramos-Horta’s comment. Tutu, at least, should know what happened to the visionary leader of the newly independent Congo – see ‘Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination – and have some idea of the history of US violence throughout Africa, Asia and Central/South America, killing true leaders and installing US stooges so that western corporations can ruthlessly exploit their natural resources. For a taste of the extensive documentation of this point, see many of the books by Noam Chomsky http://chomsky.info/ and the recent book by Andre Vltchek ‘Exposing Lies of the Empire’ http://badak-merah.weebly.com/exposing-lies-of-the-empire.html

I am only too familiar with the truth being butchered by elites and their agents in academia and the corporate media. But to read the truth being butchered so ruthlessly by Nobel Peace laureates is nauseating indeed.

Let us hope that those Nobel peace laureates who did not sign this letter will share their response to it with us.

I am deeply committed to searching out ways to resolve all conflicts nonviolently. But we must always start with the truth. Deluding ourselves about history or letting perpetrators get away with violence in the hope that they will be kinder to us next time does not work. Despite his pretty words, Obama will not change – see ‘The Destruction of Barack Obama’ http://www.nationofchange.org/destruction-barack-obama-1374153044 – and the US elite would not allow him to change should he seriously consider doing so. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. http://warisacrime.org/content/global-elite-insane

If you have the courage to acknowledge and act on the truth, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com which has been signed by one honest and genuinely admirable Nobel peace laureate already.

And remember this: if you have not won the Nobel Peace Prize, you are in the same category as Mohandas K. Gandhi and many other fine people around the world who still struggle relentlessly for a world without violence whatever personal price they may pay.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is [email protected] and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

An investigation published Tuesday in the New York Times revealed that prison guards at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York systematically beat and tortured dozens of prisoners in June of this year.

The Times report also notes that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo questioned a prisoner only hours before he was tortured. According to letters from prisoners obtained by the Times, guards rammed inmates’ heads against walls, hanged one from a pipe with a plastic bag, and threatened to waterboard and kill another.

Conditions in American prisons increasingly resemble those in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners have been shackled, strung from ceilings, waterboarded, beaten and sexually humiliated. After fifteen years of the “war on terror,” the barbaric torture methods previously inflicted on the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan are becoming increasingly commonplace at home.

The beatings and torture came in the immediate aftermath of the escape by prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat from the Clinton facility in early June. Matt and Sweat had used hacksaws to cut their way out of the maximum security state prison while the guards on patrol slept.

In the aftermath of the escape, police orchestrated a violent wave of retribution on other prisoners despite the fact that it was the guards—not the prisoners—who aided in their get-away. Police carried out a manhunt and shot both prisoners, killing Matt and wounding Sweat three weeks later.

The Times report indicates that the collective punishment carried out by the guards followed direct threats made by Cuomo, who visited the prison just hours before inmates were tortured.

According to the Times, Governor Cuomo asked prisoner Patrick Alexander if the escape by the two inmates “must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” Alexander explains that this threat was accompanied by Cuomo’s “best tough-guy stare.” Only hours after Cuomo and his media accompaniment left, Alexander was brutally beaten.

Cuomo’s visit, his threats, and the beatings that followed point to his direct involvement in orchestrating the criminal violence. The fact that he would make such threats on video underscores the degree to which the forces of the American state—from police officers and prison guards up to the governor and the president—carry out the violent repression of the population brazenly and with self-assumed impunity.

Alexander told the Times that three guards without name badges took him from his cell, handcuffed him, and placed him in a broom closet.

A guard threateningly asked him, “Do you know the difference between this interview and those other interviews?” The difference, Alexander was told, was that this time he was all alone: no defense attorney, no video cameras—just a handcuffed prisoner and the guards.

Alexander explained what happened next:

“The officer jumps up and grabs me by my throat, lifts me out of the chair, slams my head into the pipe along the wall. Then he starts punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also in the ribs and stomach. The whole time he’s holding me up by my throat.”

Alexander said that a guard then “pointed to a plastic bag hanging on some pipes, asked if I knew what it was for, and said ‘You know what waterboarding is?’” The inmate said that prison guards destroyed his diaries, family photos, and, as the article puts it, “a decade’s worth of letters from his mother and aunt that he had laminated with packing tape for safekeeping.”

Over sixty New York prisoners have filed complaints detailing similar attacks by prison guards. On one occasion, guards forced prisoners to line up in a row and then proceeded to beat them where they stood.

Another prisoner, Victor Aponte, explained that a prison guard with an American flag tattoo nicknamed “Captain America” beat him and tied a plastic bag around his face until he passed out. Guards then placed Aponte in solitary confinement for three weeks and threw out his family photographs and wedding ring.

In addition, prisoners were forced to sign affidavits denying that they had been beaten. As Aponte told the Times,

“the sergeant tells me I’ve been in prison for long time and I should know better, that if I didn’t tell the nurse that was going to examine me that nothing has happened that they were going to kill me for real this time.”

Manuel Nuñes, also interned at Clinton Correctional Facility, told the Timesthat he was beaten by New York correctional officers while being transferred to another prison. Guards “rushed into my cell, threw me down on the bed, twisted my wrist and yelled at me not to resist,” he said, adding that guards “assaulted me while I was cuffed, chained, and shackled.”

The brutality unleashed at Clinton Correctional Facility is a particularly egregious, but by no means unique, example of the treatment of prisoners in the American prison system. Forty four years after New York prison guards killed 33 prisoners in the Attica prison uprising of September 1971 the millions locked-up in American prisons still face conditions of Dickensian cruelty.

It was a stay in another New York prison on Rikers Island that led 22-year-old Kalief Browder to kill himself on June 6—the same day the torture campaign at Clinton commenced. Browder had been held for three years without having been convicted of a crime. According to a government tally, over two million people were locked-up in American prisons in 2011, with an additional five million on probation or parole.

Indeed, the brutality of the guards in upstate New York, with the direct involvement of the governor, is yet another expression of the degree to which violence, brutality, and murder have become the common currency of the American ruling class. After fifteen years of the war on terror, the types of crimes committed by the US war machine abroad are being brought home.

Philanthropist Lester Crown, left, presents the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Spirit of Courage” award to former Univ. of Illinois trustee Christopher Kennedy for overseeing the firing of Steven Salaita, 11 June, in Chicago. Simon Wiesenthal Center 

More than 1,000 pages of newly released emails expose unethical and possibly illegal behavior by campus officials regarding the University of Illinois’ decision to fire Steven Salaita after he made tweets critical of Israel’s assault on Gaza last summer.

The emails show that top officials colluded to conceal information and one administrator even destroyed what might be key evidence.

But just as stunning are the developments leading up to the university’s release of the emails.

On Thursday, 6 August, a federal judge cleared the way for Salaita’s lawsuit to proceed against university administrators and trustees for breach of contract and violation of his First Amendment free speech rights.

Salaita alleges that the officials fired him to appease, among others, pro-Israel donors.

The judge’s ruling all but demolished the university’s key arguments that it did not have a valid and binding contract with Salaita. But the judge did not allow the claims against as yet unnamed donors to proceed.

The very same day as the court ruling came the surprise resignation of Chancellor Phyllis Wise, the top official at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) campus where Salaita had been due to teach.

Explaining her departure, Wise, whose $594,000 annual salary makes her one of the highest paid public officials in Illinois, alluded only to “external issues [that] have arisen over the past year that have distracted us from the important tasks at hand.”

But by Friday, it was clear that Wise – notwithstanding a $400,000 golden parachute and a faculty position with a $300,000 salary – was leaving the chancellor’s office under a gathering cloud.

Cover-up culture

“The University of Illinois became aware in late April that certain members of the Urbana-Champaign campus administration and other campus employees might have used personal email accounts for university-related communications, and that those emails may not have been made available to those at the university responsible for responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests,” a university statement revealed.

Under university policy all records related to university business are subject to FOIA regardless of whether they were sent or received on an official or personal account.

“Emails from certain personal email accounts that were responsive to 10 FOIAs from eight requestors previously submitted to the university were not produced to the university’s FOIA team for review and potential production. These FOIA requests sought information related to James Kilgore, Steven Salaita, and the proposed Carle Illinois College of Medicine,” the university added.

(Kilgore is an adjunct faculty member who served prison time for a second-degree murder conviction related to his involvment in the radical Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s. His contract was not renewed in 2014 after a media storm over his past crimes. After setting up a review committee, the university relented and has allowed Kilgore to remain eligible to teach classes.)

The university said it had launched an internal “ethics inquiry” into the email practices it disclosed.

Deleting emails

The Electronic Intifada and others, including Urbana attorney Andrew Scheinman, have previously alleged that there was a deliberate cover-up over the Salaita matter, including possible destruction, or “spoilation,” of evidence. But rarely does one find such clear support for such suspicions as in this case.

The emails released by the university Friday – 294 pages related to Salaita, 773 pages related to the College of Medicine, and 33 pages on Kilgore – make it amply clear that evading public disclosure laws and concealing information that may be relevant to Salaita’s litigation was a key motive for Chancellor Wise.

In an 18 September 2014 email related to Salaita, for instance, Wise wrote from her private account that university spokesperson Robin Kaler “has warned me and others not to use email since we are now in litigation phase. We are doing virtually nothing over our Illinois email addresses. I am even being careful with this email address and deleting after sending.”

Wise’s admission that she selected emails could have damaging consequences for the university’s position in court.

There are several instances of Wise herself coaching others on how to act in ways that she – falsely – believed would stop communications becoming public.

In an 18 March 2014 email related to the College of Medicine (COM) project, for instance, Wise instructed Kaler to tell a subordinate to print out a certain email and “hand carry it to all of the people” in a list she provided.

