An analysis published by Emory (Law) Corporate Governance and Accountability Review is appropriately titled:

“Thick as Thieves? Big Pharma Wields its Power with the Help of Government Regulation.”

Big Pharma controls the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Its primary focus is on profit-making, aided and abetted by Washington with billions of dollars in handouts and tax credits for research — US taxpayers picking up the tab.

In return, Big Pharma charges exorbitant prices, far more than what consumers in other countries pay — at times for inadequately tested drugs with potentially harmful side effects.

This is one of those times, drug giants rushing to develop and market harmful to health COVID-19 vaccines and drugs with unproved efficacy to treat the disease.

The Emory Law analysis explained that “Americans are barraged by an endless flow of ads that claim to remedy medical maladies with prescribed drugs,” adding:

“The commercials depict productive and happy lives, with suggestive associations that human flourishing can be achieved via pharmaceutical intervention” — risks of their use given short shrift.

“The pharmaceutical industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to market its products.”

“Direct-to-consumer prescription ads are the second-fastest growing ad category” — notably on television in Hollywood happy ending style.

Left unexplained is the limited or ineffectiveness of highly promoted drugs for many users — besides the risk of harmful side effects.

Notably widely used statins to lower cholesterol are considered gateway drugs, their side effects requiring other medications to treat them — the more taken, the greater risk to health from additional side effects.

Astonishingly in 2016, “80 prescription drug advertisements were televised every hour, totaling 1,920 drug ads directed at American viewers per day,” the Emory Law analysis explained.

It’s a bonanza for US cable and broadcast channels, providing about “8% of their ad revenue.”

Studies show Americans on average watch about five hours of television daily — what noted journalist Edward R. Murrow long  ago called “the opiate of the people.”

It has everything to sell, mostly nothing to tell about major world and national issues — propaganda masquerading as news and information.

Emory Law explained that Americans “are likely to spend more time listening to pharmaceutical advertisements than talking with their physician.”

Costs of producing things are passed on to consumers, advertising a significant cost built into their price.

A marketing maxim I was taught as an MBA student long ago, still appropriate now, is that products and services are priced according to what the market will bear.

Big Pharma takes full advantage, supported by Republicans and Dems in Washington — in return for large-scale funding of their political campaigns, the essence of an incestuous relationship at the expense of the public welfare.

Big Pharma “has inordinate power and influence over consumers’ lives,” Emory Law noted — because of its partnership with government serving its interests.

Remdesivir is the latest example of a highly touted drug with dubious efficacy in treating COVID-19 patients.

In an effort to rush it to market, it’s been inadequately tested for this purpose. At best, it may only shorten hospital stays by a few days with no curative benefits.

Its longterm effects unknown, it may do more harm than good if used as directed.

According to a study discussed by the New England Journal of Medicine, COVID-19 patients given the drug had “no marked (or ‘sufficient’) benefit” in many cases.

In its own press release, Gilead Sciences said “the odds of improvement in clinical status with the 10-day treatment course of remdesivir versus standard of care…failed to reach statistical significance.”

According to establishment media reports, the Trump regime secured nearly the entire supply of the drug through around September, enough for half a million treatment courses.

Each 5-day (6-dose) course carries an exorbitant $3,120 price — for a drug with dubious value and possible harmful side effects, what’s true of most drugs, why they have warning labels.

The Washington Post noted that at best remdesivir may lessen hospital stays by a few days, adding:

The drug has “no statistically significant impact on survival for covid-19 patients.”

Reportedly, Indian generic drug companies said they can produce the drug for no more than $22 per single dose.

Cleveland Clinic Dr. Steven Nissen stressed that Gilead’s “high price (is) for a drug that has not been shown to reduce mortality,” adding:

“Given the serious nature of the pandemic, I would prefer that the government take over production and distribute the drug for free. It was developed using significant taxpayer funding.”

Public Citizen attorney Peter Maybarduk called Gilead’s price “an outrage,” adding:

“Remdesivir should be in the public domain” because US taxpayer dollars funded its development.

Pharmaceutical industry analyst Michael Yee expects Gilead to earn $525 million in sales revenue this year from the drug, $2.1 billion in 2021 — a bonanza for the company, courtesy of US taxpayers and Big Government collusion with Big Pharma.

Hydroxychloroquine is potentially more promising in treating COVID-19 patients.

Evidence shows it inhibits coronavirus infections and their spread — why Big Pharma wants the drug falsely discredited as ineffective and dangerous.

Drug companies want nothing competing with a potential profit-making bonanza that awaits from mass-vaxxing — no matter how toxic to inoculated individuals.

According to Yale School of Medicine Professor of Epidemiology and Chronic Diseases Harvey Risch, evidence from his research shows that hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin or doxycycline are effective in treating COVID-19 and should be “widely available” for infected patients.

Explaining his findings, he said the following:

“COVID-19 is really two different diseases. In the first few days, it is like a very bad cold.”

“In some people, it then morphs into pneumonia which can be life-threatening.”

“What I found is that treatments for the cold don’t work well for the pneumonia, and vice versa.”

“Most of the published studies have looked at treatments for the cold but used for the pneumonia.”

“I just looked at how well the treatments for the cold worked for the cold.”

“There are five studies done this way, four of hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin and one with hydroxychloroquine plus doxycycline, and they all show that treating the cold part of COVID-19—the early part—works very well.”