The exchange makes clear that Wise believed that this would put the hard-copy documents out of reach of FOIA. Though Wise was mistaken in this, it would have made the documents easier for the recipients to destroy without trace were they inclined to do so.

In the same exchange, Wise asked Kaler if using an electronic dropbox to leave documents for others to see would help evade scrutiny. “Do you think that box is secure?” Wise asked. “Can it be FOIed?”

Kaler responded that the dropbox “doesn’t protect documents from FOIA, but it does reduce the number of electronic copies floating around campus.”

“Un-FOIAble”

In a 10 July 2014 email, Wise admonished an external consultant for sending an email that suggested that two university officials – Vice President Christophe Pierre and then President Robert Easter – were supportive of her controversial plan for a college of medicine, saying its disclosure would put Pierre in a “compromised” position.

“You may not be used to the ‘FOIA-everything’ atmosphere that we are working in at Illinois,” Wise wrote. “I would really recommend that you ‘recall’ your email. I believe that makes it un-FOIAble.”

In a later email to another colleague, Wise confirmed that the consultant had destroyed the email as she had asked him to do.

There appears to be no reference in the emails to the famous “two-pager” memo on Salaita handed to Wise by a major donor days before she sent Salaita a letter informing him that his job no longer existed.

The Electronic Intifada made extensive efforts to try to retrieve the memo under the Freedom of Information Act. Wise and the university could not explain what happened to it.

Salaita alleges in his lawsuit that Wise destroyed the two-pager. The federal judge threw out that part of his complaint, so it may never be known what really happened to it.

Salaita, it should be recalled, also had to sue the university – successfully – to release thousands of other pages of emails about his case that it had attempted to keep from public view.

But Wise has now admitted in writing that she deleted emails – in effect destroying evidence – not just because of FOIA but because she expected litigation by Salaita.

“Something changed”

The emails confirm that up until the morning of 24 July 2014, Wise and her campus colleagues were preparing for Salaita to take up his tenured position in the American Indian Studies program a few weeks later and there was no talk of firing him.

Their plan amounted to giving him a stern lecture about his tweets when he arrived on campus.

But after a closed meeting of the board of trustees on 24 July, Wise seemed to have her marching orders. The board would be “considering carefully whether to approve” Salaita’s appointment at its subsequent meeting in September, she wrote to colleagues, adding, “Definitely not a given.”

Anand Swaminathan, one of Salaita’s lawyers, told The News-Gazette that the emails indicate that “something changed” around the time of the 24 July board meeting.

“We think these documents in some ways raise more questions than they answer,” Swaminathan added. “It’s very clear that the university administration understood all the way through, at least through 24 July, that they had obligations and commitments to Professor Salaita. Something changed in their attitude since then.”

It is known that Salaita’s tweets – almost certainly as selected and spun by hostile, pro-Israel websites – were discussed at that board meeting.

But even after 24 July, Wise appeared to know that she was about to take part in something potentially disastrous.

On 31 July, the day before she sent her letter to Salaita informing him that his job had been rescinded, Wise wrote, in an apparent reference to a redacted draft university lawyers had sent her: “It will be the beginning of a lawsuit, I am sure I will be deposed no matter who sends the letter.”

“You may need to get ready as well,” she advised her correspondent, Provost Ilesanmi Adesida.

“We did the right thing”

In a 14 December 2014 email to Adesida, Wise complained that a critical report on the firing of Salaita by the faculty senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom on Tenure blamed her for the decision.

“What angers me about this report is that they believe that I made the decision and that the [board of trustees] followed my recommendation,” she wrote. “That is just plain not true. I have been carrying the water since [public relations consultants] Edelman said that we have to stay as one voice. I don’t think I can do that any longer.”

The implication is that she was pushed to do it by, among others, board chair Christopher Kennedy.

Kennedy, who had pushed for the removal of Kilgore, also became an outspoken critic of Salaita.

Yet in other exchanges, Wise is ready to own the decision to fire Salaita. In a 6 August email to Nick Burbules, a faculty member who was one of the chancellor’s closest advisors, Wise wrote: “we did the right thing, though I know I am in for a lot of criticism and a lawsuit.”

Wiesenthal award

In June, Kennedy, the son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, accepted the “Spirit of Courage” award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The pro-Israel organization had sent a 28 July 2014 letter to Univ. of Illinois President Robert Easter urging that Salaita’s appointment be rescinded. (The letter, made public as part of an earlier FOIA release by Andrew Scheinman, is below.)

The Wiesenthal Center, which actively supports efforts to suppress and censor Palestinian rights activism and speech, presented Kennedy with the award in recognition of the fact that he “led the board in their denial of final approval of the academic position offered to Steven Salaita, a professor who posted controversial and anti-Semitic rants on social media about Israel and her supporters.”

“Bullying and blackmail”

What is completely absent from the Salaita emails – during the entire period they cover from July 2014 to May 2015 – is any reflection by university officials on whether this kind of characterization of Salaita by his strident critics was fair, accurate or complete.

Not once did they ask seriously why so many people, including thousands of academics inside and outside the university, and major bodies like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), saw the matter so differently.

Instead, a siege mentality, where all critics were, at best, misinformed and, at worst, enemies, took over.

Amid mounting campus and national protests, Burbules advised Wise on 13 August 2014: “You can’t say this, but you can’t give in to bullying and blackmail. Bringing this guy [Salaita] in now, and empowering the groups who will feel that they forced you into reversing the decision, would only guarantee year after year of further problems along these lines.”

Burbules was particularly concerned that reversing course would empower the Campus Faculty Association, potentially boosting faculty unionization drives he – and the chancellor – strongly opposed.

“Externally, the petitions and boycotts are clearly driven by people who are getting the Readers Digest version of this story (young Palestinian scholar fired by U of I because of his position on Israel),” Burbules wrote. “Some consciously promote that distortion – others are just lazy and easily swayed by soundbites.”

Total acceptance of shallow accusations was coupled with a grim determination to pursue a course that has only led the university from one disaster to the next.

Costly mess

At the AAUP’s Academe blog, John K. Wilson argues that when all the emails on Salaita, Kilgore and the College of Medicine are taken in together, “a startling picture emerges that these three cases are actually intertwined. You can’t understand what happened to Salaita without seeing the other two events.”

Having read all the emails, I concur and will offer some additional observations in another post.

Chancellor Wise’s resignation comes just weeks after Tim Killeen arrived from the State University of New York to take over as the new president of the University of Illinois.

This means that almost all the top figures implicated in the Salaita firing – Wise, former president Robert Easter and board of trustees chair Christopher Kennedy whose term ended – have left the scene.

The timing of Wise’s less than voluntary departure and the disclosures regarding the hidden emails give rise to the question of how far the new president wants to go to keep defending someone else’s costly mess.

Whether these extraordinary turns means the university will be more willing to restore Salaita’s rights and reverse its attack on free speech without a protracted court battle remains to be seen.

The conventional wisdom is that no other currency in the world can support the global bond market save the US$ Toilet Paper Money. Therefore, we cannot do without the US$ toilet paper money!

The so-called experts in economics, including the Nobel Laureates are always reciting the mantra of the global central banks led by the FED and the Bank of England (BOE) that the US$ Toilet Paper Money is indispensable to global monetary liquidity because it is the anchor of the global bond market, specially the US Treasury bonds.

Such is the accepted wisdom of the so-called wise men and women of global finance.

If truth be told, this “accepted financial wisdom” is a big lie!

In fact, the purported strength of the US$ is actually its weakest link, the Achilles Heel of the entire global financial system!

Why?

A bond is an acknowledgement of a debt. It is the glorified name of an “I.O.U.”

The present financial system is grounded on Debt.

The ridiculous situation is that, bond markets can only grow if there are more debts.

How can it be a good thing if there are more debts, debts which cannot be paid to sustain a bond market? But, the global big banks and central banks want more debts, because this is how banks make money. They earned interests on the debts they create. There are so much debt that countries are literally drowning in debt and the leading debtor is the US. Therefore, it follows that the US bond market is the world’s largest bond market!

Yet, you are brainwashed to accept that the US I.O.U.s (bonds) are the “best security” and you should hold on to the US$ toilet paper money for dear life!

Another mantra is Debt=Money (counterfeit money) or in the words of the bankers, Credit=Money (counterfeit money). Why are such monies “counterfeit”? US$ toilet paper money as well as all fiat money are strictly counterfeit monies as it has no intrinsic value save the value (the number) stated on the piece of paper i.e. US$100, €100, £100, ¥100 etc. and must be accepted by the force of law (i.e. Legal Tender Laws), without which it would be treated as useless paper.

In this mad, mad world of toilet paper money, these counterfeit monies are created out of thin air, digitally by the click of the computer mouse of a bank’s computer. A small amount of the global paper money is printed by the central banks. The coins in your pocket are minted. They are to facilitate cash transactions. But, the bulk of the counterfeit monies sloshing around the world through the global payment system are all digital monies, mere numbers in the computer screens.

What is the Big Con that fooled the entire world when the US became the undisputed Superpower after the Second World War?

It is the stupid mantra that the US Treasury Bond (debt) is the “best security” and the “ultimate monetary safe haven” in the world!

Pause and think critically. Have you ever paused and thinked long and hard on the above financial mantra?

You couldn’t have been thinking straight all these years. Your mind and your thinking skills were locked in LIMBO, suspended from reality so that global banks can keep you in perpetual debt slavery. For if you had exercise your brain and using only common sense, you would have rejected the mantra and realised that the entire global financial system is a global PONZI scheme!

How can a debt/bond (specifically US debts/bond) be ever considered as the “Best Security”?