He stressed that anyone experiencing shortness of breath during normal activities like walking “should get medical care immediately.”

Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin have been used for decades in treating rheumatoid arthritis patients, he explained.

“Hydroxychloroquine alone” is unlikely to effectively enough treat COVID-19.

“It needs to be combined with azithromycin or doxycycline and probably with zinc to make it most effective.”

“The game changer is to aggressively treat people as soon as possible, before they are hospitalized…”

As of now in his view, this combination of drugs is the only effective COVID-19 treatment, perhaps others to follow later.

They’re being used abroad. In Spain nearly three-fourths of doctors treating COVID-19 patients are using them in combination, said Risch.

If remdesivir is widely used in the US, it’ll be a large-scale experiment with dubious benefits and potentially much harm from not using drugs proved effective as discussed above.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

It’s been nearly four years since the myth of Trump-Russia collusion made its debut in American politics, generating an endless stream of stories in the corporate press and hundreds of allegations of conspiracy from pundits and officials. But despite netting scores of embarrassing admissions, corrections, editor’s notes and retractions in that time, the theory refuses to die.

Over the years, the highly elaborate “Russiagate” narrative has fallen away piece-by-piece. Claims about Donald Trump’s various back channels to Moscow—Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Alfa Bank—have each been thoroughly discredited. House Intelligence Committee transcripts released in May have revealed that nobody who asserted a Russian hack on Democratic computers, including the DNC’s own cyber security firm, is able to produce evidence that it happened. In fact, it is now clear the entire investigation into the Trump campaign was without basis.

It was alleged that Moscow manipulated the president with “kompromat” and black mail, sold to the public in a “dossier” compiled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. Working through a DC consulting firm, Steele was hired by Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump, gathering a litany of accusations that Steele’s own primary source would later dismiss as “hearsay” and “rumor.” Though the FBI was aware the dossier was little more than sloppy opposition research, the bureau nonetheless used it to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

Even the claim that Russia helped Trump from afar, without direct coordination, has fallen flat on its face. The “troll farm” allegedly tapped by the Kremlin to wage a pro-Trump meme war—the Internet Research Agency—spent only $46,000 on Facebook ads, or around 0.05 percent of the $81 million budget of the Trump and Clinton campaigns. The vast majority of the IRA’s ads had nothing to do with U.S. politics, and more than half of those that did were published after the election, having no impact on voters. The Department of Justice, moreover, has dropped its charges against the IRA’s parent company, abandoning a major case resulting from Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe.

Though few of its most diehard proponents would ever admit it, after four long years, the foundation of the Trump-Russia narrative has finally given way and its edifice has crumbled. The wreckage left behind will remain for some time to come, however, kicking off a new era of mainstream McCarthyism and setting the stage for the next Cold War.

It Didn’t Start With Trump

The importance of Russiagate to U.S. foreign policy cannot be understated, but the road to hostilities with Moscow stretches far beyond the current administration. For thirty years, the United States has exploited its de facto victory in the first Cold War, interfering in Russian elections in the 1990s, aiding oligarchs as they looted the country into poverty, and orchestrating Color Revolutions in former Soviet states. NATO, meanwhile, has been enlarged up to Russia’s border, despite American assurances the alliance wouldn’t expand “one inch” eastward after the collapse of the USSR.

Unquestionably, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the day Trump took office, the United States maintained an aggressive policy toward Moscow. But with the USSR wiped off the map and communism defeated for good, a sufficient pretext to rally the American public into another Cold War has been missing in the post-Soviet era. In the same 30-year period, moreover, Washington has pursued one disastrous diversion after another in the Middle East, leaving little space or interest for another round of brinkmanship with the Russians, who were relegated to little more than a talking point. That, however, has changed.

The Crisis They Needed

The Washington foreign policy establishment—memorably dubbed “the Blob” by one Obama adviser—was thrown into disarray by Trump’s election win in the fall of 2016. In some ways, Trump stood out as the dove during the race, deeming “endless wars” in the Middle East a scam, calling for closer ties with Russia, and even questioning the usefulness of NATO. Sincere or not, Trump’s campaign vows shocked the Beltway think tankers, journalists, and politicos whose worldviews (and salaries) rely on the maintenance of empire. Something had to be done.

In the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks published thousands of emails belonging to then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, her campaign manager, and the Democratic National Committee. Though damaging to Clinton, the leak became fodder for a powerful new attack on the president-to-be. Trump had worked in league with Moscow to throw the election, the story went, and the embarrassing email trove was stolen in a Russian hack, then passed to WikiLeaks to propel Trump’s campaign.

By the time Trump took office, the narrative was in full swing. Pundits and politicians rushed to outdo one another in hysterically denouncing the supposed election-meddling, which was deemed the “political equivalent” of the 9/11 attacks, tantamount to Pearl Harbor, and akin to the Nazis’ 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. In lock-step with the U.S. intelligence community—which soon issued a pair of reports endorsing the Russian hacking story—the Blob quickly joined the cause, hoping to short-circuit any tinkering with NATO or rapprochement with Moscow under Trump.

The allegations soon broadened well beyond hacking. Russia had now waged war on American democracy itself, and “sowed discord” with misinformation online, all in direct collusion with the Trump campaign. Talking heads on cable news and former intelligence officials—some of them playing both roles at once—weaved a dramatic plot of conspiracy out of countless news reports, clinging to many of the “bombshell” stories long after their key claims were blown up.