A owes B US$100,000.00, the debt repayable in a year’s time. But, B is in need of cash and wants to borrow US$100,000 from you. He has no security other than the “I.O.U. Note” from A (i.e. the bond). Would you lend US$100,000 to B secured by a mere promise by A that he will repay B the US$100,000 in a year’s time in the event that B fails to pay the debt he owes you?

Obviously, if A is a multi-millionaire and is not known for defaulting on his debts, you may well consider accepting A’s I.O.U. as a security for the loan you are considering giving to B. Even then, it is a BIG “If”!

The issue hinges on “Credibility” and “Confidence”.

The US is the biggest debtor in the entire world. It has been acknowledged by one and all that it is a physical impossibility for the US to repay all its debts, domestic and foreign. It has also defaulted many times, the most serious was in 1971, when the US under President Nixon reneged on the promise that the US$ is redeemable in Gold at the agreed rate of US$35 per oz. of gold. The US printed so much money that it did not have enough gold to support the exchange rate of US$35 per oz. of gold.

The US has not been able to repay any of its debts and the interests that have accrued on the debts since that awful day. All the US has been doing is to “print” digitally computer monies to make payments. Alternatively, the US issues “I.O.U.s” (i.e. bonds) to creditors such a China, Japan etc. and the proceeds would be applied to pay off the old debts when they become due. Old debts are replaced by new debts! Whenever there is a shortfall in the purchase of US bonds, the US would negotiate with creditors to “Roll-Over” the overdue debt and be granted an extension of time to repay the existing debt and accrued interests.

Given the above, how can any sane, reasonable and right thinking person classify such debts/bonds as described above as “the best security” for the creation of more debts?

In the technical jargon of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) these toilet papers (i.e. worthless I.O.U.s) are considered “Tier 1 Capital” (i.e. the best) in determining a bank’s capital ratio and therefore the bank’s credit worthiness. The more Tier 1 Capital, the more credit-worthy is the bank!

We can conclude that by the simple labelling of the US Treasury bond as the “best security”, “the most liquid asset” and the “monetary safe-haven” the global financial elites were able to instil confidence in US toilet paper money. Through this propaganda, the FED and its global financial allies were able to create a “demand for the dollar”. When this artificial confidence is coupled with the imposition that trade, especially trade in crude, must be denominated in US$, all of us, nations and people were made captives of the US$ Serfdom!

If the US bonds were so sacrosanct, how can the global financial harlots explain the total collapse of all the Global Too Big To Fail Banks during the 2008 Global Financial Tsunami and US$ trillions have to be “printed” digitally by the FED to bail out these banks?

Likewise, given the above, how can any sane, reasonable and right thinking person consider US I.O.U.s “Safe Havens” during times of financial crisis?

When an individual is unable to repay his/her debts, he/she is deemed a bankrupt and would be declared as such by the Court on an application by the creditor. Likewise, when a company is unable to pay its debts, it is deemed insolvent (a corporate term for bankruptcy) and a creditor can apply to the court to have the company would up i.e. liquidated (sent to the corporate grave in Layman’s language).

The US is a bankrupt State and would be considered a “Banana Republic” and treated as “Pariah State” if it has no nuclear weapons to blackmail countries to continue to support its broken system. It is a failed state!

Presently, we are witnessing a new phenomenon – “Sovereign Debt Default”. Most developed countries are in this state of financial mess. Greece is a typical example, but the others are barely above the waterline and when these countries get tired from having to bob up and down to gasp a mere mouthful of “financial air”, they would drown very quickly.

Make no mistake. This is the present scenario and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The central banks’ tool kit is empty of financial tools – Quantitative Easing (QEs) and Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) were the last tools and they were blunt instruments!

The Global Reserve Currency (US$) was nothing more than a financial propaganda tool to blackmail countries not aligned to the “Soviet Camp” during the Cold War to accept and submit to US hegemony. Even the Soviet Union had to use the US$ when trading outside the Warsaw Pact nations. Such was the stranglehold of the US$ in world trade, but it was based on “pure propaganda” and it did work for a while because nations and people were blinded by so much fear during the era of the Cold War that they were not thinking rationally.

This is not the case today.

There is no longer the need for a single global reserve currency.

However, the demise of the US$ would not be immediate as the financial elites would fight to the bitter end to ensure the US$ financial hegemony. Markets would be manipulated to create financial and or currency turmoils thereby provoking fear and a “flight to safety” to the US$ and US$ assets on the basis of the propaganda lie that the US$ / US$ assets are the best “monetary safe-havens”.

In fact, there is no need for a single global reserve currency. Countries ought to trade in their respective currencies, free from the artificial shackles imposed by the single global reserve currency. The demise of the single global reserve currency would do away with the volatility and the exorbitant privilege given to the US arising from the manipulation of the currency and interest rates markets by the FED and its financial allies.

The US$800 Trillion derivative casino would collapse and of course all the Global Too Big To Fail Banks would be bankrupted and the global financial system shaken to its very core. But, the period of severe pain and adjustment would be short. When every nation realise that there is no need for a single global reserve currency, confidence would return with a vengeance and global trade would flourish as the cost of doing global business would be reduced drastically. Just do the maths!

If there is a role for the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SPRs) it would be of limited use, confined to specific short-term circumstances where one or two nations suffer temporary liquidity problems. Even if such an event would occur, it is envisaged that Regional Banks set up for such purposes by member countries of a region would step in even before the need for IMF to intervene.

Future crisis, if any would be regional and not global as Regional Banking mechanisms would provide the firewall that would prevent any contagion beyond its borders. This is already taking place with the establishment of the BRICS Development Bank and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) by China and supported by over 30 countries as founding members.

Welcome to the Brave New World – a world free from the shackles of a Single Global Reserve Currency!

A world free from US financial hegemony!

In the village of Duma, an 18 month old Palestinian baby died following the fire-bombing of his family’s home by Israeli settlers. The father of the child died of burns a week later and the surviving mother and young sibling are barely alive – covered with burns from racist Jewish arson. The United Nations Special Committee to investigate Israel’s practices toward Palestinians in Israeli occupied territory have revealed that the ‘root cause’ of the escalating violence is the ‘continuous policy of Jewish settlement expansion (financed and defended by the Netanyahu regime) and the climate of impunity relating to the activities of the settlers [financed and defended by the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations]. (UN News Centre, Aug. 10, 2015).

Introduction

The recent US-Iran nuclear agreement, entitled Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, has implications far beyond the ending of nearly 40 years of regional confrontation.

Several fundamental issues concerning the nature of US policymaking, the power of a foreign regime (Israel) in deciding questions of war and peace and the role organized power configurations with overseas loyalties play in making and breaking executive and legislative authorities.

To investigate these fundamental issues it is important to discuss the historical context leading up to the rise of this paradoxical situation: Where a ‘global power’ is subject to the dictates of a second-rate state through the strategic penetration and influence by domestic organizations composed of ‘nominal citizens’ of the subject state with ‘divided (to put it politely) loyalties’.

The Centrality of Israel’s Unchallenged Regional Supremacy

The motor force of Israeli foreign and domestic policy is their drive for unchallenged regional supremacy: Military dominance through wars, territorial occupation, brutal armed interventions, extra territorial political assassinations of opponents and favorable one-sided treaties. To ensure its unquestioned dominance Israel has developed the only nuclear weapons arsenal and largest missile launch capacity in the region and has openly declared its willingness to use nuclear weapons against regional rivals.

Israel’s repeated mantra that it faces an ‘existential threat’ from its Arab neighbors and subjugated Palestinians has no factual basis. On the contrary, history has taught the world that Israel, directly and indirectly, has engaged a series of aggressive wars devastating its Arab and Muslim neighbors. Israel has bombed and/or invaded Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Sudan.  Israel has assassinated scientists in Iran and Palestinian political leaders as well as intellectuals, writers and poets in the Gulf, Jordan and Europe. Even family members have not been spared Israeli terror.

Israel can brutalize its neighbors with total impunity because of its vast military superiority, but its real power is found in its overseas proxies, the Tel Aviv-dominated Zionist power configurations, especially in North America and Europe. The mostimportant proxy organizations and individuals operate in the United States. Thanks to them Israel has received over $150 billion dollars in economic and military grants and loans from US taxpayers in the past half-century. Each year Israel rakes in billions in tribute, billions in tax-free donations from billionaire Israel loyalists with dual US citizenship, who extract their wealth from American workers, investors and gamblers, and hundreds of billions via unrestricted investments, privileged market access and technology transfers.

The economic and military transfers to Israel result from the cumulative build-up of political power among powerful US Zionists. No one disputes today that what is dubbed as the ‘pro-Israel lobby’ is the most powerful configuration inside Washington DC today. Focusing primarily on the ‘Israel lobby’ overlooks the powerful role that influential, Zionist political officials have played in deciding issues prioritized by the Israeli leadership.

Israeli power over the making and implementing of US Middle East policy has led to the US invasions of Iraq, Syria and Libya; the current economic boycott and blockade of Iran; the breakup of Sudan; and the bombing of Somalia.

Israeli power in the US operates through various political instruments in different institutional settings. The pro-Israel mass media moguls at the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and all the TV networks unconditionally defend Israel’s bombing, dispossession and repression of Palestinians while demonizing any Arab or Muslim states which has opposed its brutality – frequently calling for the US to impose sanctions and/or to launch armed attacks against Israel’s critics.