A large segment of American society eagerly bought the fiction, refusing to believe that Trump, the game show host, could have defeated Clinton without assistance from a foreign power. For the first time since the fall of the USSR, rank-and-file Democrats and moderate progressives were aligned with some of the most vocal Russia hawks across the aisle, creating space for what many have called a “new Cold War.

Stress Fractures 

Under immense pressure and nonstop allegations, the candidate who shouted “America First” and slammed NATO as “obsolete” quickly adapted himself to the foreign policy consensus on the alliance, one of the first signs the Trump-Russia story was bearing fruit.

Demonstrating the Blob in action, during debate on the Senate floor over Montenegro’s bid to join NATO in March 2017, the hawkish John McCain castigated Rand Paul for daring to oppose the measure, riding on anti-Russian sentiments stoked during the election to accuse him of “working for Vladimir Putin.” With most lawmakers agreeing the expansion of NATO was needed to “push back” against Russia, the Senate approved the request nearly unanimously and Trump signed it without batting an eye—perhaps seeing the attacks a veto would bring, even from his own party.

Allowing Montenegro—a country that illustrates everything wrong with NATO—to join the alliance may suggest Trump’s criticisms were always empty talk, but the establishment’s drive to constrain his foreign policy was undoubtedly having an effect. Just a few months later, the administration would put out its National Security Strategy, stressing the need to refocus U.S. military engagements from counter-terrorism in the Middle East to “great power competition” with Russia and China.

On another aspiring NATO member, Ukraine, the president was also hectored into reversing course under pressure from the Blob. During the 2016 race, the corporate press savaged the Trump campaign for working behind the scenes to “water down” the Republican Party platform after it opposed a pledge to arm Ukraine’s post-coup government. That stance did not last long.

Though even Obama decided against arming the new government—which his administration helped to install—Trump reversed that move in late 2017, handing Kiev hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles. In an irony noticed by few, some of the arms went to open neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military, who were integrated into the country’s National Guard after leading street battles with security forces in the Obama-backed coup of 2014. Some of the very same Beltway critics slamming the president as a racist demanded he pass weapons to out-and-out white supremacists.

Ukraine’s bid to join NATO has all but stalled under President Volodymyr Zelensky, but the country has nonetheless played an outsized role in American politics both before and after Trump took office. In the wake of Ukraine’s 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup, “Russian aggression” became a favorite slogan in the American press, laying the ground for future allegations of election-meddling.

Weaponizing Ukraine

The drive for renewed hostilities with Moscow got underway well before Trump took the Oval Office, nurtured in its early stages under the Obama administration. Using Ukraine’s revolution as a springboard, Obama launched a major rhetorical and policy offensive against Russia, casting it in the role of an aggressive, expansionist power.

Protests erupted in Ukraine in late 2013, following President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union, preferring to keep closer ties with Russia. Demanding a deal with the EU and an end to government corruption, demonstrators—including the above-mentioned neo-Nazis—were soon in the streets clashing with security forces. Yanukovych was chased out of the country, and eventually out of power.

Through cut-out organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Obama administration poured millions of dollars into the Ukrainian opposition prior to the coup, training, organizing and funding activists. Dubbed the “Euromaidan Revolution,” Yanukovych’s ouster mirrored similar US-backed color coups before and since, with Uncle Sam riding on the back of legitimate grievances while positioning the most U.S.-friendly figures to take power afterward.

The coup set off serious unrest in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking enclaves, the eastern Donbass region and the Crimean Peninsula to the south. In the Donbass, secessionist forces attempted their own revolution, prompting the new government in Kiev to launch a bloody “war on terror” that continues to this day. Though the separatists received some level of support from Moscow, Washington placed sole blame on the Russians for Ukraine’s unrest, while the press breathlessly predicted an all-out invasion that never materialized.

In Crimea—where Moscow has kept its Black Sea Fleet since the late 1700s—Russia took a more forceful stance, seizing the territory to keep control of its long term naval base. The annexation was accomplished without bloodshed, and a referendum was held weeks later affirming that a large majority of Crimeans supported rejoining Russia, a sentiment western polling firms have since corroborated. Regardless, as in the Donbass, the move was labeled an invasion, eventually triggering a raft of sanctions from the U.S. and the EU (and more recently, from Trump himself).

The media made no effort to see Russia’s perspective on Crimea in the wake of the revolution—imagining the U.S. response if the roles were reversed, for example—and all but ignored the preferences of Crimeans. Instead, it spun a black-and-white story of “Russian aggression” in Ukraine. For the Blob, Moscow’s actions there put Vladimir Putin on par with Adolf Hitler, driving a flood of frenzied press coverage not seen again until the 2016 election.

Succumbing to Hysteria 

While Trump had already begun to cave to the onslaught of Russiagate in the early months of his presidency, a July 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki presented an opportunity to reverse course, offering a venue to hash out differences and plan for future cooperation. Trump’s previous sit-downs with his Russian counterpart were largely uneventful, but widely portrayed as a meeting between master and puppet. At the Helsinki Summit, however, a meager gesture toward improved relations was met with a new level of hysterics.