The US military campaign known as the ‘Global War on Terror’, a series of brutal invasions and ‘regime changes’, launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001 was formulated and promoted by fanatical Israeli proxies in strategic positions within the Bush government, especially Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, ‘Scooter’ Libby, Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle. The boycott of Iran was designed and implemented by US Treasury officials Levey and Cohen. The drumbeat for war in Iraq and the phony ‘intelligence’ about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was propagated by New York Times scribe Judith Miller, designed by Wolfowitz and Feith, backed by the 52 President of Major American Jewish Organizations and ultimately paid for with the lives of over five thousand Americans and well over a million Iraqi civilians. The destruction and breakup of Iraq, a long-time supporter of Palestinian national rights, was accomplished without the loss of a single Israeli life – despite the enormous benefit the Jewish state has enjoyed from the war! The extraordinary success of this highest Israeli military priority was due entirely to the machinations of Israel’s highly placed US proxies.

Yet the cost of the war has been very high for the American people (and unimaginably high for Iraqis): Over a quarter million physical and mental casualties among US troops; two trillion dollars and counting in military expenditures crippling the US economy and a vast and growing army of Islamist and nationalist rebels opposing US interests throughout the region.

The Israeli power configuration within the US led the US into a war, which enhanced Israel’s dominance of the Middle East region and accelerated its annexation of Palestinian land. But Israeli ambition for total regional power is not complete. It still faces a formidable opponent to its conquest of the Middle East: Iran remains a staunch supporter of the people and national sovereignty of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

The regime of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, backed by the entire Israeli political opposition and the majority of the Jewish electorate, has been aggressively pushing for a US confrontation with Iran – through economic and eventually military warfare.

There have been scores of public and private meetings in the US and elsewhere, where Netanyahu’s regime “informed” (or rather dictated to) the entire Zionist power configuration to launch an economic and military attack against Iran with the open aim of ‘regime change’ and the ultimate aim of breaking up and destroying the Islamic republic – similar to the destruction of Iraq, Libya and now Syria.

Israel’s Proxies and the Obama – Iran Nuclear Accord

All the major US spy agencies, including the CIA, long concluded that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program. Its nuclear program has been proven to be limited to legal, internationally sanctioned peaceful civilian use. When the US intelligence establishment went ‘off-script’ and cleared Iran of a nuclear weapons program, Israel responded by brazenly assassinating five Iranian scientists and engineers, leaking faked evidence of a nuclear weapon program and directing its US proxies to push the US toward greater economic sanctions. They escalated their media campaign demonizing Iran, pushing for an economic and military blockade of Iran using the US naval forces in the Persian Gulf and its military bases in adjoining countries. Israeli officials want yet another US war for Israel along the lines of the Iraq invasion.

With the recent change in the Iranian government leadership via democratic elections there have been serious expressions of greater flexibility with regard to inspections of its nuclear programs and facilities. At the same time Washington has been confronted with multiple escalating insurgent wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. This provides the context for President Obama’s ‘pivot’ toward negotiations and diplomacy to secure an agreement with Iran and away from military confrontation.

This has infuriated the Netanyahu regime. Its government leaders and agents met with the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations, leading Zionist Washington insiders like (Dennis Ross), super-rich Zionist billionaires and multiple delegations of notables and told them to launch an all-out campaign to sabotage the Iran-US- England- France-Russia-China, and Germany (‘P5+1’) nuclear agreement.

The entire Zionist political apparatus immediately organized a multi-prong, multi-million dollar campaign blitz to undermine the US President. The American (sic) Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) mobilized hundreds of its full-time functionaries, invading the US Congress with offers of all expense-paid junkets to Israel, political threats, campaign ‘donation’ enticements and outright blackmail.

Influential US Zionist Congress people joined the onslaught with their ‘leader’ the ‘Senator from Tel Aviv’ Charles Schumer, accompanied by his fellow Zionist one-hundred percenters, Congress people like Steve Israel, Ted Deutsch, Eliot Engel and Nita Lowery. They have openly chosen to follow the dictates of the Israeli Prime Minister against their fellow Democrat US President Obama. Schumer, who frequently boasts that his name derives from ‘shomer Yisrael’ (Israel’s Guardian), flaunts his ‘role in Washington’ to serve Israel’s interest.  The unannounced (or undenounced) ‘elephant in the room’ is their primary loyalty to Israel over the US. The Democratic Congressional Zionists have joined hands with the Republican war mongers – both in tow to militarist, Zionist billionaires and media moguls. The 52 organizations brazenly announced a $40 million budget to fund an Israeli front group “Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran” to undermine President Obama’s (and the other members of the P5+1) push for diplomacy.Netanyahu’s ‘megaphones’ in the US mass media spread his message in their daily reports and editorial pages. The Zionist power configuration ran roughshod over dissident Jewish voters and Congress people who dared to support Obama’s Iran agreement – an agreement which has majority support of the war-weary US public and strong support from US scientists and Nobel Prize recipients.

President Obama has finally counter-attacked this campaign to undermine the agreement, calling attention to the fact that “the same people who led us into the Iraq war are pushing us into war with Iran”. The President discreetly omitted identifying the Israeli links of the “same people”.

Obama understands that the alternative to the peace accord opposed by Israel and the Zionist-led US Congress members will be a devastating regional war, costing trillions of dollars in losses to the US economy, thousands of US lives and hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers – not to speak of millions of Iranian casualties – and an environmental holocaust! While the Zionist power configuration saturates the airwaves with its unending lies and fear mongering, each and every major city and community Jewish Confederation have sent their activists to plant stories and twist arms to sabotage the agreement.

While many US intellectuals, liberals, progressives and leftists support the US-Iran agreement (see the Scientists’ Letter to Obama on Iran Nuclear Deal, Aug. 8, 2015 with 29 top scholars and Nobel laureates support diplomacy), few would dare to identify and attack Israel’s US proxies as they promote Tel Aviv’s agenda pushing the US to war with Iran. A brief glance through the sectarian left press, for example, The Socialist Register, New Politics, New Left Review, finds no discussion of the powerful, well-financed, highly organized, elite-driven Israeli proxies and their role in determining US wars in the Middle East, and more specifically the war agenda toward Iran.

Conclusion

The success or failure of the US-Iran nuclear agreement will have momentous, world-historic consequences that go far beyond the Middle East. Obama is absolutely right to pose the question as one between a diplomatic accord or a large scale, long-term devastating war. But war is what Israel, its leaders, its majority and its opposition parties are demanding and what its US proxies are pursuing.

The basic question for all Americans is whether we will act as an independent, sovereign country pursuing peace through diplomacy, as we currently see unfolding with Iran and Cuba, or a submissive military instrument, directed by Israel’s proxies hell-bent on destroying America for Israel.

 

Dawabsha family survivors aren’t afforded the same rights as Jews. Israel’s Property Tax and Compensation Fund Law (1961) provides monetary payments for property damage caused by terrorism.

Its Victims of Hostile Action Law (1970) provides compensation for bodily injuries suffered from terrorist attacks – as well as payments to family members of deceased victims.

Palestinians don’t qualify, only Jews, another example of a racist state, ignoring the rights of all people it’s obligated to protect.

Riham Dawabsha and her four-year-old son Ahmad are the remaining family survivors – both in intensive care precariously clinging to life with severe third-degree burns covering most of their bodies.

They’re physically unable to seek redress. They may not survive their ordeal. Yet Israeli law requires Palestinians victims of terrorism to appeal to a Defense Ministry committee – hostile to their interests – for compensation unlikely to be received.

Palestinian MK Yousef Jabareen called Israel’s system “absurd” and discriminatory. “Victims of nationalistic action must be eligible for compensation, and it doesn’t matter if they’re Arab or Jewish,” he said.

He wants Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to assure Palestinian terrorism victims are treated the same as Jews.

Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) attorney Dan Yakir called Israeli discrimination “another example of the intolerable disparity between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank in all areas of life.”

Firebombing the Dawbsha home on July 31 sparked world outrage. Israeli officials called the attack “terrorism.” Riham and Ahmad deserve no less compensation and overall redress than Jews.

Nothing can replace the loss of 18-month-old Ali and Riham’s husband Saad. No amount of redress can reunite all family members in peace and security. Nothing can change what happened that fateful day.

Israeli security forces routinely conspire with settler terrorists against defenseless Palestinian victims – letting them rampage freely, commit near daily acts of violence and vandalism with virtual impunity.

Police states operate this way – including whitewashing their worst high crimes. Israeli forces last summer alone mass murdered over 2,200 Gazans, injured over 11,000, and turned large parts of the Strip to rubble – still not rebuilt because construction materials and other vital supplies are blocked from entering except in too small amounts to matter.

While horrendous crimes of war and against humanity were being committed, Israeli security forces viciously assaulted Arab citizens peacefully protesting ongoing carnage. Jewish activists joined them in solidarity.

On August 11, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel published a report titled “Silencing the Opposition: Israel’s Law Enforcement’s Restrictions on Freedom of Expression in Israel during ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in Gaza, 8 July – 26 August 2014.”

Israeli authorities “adopted a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to citizens opposing” aggressive war against 1.8 million Gazans trapped under siege, said Adalah.

The entire Strip was turned into a free-fire zone. No safe havens existed – not private homes, mosques, refugee camps, schools, or UN facilities to keep civilians out of harm’s way.

Israeli Arabs and Jews were denied their free expression right to protest. Police brutality confronted them. Serious violations of Israel’s Criminal Procedure Code and other statutes were committed.

“The police exhibited a complete disregard for the principles and criteria that apply to its authority for preventing and dispersing demonstrations, which are stipulated in rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court as well as Guideline 3.1200 issued by the Attorney General regarding the right to protest,” said Adalah.

After one month of conflict, over 1,500 protesters were violently arrested – mostly Arabs, some requiring hospitalization. Children were brutalized like adults.