Trump’s refusal to interrogate Putin on his supposed election-hacking during a summit press conference was taken as irrefutable proof that the two were conspiring together. Former CIA Director John Brennan declared it an act of treason, while CNN gravely contemplated whether Putin’s gift to Trump during the meetings—a World Cup soccer ball—was really a secret spying transmitter. By this point, Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe was in full effect, lending official credibility to the collusion story and further emboldening the claims of conspiracy.

Though the summit did little to strengthen U.S.-Russia ties and Trump made no real effort to do so—beyond resisting the calls to directly confront Putin—it brought on some of the most extreme attacks yet, further ratcheting up the cost of rapprochement. The window of opportunity presented in Helsinki, while only cracked to begin with, was now firmly shut, with Trump as reluctant as ever to make good on his original policy platform.

Sanctions!

After taking a beating in Helsinki, the administration allowed tensions with Moscow to soar to new heights, more or less embracing the Blob’s favored policies and often even outdoing the Obama government’s hawkishness toward Russia in both rhetoric and action.

In March 2018, the poisoning of a former Russian spy living in the United Kingdom was blamed on Moscow in a highly elaborate storyline that ultimately fell apart (sound familiar?), but nonetheless triggered a wave of retaliation from western governments. In the largest diplomatic purge in US history, the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian officials in a period of two days, surpassing Obama’s ejection of 35 diplomats in response to the election-meddling allegations.

Along with the purge, starting in spring 2018 and continuing to this day, Washington has unleashed round after round of new sanctions on Russia, including in response to “worldwide malign activity,” to penalize alleged election-meddling, for “destabilizing cyber activities,” retaliation for the UK spy poisoning, more cyber activity, more election-meddling—the list keeps growing.

Though Trump had called to lift rather than impose penalties on Russia before taking office, worn down by endless negative press coverage and surrounded by a coterie of hawkish advisers, he was brought around on the merits of sanctions before long, and has used them liberally ever since.

Goodbye INF, RIP OST

By October 2018, Trump had largely abandoned any idea of improving the relationship with Russia and, in addition to the barrage of sanctions, began shredding a series of major treaties and arms control agreements. He started with the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons—medium-range missiles—and removed Europe as a theater for nuclear war.

At this point in Trump’s tenure, super-hawk John Bolton had assumed the position of national security advisor, encouraging the president’s worst instincts and using his newfound influence to convince Trump to ditch the INF treaty. Bolton—who helped to detonate a number of arms control pacts in previous administrations—argued that Russia’s new short-range missile had violated the treaty. While there remains some dispute over the missile’s true range and whether it actually breached the agreement, Washington failed to pursue available dispute mechanisms and ignored Russian offers for talks to resolve the spat.

After the U.S. officially scrapped the agreement, it quickly began testing formerly-banned munitions. Unlike the Russian missiles, which were only said to have a range overstepping the treaty by a few miles, the U.S. began testing nuclear-capable land-based cruise missiles expressly banned under the INF.

Next came the Open Skies Treaty (OST), an idea originally floated by President Eisenhower, but which wouldn’t take shape until 1992, when an agreement was struck between NATO and former Warsaw Pact nations. The agreement now has over 30 members and allows each to arrange surveillance flights over other members’ territory, an important confidence-building measure in the post-Soviet world.

Trump saw matters differently, however, and turned a minor dispute over Russia’s implementation of the pact into a reason to discard it altogether, again egged on by militant advisers. In late May 2020, the president declared his intent to withdraw from the nearly 30-year-old agreement, proposing nothing to replace it.

Quid Pro Quo

With the DOJ’s special counsel probe into Trump-Russia collusion coming up short on both smoking-gun evidence and relevant indictments, the president’s enemies began searching for new angles of attack. Following a July 2019 phone call between Trump and his newly elected Ukrainian counterpart, they soon found one.

During the call, Trump urged Zelensky to investigate a computer server he believed to be linked to Russiagate, and to look into potential corruption and nepotism on the part of former Vice President Joe Biden, who played an active role in Ukraine following the Obama-backed coup.

Less than two months later, a “whistleblower”—a CIA officer detailed to the White House, Eric Ciaramella—came forward with an “urgent concern” that the president had abused his office on the July call. According to his complaint, Trump threatened to withhold U.S. military aid, as well as a face-to-face meeting with Zelensky, should Kiev fail to deliver the goods on Biden, who by that point was a major contender in the 2020 race.

The same players who peddled Russiagate seized on Ciaramella’s account to manufacture a whole new scandal: “Ukrainegate.” Failing to squeeze an impeachment out of the Mueller probe, the Democrats did just that with the Ukraine call, insisting Trump had committed grave offenses, again conspiring with a foreign leader to meddle in a U.S. election.

At a high point during the impeachment trial, an expert called to testify by the Democrats revived George W. Bush’s “fight them over there” maxim to argue for U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine, citing the Russian menace. The effort was doomed from the start, however, with a GOP-controlled Senate never likely to convict and the evidence weak for a “quid pro quo” with Zelensky. Ukrainegate, like Russiagate before it, was a failure in its stated goal, yet both served to mark the administration with claims of foreign collusion and press for more hawkish policies toward Moscow.

The End of New START?

The Obama administration scored a rare diplomatic achievement with Russia in 2010, signing the New START Treaty, a continuation of the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty inked in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Like its first iteration, the agreement places a cap on the number of nuclear weapons and warheads deployed by each side. It featured a ten-year sunset clause, but included provisions to continue beyond its initial end date.