Police viciously attacked every peaceful demonstration held throughout 51 days of conflict. Courts rubber-stamped their actions – ordering lengthy detentions for people exercising their legitimate rights peacefully, committing no crimes.

Judges showed overt sympathy with aggressive war murdering Palestinians in cold blood. They were intolerant of peaceful protesters.

Nearly 350 criminal indictments were filed on bogus charges of violating public peace, congregating unlawfully, acting unruly in public, assaulting police, inciting racism or committing violent acts.

Legitimate anti-war activism was criminalized – Israeli Arab citizens especially singled out for harsh treatment. Arab workers were fired for opposing government policies on Facebook and other social networking sites. Students and faculty members were disciplined the same way.

Adalah concluded its report saying “the attitude of the Israeli law enforcement authorities has not changed since the grave events of October 2000 (start of the second intifada), nor since the police’s gross misconduct against protestors during Israel’s previous military offensive in Gaza in 2009 (Operation Cast Lead).”

(T)he incidents described in this report indicate that a public atmosphere of intolerance, racism, persecution and incitement characterized the most recent war.

Social networking sites became a frontier for targeting individuals opposed to the war on Gaza, with employees harassed and followed by co-workers and sometimes fired for online posts or statements.

The situation was just as severe for students and faculty members, whose political activities were closely monitored by universities and who faced disciplinary measures for speaking out against the military operation.

“Altogether, the widespread phenomenon of Israel’s restrictions on the freedom of expression of Palestinians citizens reached a point to which that freedom was almost rendered non-existent, all with the aim of silencing opposition against a devastating war” – premeditated lawless aggression by any standard.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

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

To read Part I of this article click here 

Strategic Scenarios

Having grasped an understanding of the geostrategic imperatives motivating the four main state actors most directly involved in and affected by the Kurdish insurgency, it’s now time to put everything together in forecasting a few of the most likely scenarios that this explosive mix can result in. Basically, the scenario progression works as such – the first one describes the opening stage of the conflict and should be closely investigated and immediately monitored in order to see which direction it’s headed in. Depending on the eventual geopolitical affiliation of the Kurds, the situation will start developing in accordance with the precepts of either the second or third scenarios. At last, the fourth scenario is more like the final step that the US will take in guiding events towards its most advantageous benefit, and it can thus be seen as the last possible strategic scenario capable of being predicted within somewhat of an accurate degree of knowledge at this given moment.

1. Tehran And Tel Aviv Team Up (Then Fall Out) In Kurdistan:

It may sound shocking, but as was argued in Part I, Iran and Israel have overlapping energy-related interests in maintaining friendly and moderately supportive relations with Turkey’s Kurds. To recap, Israel is interested in securing the BTC pipeline from which it receives 40% of its oil needs, while Iran wants a stable regional environment to safeguard any prospective pipelines from it and/or Turkmenistan to the EU. The situation of shared strategic interests between Iran and Israel in Turkish Kurdistan is very much like that between Iran and the US in Iraqi Kurdistan. Both sides support the Kurds in their fight against ISIL, even though they do so for different reasons and neither of them coordinates its activities with the other. Any ‘strategic honeymoon’ between Iran and Israel in Turkish Kurdistan isn’t expected to be permanent, however, since their drastically divergent end goals will lead to a destined falling out, as Israel tries to push the Kurds towards creating a pro-Western state while Iran tries to restrain them into accepting broad autonomy (whether it’s offered at the time or if a possibly mediating Tehran suggests such an idea itself) in the interests of overall stability and regional order. Of course, the rapidity at which Iran and Israel go from being surprising and unspoken ‘partners’ to reverting back to their roles as regional competitors will depend on both the success of the Kurdish insurgents and their governing body’s commitment to either a Western- or Resistance-oriented geopolitical disposition.

2. A ‘Geopolitical Israel’:

Looking at one of the two most likely scenarios that can branch out from that point, if the Kurds throw their lot behind Israel and the US (and the latter agrees to assist it at that time), then the creation of their hoped-for state would become a geopolitical oasis of unipolar influence in the heart of the Mideast. As was described in the first section when discussing this possibility, the US could use Kurdistan as a base for launching destabilizing operations further afield along the newly christened ‘country’s’ periphery, allowing it to simultaneously exert influence in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Furthermore, the battle-hardened Kurdish militants that ‘earned’ their entity’s ‘independence’ would then take on the role of ‘New Israelis’, in that their history of violence against all sides becomes the basis for a paranoid siege mentality that sees them begging for an external patron (US and Israel) to can ‘guarantee’ their artificial entity’s security from ‘external threats’. This is the exact same template that happened with Israel, which itself is an artificial entity that fought against its neighbors to secure its ‘independence’ and then sided with a stronger external patron (the US) to maintain its regionally hegemonic edge, so it’s for these reasons and the per the resultant similar strategic benefits that the West would receive that a pro-Western independent Kurdistan is referred to as a ‘geopolitical Israel’ and is such a major threat to the multipolar world.

3. The Resistance Bridge:

As disturbing as the previous scenario may be, it’s not preordained that things will go that way, and actually, there’s an equally possible chance that the geopolitical pendulum could swing in the polar opposite direction. If the Turkish Kurds end up on the winning side of the insurgency and identify more closely with Iran and the multipolar Global Resistance than the US/Israel and the unipolar world, then the partial or whole fulfillment of their demands (autonomy or independence) could create a solid bridge between Iran and Syria via Turkish/Iraqi Kurdistan. This is the reverse of the ‘geopolitical Israel’ scenario because it would empower Iran as the external patron that could then project its own proxy influence through Kurdistan (whether it’s autonomous or independent) to Turkey and Iraq. For obvious reasons, the US and Israel are completely opposed to this scenario and would frantically do whatever they could to stop it, but it’s of course questionable to what extent they might be able to alter the course of events given how chaotic the situation is that they may have created by that time. Even if it was their intent to corral the chaos in the direction of their strategic interests, it’s still chaos after all, and can accordingly turn against its creators’ designs and work out to their ultimate geopolitical disadvantage.

4. The American Kingmaker In Kurdistan:

The most important, and as of now, uncertain variable affecting the course of the Kurdish insurgency is the US’ position in the conflict. It’s not yet clear what the US will ultimately do, but the ball is most certainly in its court. It can of course continue to support Turkey against the PKK while playing a double game through its assistance to the PYG and the Kurdish Regional Government, or it could ‘abruptly’ turn against Turkey and pivot back to Kurdistan if Ankara begins to lose and/or is too deeply mired in Syria to be of any worthwhile geopolitical utility to it continuing as a unified entity. More than likely, the US will indefinitely continue with its policy of strategic ambiguity by exercising a restrained combination of each proposed measure in order to hedge its geopolitical bets, thus keeping both sides guessing and thereby motivating them to fight their respective campaigns to the fullest in order to secure what they hope to be the US’ favor in supporting their existential struggles. Once it does decide to decisively intervene, the US can either amplify the differences between the Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian Kurdish communities as a response to the Resistance Bridge scenario, or it can try to unify each of these units in order to fulfill the ‘geopolitical Israel’ forecast. It’s too early to tell which side the US is leaning towards at the moment, but once it chooses to act as the kingmaker, these are the probable actions that it’ll take in attempting to affect events towards its desired geopolitical ends.

Strategic Summary

This two-part article series contained a lot of strategic knowledge and forecasts about what may very well be the world’s most geopolitically complex region, so it’s forgivable if the reader feels slightly overwhelmed and possibly even a little bit confused about its contents. For the sake of clarity then, it’s appropriate to present a very basic four-point summary of the bigger picture in order to facilitate a better understanding of the topic:

1. Destabilization in Turkish Kurdistan adversely affects the BTC pipeline and any prospective plans for an Iran-EU and/or Turkmenistan-EU pipeline project, thus impelling both Iran and Israel to surprisingly offer at least implicit support to the same proxy actor in order to guarantee secure transit for each of their respective energy interests.
2. Iran and Israel’s differing end-game visions for Kurdistan (autonomy vs. independence) mean that the two sides will ineluctably break free of their ‘honeymoon’ phase sooner than later and bring their regional rivalry into Turkey’s simmering domestic conflict.
3. Turkish Kurdistan can choose to align itself with either the unipolar or multipolar worlds, and accordingly, this will be one of the most crucial factors in determining its future trajectory and the type of response that the US takes to the conflict.
4. American committed (covert) involvement on one side or the other is the single-most important variable deciding the direction of the conflict and what Turkish Kurdistan’s geopolitical orientation will ultimately be.

Concluding Thoughts

Turkey opened up a can of worms by reigniting its War on the Kurds, and it’s foreseeable that the current insurgency heralds much more than a short-term regional crisis. It’s very likely that the Kurds will continue their insurgency with the same passion and intensity that the Turks will embody in continuing their military operations, as both sides realize the existential interests that they have at stake in this conflict (for Erdogan, electioneering ends and territorial integrity; for the Kurds, the creation of a politically autonomous or independent [perhaps even transnational] homeland). Considering this, it’s thus necessary to elaborate more on the interests of each of the primary state actors involved in and/or affected by this bubbling situation. In crafting the most reasonable scenarios incorporating the acquired insight, it turns out that a somewhat procedural series of events appears as the most likely course for how the conflict will develop.