With the treaty set to expire in early 2021, it has become an increasingly hot topic throughout Trump’s presidency. While Trump sold himself as an expert dealmaker on the campaign trail—an artist, even—his negotiation skills have shown lacking when it comes to working out a new deal with the Russians.

The administration has demanded that China be incorporated into any extended version of the treaty, calling on Russia to compel Beijing to the negotiating table and vastly complicating any prospect for a deal. With a nuclear arsenal around one-tenth the size of that of Russia or the U.S., China has refused to join the pact. Washington’s intransigence on the issue has put the future of the treaty in limbo and largely left Russia without a negotiating partner.

A second Trump term would spell serious trouble for New START, having already shown willingness to shred the INF and Open Skies agreements. And with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) already killed under the Bush administration, New START is one of the few remaining constraints on the planet’s two largest nuclear arsenals.

Despite pursuing massive escalation with Moscow from 2018 onward, Trump-Russia conspiracy allegations never stopped pouring from newspapers and TV screens. For the Blob—heavily invested in a narrative as fruitful as it was false—Trump would forever be “Putin’s puppet,” regardless of the sanctions imposed, the landmark treaties incinerated or the deluge of warlike rhetoric.

Running for an Arms Race

As the Trump administration leads the country into the next Cold War, a renewed arms race is also in the making. The destruction of key arms control pacts by previous administrations has fed a proliferation powder keg, and the demise of New START could be the spark to set it off.

Following Bush Jr.’s termination of the ABM deal in 2002—wrecking a pact which placed limits on Russian and American missile defense systems to maintain the balance of mutually assured destruction—Russia soon resumed funding for a number of strategic weapons projects, including its hypersonic missile. In his announcement of the new technology in 2018, Putin deemed the move a response to Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from ABM, which also saw the U.S. develop new weapons.

Though he inked New START and campaigned on vows to pursue an end to the bomb, President Obama also helped to advance the arms build-up, embarking on a 30-year nuclear modernization project set to cost taxpayers $1.5 trillion. The Trump administration has embraced the initiative with open arms, even adding to it, as Moscow follows suit with upgrades to its own arsenal.

Moreover, Trump has opened a whole new battlefield with the creation of the US Space Force, escalated military deployments, ramped up war games targeting Russia and China and looked to reopen and expand Cold War-era bases.

In May, Trump’s top arms control envoy promised to spend Russia and China into oblivion in the event of any future arms race, but one was already well underway. After withdrawing from INF, the administration began churning out previously banned nuclear-capable cruise missiles, while fielding an entire new class of low-yield nuclear weapons. Known as “tactical nukes,” the smaller warheads lower the threshold for use, making nuclear conflict more likely. Meanwhile, the White House has also mulled a live bomb test—America’s first since 1992—though has apparently shelved the idea for now.

A Runaway Freight Train

As Trump approaches the end of his first term, the two major U.S. political parties have become locked in a permanent cycle of escalation, eternally compelled to prove who’s the bigger hawk. The president put up mild resistance during his first months in office, but the relentless drumbeat of Russiagate successfully crushed any chances for improved ties with Moscow.

The Democrats refuse to give up on “Russian aggression” and see virtually no pushback from hawks across the aisle, while intelligence “leaks” continue to flow into the imperial press, fueling a whole new round of election-meddling allegations.

Likewise, Trump’s campaign vows to revamp U.S.-Russian relations are long dead. His presidency counts among its accomplishments a pile of new sanctions, dozens of expelled diplomats and the demise of two major arms control treaties. For all his talk of getting along with Putin, Trump has failed to ink a single deal, de-escalate any of the ongoing strife over Syria, Ukraine or Libya, and been unable to arrange one state visit in Moscow or DC.

Nonetheless, Trump’s every action is still interpreted through the lens of Russian collusion. After announcing a troop drawdown in Germany on June 5, reducing the U.S. presence by just one-third, the president was met with the now-typical swarm of baseless charges. MSNBC regular and retired general Barry McCaffrey dubbed the move “a gift to Russia,” while GOP Rep. Liz Cheney said the meager troop movement placed the “cause of freedom…in peril.” Top Democrats in the House and Senate introduced bills to stop the withdrawal dead in its tracks, attributing the policy to Trump’s “absurd affection for Vladimir Putin, a murderous dictator.”

Starting as a dirty campaign trick to explain away the Democrats’ election loss and jam up the new president, Russiagate is now a key driving force in the U.S. political establishment that will long outlive the age of Trump. After nearly four years, the bipartisan consensus on the need for Cold War is stronger than ever, and will endure regardless of who takes the Oval Office next.

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Kyle Anzalone blogs at the Libertarian Institute and kylesfylesblog.com.

Will Porter is an independent blogger and a student pursuing a career in journalism. He blogs at www.TheMarketRadical.wordpress.com and at www.notbeinggoverned.com.

Featured image is from TLI

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing.” – Benjamin Franklin

July 1st is a strange day in Canada. From Pacific to the Atlantic coast, Canadians have made it an annual practice to paint maple leaves on their faces and party like there was no tomorrow.

But what exactly does this day signify?

It may be a bit of a bitter pill to swallow for some, but as I outlined in my Missed Chance of 1867, and the True Story of the Alaska Purchase, the original founding of Canada on July 1st, 1867 was designed by British Geopoliticians for the explicit purpose of keeping Canada locked into the British Empire as a wedge separating the potential U.S./Russia alliance that had the power of breaking the system of empire forever. During this 1863-1867 period, Canada’s pro-Lincoln statesmen under the influence of Les Rouges in Quebec and Isaac Buchanan in Ontario had lost their grip on power and the nation lost a vital chance of becoming a participant in a new world of win-win cooperation, rail and industrial growth outside of systems of empire.

This failure of 1867 was not the first, but rather the third time in 90 years that Canada missed its chance to break free of the Empire and become a genuine nation state.

Here, I would like to review the first of two pre-1867 “missed chances”.

1774 and the Ben Franklin Challenge

Many Canadians (and Americans) find themselves shocked when confronted with the fact that Canada’s first postal service and first newspaper were both created by… Benjamin Franklin!

Established in 1753 in Halifax as part of Franklin’s overhaul in communications infrastructure in the Americas, mail services were extended to Quebec City and Montreal after the French were defeated in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 as France’s colony north of Vermont fell to the British. Franklin had been made Post-Master General in 1753 (the same year his famous kite experiment made him an international sensation).

Montreal’s Gazette was founded by a French republican named Fleury Mesplat recruited by Franklin in order to help counteract the destructive effects the French feudal system had on the cognitive powers of the Quebec colonists whose rampant illiteracy dovetailed their non-existent appetites for representative government or freedom. In this feudal culture, blind obedience to authority (whether political or religious) was seen as preferable to thinking for oneself.

Although Franklin created these cultural milestones and was an active diplomat working to persuade the Quebecois of the importance of becoming a 14th member of the united colonies, his mission failed due to a series of bribes, acts of treason and short sighted thinking by men who should have known better. Ultimately, the Quebecois chose submission to Crown rather than risking their lives for freedom.

Before we say how and why this happened, some additional words on Franklin are necessary.

Getting to know the Real Benjamin Franklin

Despite the widespread mythology that the father of the American Revolution, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was merely a womanizing tinkerer and land speculator, the reality, upon closer inspection, is quite different.

Having become recognized as a world’s leading scientist during the 1750s for his discovery of the nature of electricity, Franklin became revered across Europe as the “Prometheus of America” (having stolen fire from Zeus to share with mankind, Prometheus was always seen as an anti-imperial figure by lovers of freedom since the time of Aeschylus). Franklin polarized the elite of the European nobility and strove to infuse a spirit of creative seeking and self improvement wherever he went by promoting industry, infrastructure and science.

His approach to indiscriminate acts of improvement were highly motivated by his early studies of a 1710 book by his mentor Cotton Mather called “Essays to Do Good” which Franklin described as “an influence on my conduct through life; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good, than on any other kind of reputation; and if I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book.”

For many years, Franklin was not in favor of a full revolution, but believed that it were possible to reform the British Empire (which had only recently been hijacked by the Venetian Party faction during the Glorious Revolution of 1688). During Franklin’s lifetime, the republican spirit of Thomas More, Erasmus and Shakespeare was still very much alive and it was this Promethean Christian spirit that he felt could be kindled to transform the Empire from a Satanic Hellfire Club operation into something viable and in harmony with humanity’s wellbeing (1).

This belief led Franklin to transform Britain itself through his creation of the British Lunar Society while acting representative to Britain in 1857. This group featured such scientists as Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood and Erasmus Darwin and uniquely drove the advancement of internal improvements (roads, canals, bridges, steam power, sewage etc), industrial growth and living standards in Britain.

In the 13 colonies of America, Franklin created the first fire department (1736), public library (1731), and founded the University of Pennsylvania. As a leading printer and later post-master general, Franklin knew that the American population of the 1730s did not yet have the moral or cognitive fortitude to induce a revolutionary positive change for the world and as such he created the influential Poor Richards Almanac which wrapped moral lessons and insights into poetry, science, astronomy and philosophy lessons with every single issue. This popular journal probably did more than anything else as a form of mass cultural education which empowered Americans to eventually think on a level sufficient to understand why concepts like Freedom were worth dying for (taxation without representation was merely one of 27 points enumerated in the Declaration of Independence).

In preparing the foundations for a reform of the world political-economic system, Franklin studied Chinese culture and strove to model western reforms on the best principles of Confucianism and the Chinese constitution.

Franklin applied the best techniques of satirist-republican Jonathan Swift and wrote countless hilarious essays under pen names like Silence Dogood, Martha Careful, Richard Saunders and Anthony Afterwit. He also followed Swift’s lead as he argued against British population control in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. As early as 1729, Franklin codified a system of banking tied not to the worship of money or markets but rather internal improvements which argued for the creation of colonial scrip (not controlled by private central bankers). These insights would derive from his studies of Colbertist Dirigism and preceded the later work by his protégé Alexander Hamilton who established the American system of Political economy in his 1790-91 reports.

Most importantly, Franklin worked to coordinate an international network of collaborators among the enlightened intelligentsias of Russia, France, Germany, Prussia, Spain, Italy and even India and Morocco! In this way, the scientist/poet/statesman walked in the footsteps of the great Gottfried Leibniz who had attempted a similar grand design when Franklin was still a boy.