As fate and energy interests would have it, this initially puts both Iran and Israel on the same side of the ‘barricades’ at least in the situation’s opening phase. As their divergent end-game interests lead to similarly divergent policies (which are compounded by the length of time that the conflict drags on for), Tehran and Tel Aviv will inevitably introduce their regional rivalry into the equation, which can be expected to exacerbate the destabilization in southeastern Turkey. Ultimately, however, the US is the real kingmaker here, since it will diametrically alter the balance of situational power once it throws its weight behind either the Turkish government or the Kurdish insurgents, but by no means does this guarantee that its selected side will emerge victorious. Thus, as the situation in Turkish Kurdistan becomes exceedingly more complex by the day, it’s hoped that this article can serve as a useful guide in helping observers understand what’s happening and where it all might be headed in the coming future.

Andrew Korybko is the political analyst and journalist for Sputnik who currently lives and studies in Moscow, exclusively for ORIENTAL REVIEW.

Greek Economy Minister George Stathakis told the Financial Times: “We have a deal” – for an 86 billion euro bailout over the next three years at a cost of selling Greece’s soul to predatory money lenders, financial terrorists by any standard.

The European Commission confirmed “an agreement in principle.” Some details remain to be resolved.

According to the FT,

“(t)he agreement covers the main points of a sweeping three-year fiscal and structural reform programme agreed with bailout monitors from the commission, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Stability Mechanism, the EU’s own bailout fund.”

In other words, total capitulation to Troika demands no just societies would tolerate – agreeing to let Greece be more financially and economically raped and pillaged than already, its entire population (except its privileged class complicit with Euroland bandits) held hostage to monied interests wanting all their demands met, unwilling to compromise, uncaring about appalling human suffering already inflicted.

So-called “prior actions” agreed to include a 50 billion euro privatization scheme to loot prime Greek enterprises and assets over the next 30 years, as well as a plan for dealing with 90 billion euros of past due loans.

Greece needs immediate funding to pay pay 3.2 billion euros in ECB debt service by August 20. Details agreed to other than what’s already known weren’t announced – or remaining unresolved issues.

On Tuesday, technical agreement talks will conclude. Finance ministers of all Eurozone nations must approved agreed on terms.

The FT said a conference call involving finance ministers from all 28 EU members is planned for later on Tuesday – “in case the talks fall through again and Greece requires (another) bridging loan to” pay ECB debt service later this month.

Eurozone finance ministers are expected to meet Friday in Brussels to approve bailout terms if all goes according to plan. Countries requiring parliamentary approval (including Germany) will seek it next week.

The FT reported all parties agreed to aim for a 2015 Greek 0.25 budget deficit, a 2016 0.5% surplus, 1.75% in 2017, and 3.5% in 2018. Given Greece’s dire financial and economic condition, deficits may increase ahead, not improve.

Its economy teeters toward collapse. The new bailout deal exacerbates its problems – piling on more odious debt than already with no way to repay it. At some point, default becomes inevitable.

SYRIZA officials will present the bailout package to parliament on Tuesday. On Wednesday, its economic committee will review it, then a final vote on Thursday. Expect rubber-stamp approval like before despite overwhelming public opposition.

Final score as expected: Bankers win. Ordinary people lose. Price for defeat: Greater unemployment, destitution, lost or reduced social services and human misery.

No society should tolerate a system based on predation. Western ones allow no alternative.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

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

 

image: Prof. James Tracy 

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” Edward Bernays observed almost a century ago.

“Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” Bernays’ insight reflects the view of corporate statists he regularly commissioned with.

Intertwined with complex public relations exercises, corporate news media’s role today has far less to do with informing the public than it does with maintaining a perpetual tension and anxiety throughout the body politic. Through such tension the citizenry will further gravitate toward or even consciously advocate for heightened police state measures now peddled a prerequisite for public safety.

Recent quantitative and historically-oriented studies by USA Today and the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on mass murder in the United States provide much food for thought especially since they suggest vast public misperceptions concerning massacre events that call out for further inquiry. More than ever, public opinion has been fueled by a corporate news media disproportionately sensationalizing certain mass murders while overlooking others that are at least as serious.

The CRS looked at an array of academic studies and FBI data to find an annual average of 31 mass murders (defined as four or more victims excluding the perpetrator). Importantly, mass shootings have increased only slightly between 2009 and 2013 versus preceding five year periods dating to 1999. Of these, about two thirds involve firearms. If the year 2012 was excluded from the latest 2009-13timespan that period’s average number of incidents (22.4) and fatalities (116) would have shown a significant decrease versus the previous two five year averages.

Prominent gun rights opponents such as President Obama and Michael Bloomberg have advocated for gun control measures. Their activism has been most vigorous following the 2012 events, in particular the mass shootings at Aurora Colorado and Newtown Connecticut, each of which now appear to have been “false flags” intended to bolster the case for scaling back the Second Amendment (e.g. here, here, here and here).

Despite these poorly understood and vastly propagandized events Aurora and Sandy Hook have been imbued in the pubic mind on a scale comparable to the September 11, 2001 “terror attacks.” This is the case even though there are now far more contradictions and unanswered questions concerning both events than when they initially transpired.

In the case of Newtown local and state authorities have had difficulty responding to numerous public records requests simply querying on the most fundamental documents to confirm whether the event ever took place as reported by major news media. The very news outlets sensationalizing the massacre have long since moved on to solicit the most recent bloodlettings in Charleston, Chattanooga, and Lafayette.

Corporate news outlets indeed know how the public fears being involved in such an event. According to one nationwide survey of adults highlighted in the CRS study,

Americans’ top fears include 1) walking alone at night, 2) becoming the victim of identity theft, 3) various risks of using the Internet, 4) being the victim of a mass shooting, and 5) public speaking.

Most Americans learn of catastrophic events from television news, and overwhelmingly rely on the video display of news to make sense of their world. The corporate media chieftains and their subordinate producers and editors overseeing the modern consciousness industry thus have free reign to manipulate the thoughts, fears, even the dreams of the populace, thereby shaping the psychic basis for what is deemed desirable public policy. They choose specific stories and gauge the extent of their exposure to craft national public opinion and dismiss others not upholding certain agendas, such as race-based social tension and gun control. As the observations below suggest, Time Warner’s CNN is a central agent in bolstering such perspectives.

A cursory examination of recent broadcast news may prove helpful in demonstrating today’s psywar on the American people. Coverage of the July 18, 2015 shooting at a military recruiting station and base in Chattanooga Tennessee, and the July 23, 2015 massacre in a Lafayette Louisiana movie theater are illustrative. Each incident resulted in profuse media attention, making the events impossible to overlook.

Yet equally tragic and alarming mass murders transpired on these exact dates with comparatively little reportage or commentary from corporate media. For example, on July 18 in Northern California one Martin Martinez was charged with the murders of three young children and two women, one of whom was a practicing physician.

On July 23 two teenage boys were taken into custody in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma as suspects in the brutal stabbing deaths of five family members. The scene was so disturbing that even responding police officers were visibly shaken, a rare story by NBC News noted. “The crime scene has taken a pretty heavy toll on officers who have come out here,” a Broken Arrow policeman remarked. “It hits close to home, especially when the victims are adults and juveniles. Our officers have a lot to take in.”

Comparing the coverage of these four comparable events that transpired on or around the same dates indexed by the LexisNexis database, one finds the privileged stories chose to impress upon the public mind the alleged problem of “love wolves,” their purported ideological predispositions—in these instances Muslim and Nazi-racist fanaticism—and the apparent ease with which they have obtained firearms.

Chattanooga Marine Base Shooting Coverage in Broadcast News, July 16-23, 2015 via LexisNexis

Total Story Transcript Yield: 389

Various Independent and Network Affiliate Broadcasts — 120
CNN — 119
Fox News — 36
CBS News — 21
ABC News — 19
NBC News — 14
MSNBC — 12
Federal News Service — 10
National Public Radio — 8
Channel News Asia — 6
CNN International — 6
Canadian Television Network — 4
Lou Dobbs Tonight — 4
Congressional Quarterly Transcriptions — 3
Euronews English — 3
PBS NewsHour — 3
ABC Australia — 1

Modesto California Mass Murder Broadcast News Coverage, July 18-25, 2015 via LexisNexis

Total Story Transcript Yield: 22

Various Independent and Network Affiliate Broadcasts — 17
CNN — 1
ABC News — 1
CBS News — 1
NBC News — 1
Canadian Television Network — 1

Lafayette Theater Shooting Broadcast News Coverage, July 23-30, 2015 via LexisNexis

Total Story Transcript Yield: 343

Various Independent and Network Affiliate Broadcasts — 161
CNN — 78
Fox News — 9
CBS News — 22
ABC News — 21
NBC News — 13
MSNBC — 12
Federal News Service — 9
Canadian Television Network — 3
National Public Radio — 2
Congressional Quarterly Transcriptions — 3
Channel News Asia — 2
CNN International — 2
Euronews English — 2
PBS NewsHour — 1
Financial Market Regulatory Wire — 1
Lou Dobbs Tonight — 1

Broken Arrow Oklahoma Mass Stabbing Broadcast News Coverage, July 23-30, 2015

Total Story Transcript Yield: 7

Various Independent and Network Affiliate Broadcasts — 4
CNN — 1
ABC — 1
NBC — 1

How can one explain such disparate coverage? It may be attributable to the random nature of editorial decision-making at major news outlets. A more critical analysis, however, suggests a coordinated effort to maneuver public opinion behind the “war on terror” and continued public acceptance of America’s police state.

Can this merely be dismissed as “conspiracy theory”? It is well established that CNN and NPR have collaborated with US military psychological warfare experts in recent years. “CNN had hosted a total of five interns from U.S. Army Psyops, two in television, two in radio, and one in satellite operations,” Project Censored noted in the early 2000s, citing coverage of the phenomenon in both alternative and mainstream outlets.

The military/CNN personnel belonged to the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of the main tasks of this group of almost 1,200 soldiers and officers is to spread “selected information.” The propaganda group was involved in the Gulf War, the war in Bosnia, and the crisis in Kosovo.