Back to Canada…

When he was still of the view that Britain could be reformed, Franklin wrote his famous Canada Pamphlets of 1760 which made the case that even though monetarily speaking it was more profitable for Britain to take France’s possessions in Guadeloupe due to the high price of sugar and rum, it was infinitely preferable to take Canada instead where potential for growth and improvement was boundless. Franklin knew the evil corruption of London and the European imperial powers (which had vast possessions in the Americas), but always believed that a united colonial republican movement could become the spark plug for an international new renaissance movement forecasted by John Winthrop’s City on a Hill vision of 1630.

This was the belief that underlay Franklin’s 1769 message to Lord Kames which has confused so many modern scholars as Franklin says:

“No one can more sincerely rejoice than I do, on the reduction of Canada and this not merely as I am a Briton. I have long been of opinion that the foundations to the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; And though like other foundations they are low and little now, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever erected.”

When it became clear that the British aristocracy was intent on crushing Franklin’s dreams of emancipation by the early 1770s, Franklin began devoting all of his energy towards a full revolution from the “mother country” and French Canada was always a high prize. Since British abuses of the French population ran rampant, and sympathy for the republican cause was widespread among Quebec subjects (though not the feudal elite), Franklin and others believed that Quebec’s eventual participation would not be a difficult affair.

By 1774, the British Empire pre-empted the inevitable participation by passing the Quebec Act giving an unprecedented array of religious freedoms to Quebec’s population which were always fearful of losing their Catholic traditions. These freedoms came however, at the cost of unquestioned loyalty to the Crown, and to accept never having representative government (only Crown appointees). The Jesuit-run clergy elite were overjoyed to keep their hold on the population, tithes and still enjoy revenue of the human cows on their lands. As an additional insurance, the Church under the control of Bishop Briand ensured that any subject who joined Washington’s rebellion would be excommunicated on the spot and thus burn in hellfire for eternity!

Ordering all parishes to accept the reign of King George, Bishop Briand stated:

“The God of armies…who extends or restricts at his pleasure the boundaries of empires, having by his eternal decrees put us under the domination of his Britannic Majesty, it is our duty, based on natural law, to be interested in all that concerns him. We order you to submit to the king and to all those who share his authority.”

A particularly dangerous part of the Quebec Act was the extension of Quebec’s Crown-controlled lands down into the Ohio River fully encircling the 13 colonies and making them subject to non-linear attacks by Jesuit-run natives. While the native population was highly wronged by all sides at different times during this conflict but the British and Jesuit collaborators used the most refined techniques of manipulation and have to the present day. The caging of the colonies onto the Pacific Coast was a far sighted maneuver to subvert the mandate of the “Continental” Congress whose name implied it’s larger goal.

On October 26, 1774 a Letter to the Inhabitants of Quebec was sent from the Continental Congress extolling the population to join in the declaration of independence and unite with the 13 colonies. While the whole letter should be read in full, it ended with this call:

“We only invite you to consult your own glory and welfare, and not to suffer yourselves to be inveigled or intimidated by infamous ministers so far as to become the instruments of their cruelty and despotism, but to unite with us in one social compact, formed on the generous principles of equal liberty and cemented by such an exchange of beneficial and endearing offices as to render it perpetual. In order to complete this highly desirable union, we submit it to your consideration whether it may not be expedient for you to meet together in your several towns and districts and elect Deputies, who afterwards meeting in a provincial Congress, may chose Delegates to represent your province in the continental Congress to be held at Philadelphia on the tenth day of May, 1775.”

The British and their French collaborators ensured that hardly any of these letters would be permitted into Quebec, and sadly for the hundreds that did arrive, the rate of illiteracy among the feudal population made it nearly impossible for most to read or understand it. Despite this problem, several hundred did risk perpetual hellfire and joined the revolutionary cause under the leadership of Clement Gosselin (later known as Washington’s French-Canadian Spy).

The Last Attempt: Franklin in Canada

The last effort to convince Quebec to join came a year later, as a delegation led by an aging Ben Franklin made their way to Montreal where they stayed for two weeks from April 29- May 6, 1776. The Continental Congress gave Franklin the following instructions:

“Inform them that in our Judgment their Interest and ours are inseparably united. That it is impossible we can be reduced to a servile Submission to Great Britain without their sharing in our Fate; and on the other Hand, if we obtain, as we doubt not we shall, a full Establishment of our Rights, it depends wholly on their Choice, whether they will participate with us in those Blessings, or still remain subject to every Act of Tyranny, which British Ministers shall please to exercise over them. Urge all such Arguments as your Prudence shall suggest to enforce our Opinion concerning the mutual Interests of the two Countries and to convince them of the Impossibility of the War being concluded to the Disadvantage of the Colonies if we wisely and vigorously co-operate with each other.

“To convince them of the Uprightness of our Intentions towards them, you are to declare that it is our Inclination that the People of Canada may set up such a Form of Government, as will be most likely, in their Judgment, to produce their Happiness; and you are in the strongest Terms to assure them, that it is our earnest Desire to adopt them into our Union as a Sister Colony, and to secure the same general System of mild and equal Laws for them and for ourselves, with only such local Differences, as may be agreeable to each Colony respectively.”

A rampant smallpox outbreak among American soldiers in Montreal (via the British spread of germ-infested blankets), mass demoralization and news of an oncoming British counterattack to regain control of Montreal put an end to that effort and Franklin returned to America empty handed.

The rest they say is history.