The military personnel stayed with CNN for at least two weeks “to get to know the company and to broaden their horizons.” Collins maintains that “they didn’t work under the control of the army.” The temporary outplacement of U.S. Army Psyops personnel in various sectors of society began a couple of years ago. Contract periods vary from weeks to one year.

In light of the Sandy Hook and Aurora events, in addition to other sensationalized mass shootings like those referenced above, it is not unreasonable to question whether CNN and other major news outlets are again carrying out such exercises. Given the corporate news media and federal government’s accelerating arrogance and lack of accountability, would the public ever be privy to such a scheme?

With the above comparisons in mind one needs to seriously consider the extent to which CNN and other news outlets are again working with intelligence and/or military psywar personnel to essentially “brainwash the American public” on crucial issues such as gun control, as former Attorney General Eric Holder recommended in 1995.

There is an all too apparent intent behind today’s terrorist and mass shooting events—an insidious and fraudulent effort to rob people of not only their constitutional freedoms but also their peace of mind and ability to exercise basic free association in their communities. This brings a whole new meaning to the term “terrorism,” as well as the real parties actually implicated in the psychic torment of a once free nation.

Few, if any, corporations absorb the full cost of their operations. Corporations shove many of their costs onto the environment, the public sector, and distant third parties. For example, currently 3 million gallons of toxic waste water from a Colorado mine has escaped and is working its way down two rivers into Utah and Lake Powell. At least seven city water systems dependent on the rivers have been shut down. The waste was left by private enterprise, and the waste was accidentally released by the Environmental Protection Agency, which might be true or might be a coverup for the mine. If the Lake Powell reservoir ends up polluted, it is likely that the cost of the mine imposed on third parties exceeds the total value of the mine’s output over its entire life.

Economists call these costs “external costs” or “social costs.” The mine made its profits by creating pollutants, the cost of which is born by those who had no share in the profits.

As this is the way regulated capitalism works, you can imagine how bad unregulated capitalism would be. Just think about the unregulated financial system, the consequences we are still suffering with more to come.

Despite massive evidence to the contrary, libertarians hold tight to their romantic concept of capitalism, which, freed from government interference, serves the consumer with the best products at the lowest prices.

If only.

Progressives have their own counterpart to the libertarians’ romanticism. Progressives regard government as the white knight that protects the public from the greed of capitalists.

If only.

Everyone, and most certainly libertarians and progressives, should read Jeffrey St. Clair’s book, Born Under A Bad Sky (2008). St. Clair is an engaging writer, and his book is rewarding on many levels. If you have never floated the Western rivers or met the challenge of treacherous rapids or camped among mosquitoes and rattlesnakes, you can experience these facets of life vicariously with St. Clair, while simultaneously learning how corruption in the Park Service, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management results in timber companies, mining companies, and cattle ranchers making money by plundering national forests and public lands.

The public subsidies provided to miners, loggers, and ranchers are as extravagant and as harmful to the public interest as the subsidies that the Federal Reserve and Treasury provide to the “banks too big to fail.”

Progressives and libertarians need to read St. Clair’s accounts of how the Forest Service creates roads into trackless forests in order to subsidize timber companies’ felling of old growth forest and habitat destruction for endangered and rare species. Our romanticists need to learn how less valuable lands are traded for more valuable public lands in order to transfer wealth from the public to private hands. They need to learn that allowing ranchers to utilize public lands results in habitat destruction and the destruction of stream banks and aquatic life. They need to understand that the heads of the federal protective agencies themselves are timber, mining, and ranching operatives who work for private companies and not for the public. Americans of all persuasions need to understand that just as senators and representatives are bought and paid for by the military/security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby, they are owned also by mining, timber and ranching interests.

The public interest is nowhere in the picture.

The two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at 39% and 52% of capacity. The massive lakes on which the Western United States is dependent are drying up. And now Lake Powell is faced with receiving 3 million gallons of waste water containing arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum and cadmium. Wells in the flood plains of the polluted rivers are also endangered.

The pollutants, which turned the rivers orange, flowed down the Animas River from Silverton, Colorado through Durango into the San Juan River in Farmington, New Mexico, a river that

flows into the Colorado River that feeds Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

All of this damage from one capitalist mine.

In November of last year, US Rep. Chris Stewart (R.Utah) got his bill passed by the House.Stewart is a hit man for capitalism. His bill “is designed to prevent qualified, independent scientists from advising the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They will be replaced with industry affiliated choices, who may or may not have relevant scientific expertise, but whose paychecks benefit from telling the EPA what their employers want to hear.” http://www.iflscience.com/environment/epa-barred-getting-advice-scientists

Rep. Steward says it is a matter of balancing scientific facts with industry interests.

And there you have it.

Getty photographer Scott Olson arrested at Ferguson protest, 18 August 2014. (Ryan J. Reilly/@ryanjreilly)

Markets received a seismic jolt from China on Tuesday as it devalued its currency, the Yuan, by the most in two decades, cutting its daily reference rate by 1.9 percent. The move sparked instant selloffs in stocks, commodities, and emerging market currencies as well as a drop in the yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note, which is trading early this morning at a yield of 2.16 percent.

The devaluation was interpreted in the markets as a sign of capitulation by China to forego a stable currency policy in a last-ditch effort to revitalize sluggish export growth. On Friday, China reported that its exports had plunged by 8.3 percent overall in July with dramatic declines of 12.3 percent to the European Union and 13 percent to Japan. Exports to the United States fell by 1.3 percent.

While China announced that the currency devaluation was a one-off move, the prevailing fear in global markets is that it marks a new round in the raging currency wars where countries are now competing to debase their currencies in hopes of making their exports more competitively priced in global markets.

The move spells trouble for the U.S. on a number of fronts. As of 8:39 a.m. in New York, stock futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were in the red by 147 points.

The U.S. imports more goods from China than any other country. Through June of this year, the U.S. had imported $226.7 billion in goods from China versus $150.4 billion from Canada and $145.1 billion from Mexico, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Federal Reserve has been struggling to avoid importing deflation into the U.S.; this devaluation move now means that Chinese goods flowing into the U.S. just got cheaper and the ability of U.S. exporters to compete in global markets just got a lot harder.

According to a Federal Reserve report released on July 17, the rising value of the U.S. Dollar is having a significant negative impact on large U.S. based multinationals. The report noted that “The dollar’s strength likely explains roughly a third of the recent decline in profits earned from foreign subsidiaries” and that “Firms with high foreign sales tend to be larger and account for almost 75 percent of S&P 500 nonfinancial earnings excluding oil and utilities.”

As we have reported before, this global currency race to the bottom cannot be solved by central banks. The problem is directly rooted in the unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality that plague this era. In the U.S., that problem springs directly from Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer system.

Read more

Getty photographer Scott Olson arrested at Ferguson protest, 18 August 2014. (Ryan J. Reilly/@ryanjreilly)

Markets received a seismic jolt from China on Tuesday as it devalued its currency, the Yuan, by the most in two decades, cutting its daily reference rate by 1.9 percent. The move sparked instant selloffs in stocks, commodities, and emerging market currencies as well as a drop in the yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note, which is trading early this morning at a yield of 2.16 percent.

The devaluation was interpreted in the markets as a sign of capitulation by China to forego a stable currency policy in a last-ditch effort to revitalize sluggish export growth. On Friday, China reported that its exports had plunged by 8.3 percent overall in July with dramatic declines of 12.3 percent to the European Union and 13 percent to Japan. Exports to the United States fell by 1.3 percent.

While China announced that the currency devaluation was a one-off move, the prevailing fear in global markets is that it marks a new round in the raging currency wars where countries are now competing to debase their currencies in hopes of making their exports more competitively priced in global markets.

The move spells trouble for the U.S. on a number of fronts. As of 8:39 a.m. in New York, stock futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were in the red by 147 points.

The U.S. imports more goods from China than any other country. Through June of this year, the U.S. had imported $226.7 billion in goods from China versus $150.4 billion from Canada and $145.1 billion from Mexico, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Federal Reserve has been struggling to avoid importing deflation into the U.S.; this devaluation move now means that Chinese goods flowing into the U.S. just got cheaper and the ability of U.S. exporters to compete in global markets just got a lot harder.

According to a Federal Reserve report released on July 17, the rising value of the U.S. Dollar is having a significant negative impact on large U.S. based multinationals. The report noted that “The dollar’s strength likely explains roughly a third of the recent decline in profits earned from foreign subsidiaries” and that “Firms with high foreign sales tend to be larger and account for almost 75 percent of S&P 500 nonfinancial earnings excluding oil and utilities.”

As we have reported before, this global currency race to the bottom cannot be solved by central banks. The problem is directly rooted in the unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality that plague this era. In the U.S., that problem springs directly from Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer system.

Read more

The lead editorial Monday in the New York Times has brought to the attention of the general public the Pentagon’s issuance of a major new document defining rules of conduct on the battlefield for US military personnel and their commanders. The Law of War Manual, a massive 1,165-page document, was published in June, but was initially discussed exclusively in blogs specializing in military law and security policy.

The major US newspapers and television networks, which have full-time Pentagon correspondents and regularly review Pentagon press releases, chose to say nothing about the Law of War Manual, for reasons that become obvious when the content of the document is explored. Nor did they comment initially on the manual’s provisions for journalists until the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement July 31 under the headline, “In times of war, Pentagon reserves right to treat journalists like spies.”

The CPJ statement noted the rising number of journalists imprisoned or killed while covering the actions of armed groups in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa. It attacked the Pentagon document for justifying the treatment of journalists as belligerents or outright spies, who may be detained, imprisoned or even killed at the discretion of battlefield commanders, as well as endorsing blanket military censorship of press reporting.

The CPJ declared,

“The Obama administration’s Defense Department appears to have taken the ill-defined practices begun under the Bush administration during the War on Terror and codified them to formally govern the way US military forces treat journalists covering conflicts.”

The continuity between administrations is underscored by the identity of the Law of War Manual’s principal author, Pentagon General Counsel Stephen W. Preston. Before moving to the Department of Defense, Preston was general counsel of the CIA from 2009 to 2012, the period when the agency was ferociously resisting a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into torture at CIA secret “black site” prisons under the Bush administration.

The Times editorial complains about the guidelines for treatment of journalists and pleads with the White House to take action to force their immediate repeal. At the same time, it notes that a spokesman for the National Security Council refused even to say whether the White House had signed off on the manual.

The Times objects to the manual’s claim that “Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying,” and its insistence that journalists must “act openly and with the permission of relevant authorities,” a provision that would make impossible virtually any kind of war reporting other than the state propaganda provided by the notorious “embedded journalists” of the 2003 Iraq invasion.

But the editors give no explanation why the news pages of the Times have never mentioned the Law of War Manual, or why their concern is limited to the two pages of the manual that apply to journalists and not to the bulk of the document, which amounts to a green light for military atrocities including mass killings.

The World Socialist Web Site will examine the 1,165-page Pentagon document more fully in the coming days, but certain preliminary points can be made. The Law of War Manual:

* Declares legitimate the use of nuclear weapons, stating, “There is no general prohibition in treaty or customary international law on the use of nuclear weapons.” Nor is the use of nuclear weapons considered “inherently disproportionate,” even if the target is a military force that does not possess nuclear weapons.

* Authorizes the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, herbicides (such as Agent Orange in Vietnam), laser weapons and riot control agents (tear gas, pepper spray, etc.), as well as depleted uranium munitions.

* Authorizes cluster munitions, mines and booby-traps, noting that “the United States is not a Party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.”

* Authorizes the use of exploding (hollow-point) bullets, stating that the United States government was not a party to the 1868 St. Petersburg declaration banning their use or the 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets.

* Justifies drone missile attacks by both the Pentagon and intelligence agencies such as the CIA, declaring flatly, “There is no prohibition in the law of war on the use of remotely piloted aircraft…”

* Declares that when human rights treaties and the laws of war come into conflict, “these apparent conflicts may be resolved by the principle that the law of war… is the controlling body of law with regard to the conduct of hostilities.”

As pointed out in discussions in specialist journals, the new Law of War Manual redefines the principles set out in the most comprehensive previous such document, issued by the Pentagon in 1956, by declaring that “the main purposes of the law of war are: protecting combatants, noncombatants, and civilians from unnecessary suffering.”

The previous document did not include civilians in the concept of “unnecessary suffering,” not because it permitted greater violence against civilians, but because it assumed that any such violence was prohibited, and that any deliberate targeting of civilians was illegal and a war crime.

The new document seeks to distinguish between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” acts of military violence against civilian targets, using the criterion of military necessity. Thus, acts of mass slaughter of civilians could be justified if sufficient military advantages were gained by the operations.

It is no surprise that the New York Times and the entire American media have been silent on the issuance of the Law of War Manual. They are following orders to conceal from the American people, and from the world’s population, the Pentagon’s preparations for new and more massive war crimes, along with the destruction of democratic rights spelled out in the US Constitution.

The Times separates the Pentagon’s rejection of the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom from the eruption of American militarism, which it supports. In fact, the new manual demonstrates the incompatibility of militarism and democracy. The struggle against imperialist war is inseparable from the struggle against dictatorship. They both require the development of an international struggle of the working class against capitalism.

St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger declared a state of emergency Monday as protests marking the anniversary of the police murder of Michael Brown intensified after officers shot 18-year-old Tyrone Harris Sunday night.

The circumstances surrounding Harris’s shooting remain unclear, but it is known that four plainclothes police officers shot him multiple times near a demonstration taking place on West Florissant Street in Ferguson, Missouri.

Harris remains in critical condition after undergoing surgery following the shooting. So far, over 100 people have been arrested in the St. Louis region since Sunday night, while heavily armed police officers have descended upon the area, dispersing demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Stenger said that the declaration of the state of emergency was necessary to prevent “the potential for harm to persons and property” in the area. “The recent acts of violence will not be tolerated,” he added.

In fact, the demonstrators remained largely peaceful, and any violence was attributable to the police. The declaration of such preemptive states of emergency, citing only the hypothetical possibility of violence, has become increasingly common in the United States.

The announcement echoed last year’s preemptive declaration of a state of emergency by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, in anticipation of the November 25 grand jury decision not to bring charges against Brown’s killer, Darren Wilson. Nixon simultaneously mobilized the National Guard, which carried out mass arrests of demonstrators.

Also on Monday, the Washington Post revealed that one of its reporters, Wesley Lowery, has been charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer following his arrest on trumped-up charges during demonstrations last year. Lowery, who has been ordered to appear in a St. Louis County municipal court August 24, was one of over a dozen journalists arrested for documenting the police suppression of protests in Ferguson over the past year.

Stenger declared the state of emergency less than an hour before 57 protesters were arrested during a demonstration in front of the St. Louis County Federal Courthouse. Significantly, the peaceful protesters were arrested by officers from the Department of Homeland Security, underscoring the collusion of the federal secret services with local police forces.

St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar has been placed in charge of police in Ferguson during the state of emergency.

Tyrone Harris was shot at around 11:15 p.m. Sunday in the arm, legs, back, chest, liver and groin and taken to Barnes Jewish Hospital, where his family was later denied entry. The official story given by police of what led them to shoot Harris has come under intense scrutiny from the youth’s family. His father, Tyrone Harris Sr., maintains that his son was unarmed, calling the police story “a bunch of lies.” He also revealed that his son was close friends with Michael Brown, and was present at the protests in commemoration of his death.

Harris Sr. says that two witnesses who were with his son told him that he was unarmed and had merely been drawn into a dispute between two groups of young people. The two witnesses told Harris Sr. that his son was “running for his life” when police shot at him eight to 12 times, eerily similar to the manner in which the unarmed Brown was killed by officer Darren Wilson last year.

Harris’s girlfriend, Qunesha Coley, told the Washington Post that she and Harris went to Ferguson to commemorate Brown’s death, and upon arriving they met up with some friends who had stolen a television. Coley says that when they tried to sell the TV to another group of young men, that group instead started shooting, at which point Harris and Coley began to flee.

“My son was running to the police to ask for help, and he was shot,” Harris Sr. said. “It’s all a bunch of lies… They’re making my son look like a criminal.”

Belmar claimed at a news conference early Monday morning that Harris Jr. was armed and among an estimated six people who exchanged gunfire late Sunday evening near the protest. He alleged that Harris then attempted to flee and was followed by an unmarked vehicle carrying four plainclothes officers, at which point he opened fire on the vehicle. Belmar said that the four officers then chased Harris on foot, and only opened fire after he allegedly shot at them again. None of the officers suffered injuries during the supposed exchange of fire.

Belmar claims that Harris was found with a 9mm pistol, an assertion that his father contests. “My son’s fingerprints are not on that gun,” Harris Sr. said. “He was gunned down like a hog.”

Conveniently, none of the officers involved in the shooting were wearing body cameras and there was no dash camera in the unmarked car.

St. Louis County prosecutors Monday announced 10 felony charges against Harris, including four counts of first-degree assault on a law enforcement officer, five counts of armed criminal action and one count of shooting a firearm at a motor vehicle. His bond was set at $250,000. All four officers that shot Harris have been placed on paid administrative leave.

The majority of officers confronting demonstrators donned body armor, and were backed by numerous Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected tanks and other military equipment. Immediately after the shooting of Harris, police forcibly dispersed the remaining protesters by saturating the area with tear gas and smoke.

The brutal police crackdown on demonstrators contrasted starkly with the peaceful memorial marches that had taken place on Sunday. Over 1,000 people, coming from across the US, gathered at the site of Brown’s death in the Canfield Green apartment complex at around noon. They embarked on a 1.5-mile “silent march” up West Florissant Avenue with Brown’s family.

Roughly 300 people gathered inside Greater St. Mark Family Church and observed 4 and a half minutes of silence, symbolizing the 4 and a half hours Brown’s body was left lying in the street after being shot to death. Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who was choked to death last year in Staten Island, New York, spoke at the church. Relatives of Oscar Grant, another youth murdered by police in 2009 in Oakland, California, were also in attendance.

Solidarity demonstrations took place in cities across the US Sunday, including in New York City, Pittsburgh, Denver, Olympia, Washington, St. Petersburg, Florida, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ypsilanti, Michigan, and at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, where Sandra Bland was found dead last month. In London, protesters gathered outside the American Embassy. Numerous other demonstrations are planned throughout the week.

In the year since Michael Brown was killed on August 9, at least 1,159 people have been killed by police in the US. The Obama administration has done everything in its power to ensure that killer cops are shielded from prosecution. The Justice Department completed the whitewash of the murder of Michael Brown last March by failing to bring federal civil rights charges against Wilson, affirming the de facto right of police to murder with impunity.

Behind the backs of the population, the Obama administration has continued to funnel billions of dollars in military equipment to local police forces, including the armored vehicles and assault rifles that are once again on display in Ferguson.

Scotland announced yesterday that it will ban GM crops from being grown on its territory to protect its “clean and green brand,” and because of a lack of evidence showing that Scottish consumers want GM products. [1]