How the International Revolution was Subverted

While the French feudal elite were soon joined by a new set of United Empire Loyalists who left America after the Revolutionary War to establish English-speaking Canada, some traitors remained behind in the United States where they passed themselves off outwardly as friends of the revolution but always maintained a secret allegiance to the City of London and the system of hereditary powers antagonistic to the Principles of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

These traitors fomented the growth of a perverse form of manifest destiny which abolitionists like Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Gouvernor Morris, Robert Morris, etc… fought tirelessly against throughout their lives. These traitorous bigots made every effort to spread slavery, destroy native Americans while subverting the true heritage of the republican cause from within.

One notable early representative of this group killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804 and set up the Bank of Manhattan establishing Wall Street as a City of London tentacle within America itself where this proto-deep state remained in power for the next 250 years.

In France, Ben Franklin’s allies led by Marquis Lafayette and Jean-Sylvain Bailey found their noble republican efforts of 1789-90 sabotaged by a color revolution in the form of the Bloody Jacobin terror coordinated by London’s Foreign Office and which I outlined in a recent paper: The Jacobin Terror (Just Another Color Revolution?).

In Canada, the British Foreign Office instituted a form of government which gave some limited elected positions to the plebians in 1791 but ensured that all actual power remained firmly in the hands of appointees of the Crown. During the post-1791 years, local oligarchies formed under the Family Compact of Upper Canada and the feudal elite of the Church in Lower Canada who collaborated closely in an unholy alliance. Their efforts were always driven by the need to keep the nation “un-American” by ensuring that the lands remain under-developed, the economy remain cash cropping as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, and the population docile, ignorant and malleable.

In spite this perversion of history, growing poverty and injustices did induce a movement of resistance which began to take the form of republican “patriot movements” under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie in Upper Canada and Louis-Joseph Papineau in Lower Canada- both of whom would come to a head in the Rebellions of 1837-38 (aka: the second missed chance).

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The author wrote a larger series of studies under the title “Origins of the Deep State in North America parts 1-3 and an even fuller picture of this story is told in The Untold History of Canada.

Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.

Note

(1) Franklin’s deployment as a counter-intelligence spy into the London Hellfire Clubs in the 1730s as part of Cotton Mathers’ battle against the empire is told in Graham Lowry’s How the Nation Was Won (1630-1754)

Featured image is from SCF

Selected Articles: Trump’s Foreign Policy

July 2nd, 2020 by Global Research News

We hope that by publishing diverse view points, submitted by journalists and experts dotted all over the world, the website can serve as a reminder that no matter what narrative we are presented with, things are rarely as cut and dry as they seem.

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Trump’s Record on Foreign Policy: Lost Wars, New Conflicts and Broken Promises

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, July 02, 2020

On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.

Children’s Health Defense Responds to Accusation of Spreading “Misinformation” on Facebook

By Jeremy R. Hammond and Children’s Health Defense, July 01, 2020

In November 2019, the Washington Post and other major news media accused Children’s Health Defense (CHD) of using Facebook advertisements to spread “misinformation” about vaccines. The basis for these accusations, which have since continued, is a study published in the prestigious medical journal Vaccine that named CHD as a top buyer of vaccine-related Facebook ads. What the media failed to inform the public, however, is that the government-funded authors of this study failed to identify even a single example of a Facebook ad from CHD that contained any misinformation.

The 1968 My Lai Massacre: The Scene of the Crime

By Seymour M. Hersh, July 01, 2020

In testimony before an Army inquiry, some of the soldiers acknowledged being at the ditch but claimed that they had disobeyed Calley, who was ordering them to kill. They said that one of the main shooters, along with Calley himself, had been Private First Class Paul Meadlo. The truth remains elusive, but one G.I. described to me a moment that most of his fellow-soldiers, I later learned, remembered vividly. At Calley’s order, Meadlo and others had fired round after round into the ditch and tossed in a few grenades.

A Canada Day Surprise: How a ‘Synthetic Nationalism’ Was Created to Break the US-Russia Alliance

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, July 01, 2020

The motive for this 1867 confederation was driven by the British Empire’s burning fear of losing its valuable possessions in the Americas during the course of the Civil War when Britain’s “other confederacy” operation against Lincoln’s union was obviously going to fail. The fact that the U.S.-Russian alliance that saved the Union in 1863 and led into the sale of Alaska in 1867 would also usher in an inevitable growth of rail development through the Bering Strait connecting both civilizations was a prospect devoutly to be feared by the City of London.

Remembering the Handover of ‘One Palestine, Complete’

By Jehan Alfarra, July 01, 2020

On this day in 1920, the first High Commissioner for Palestine, 1st Viscount Samuel, Herbert Samuel, was handed the administration of the country by the British government and signed a receipt acknowledging that he had received “one Palestine, complete”. It was still another three years before the Mandate for Palestine granted to Britain by the League of Nations came into effect.

July 1st 1867: Canada’s National Sovereignty: America’s Plan to Annex and Invade Canada

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 01, 2020

While Canadians are familiar with the 1866 US Plan to Annex Canada, they are unaware of the fact that the US had formulated a plan in the late 1920s to bomb and invade Canada. (This is not mentioned in our history books and it is not the object of critical media reports.)

The war plan directed against Canada initially formulated in 1924 was entitled “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan — Red”. It was approved by the US War Department under the presidency of Herbert Hoover in 1930. It was updated in 1934 and 1935 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was withdrawn in 1939 (but not abolished) following the outbreak of the Second World War.

Israeli Police Brutality: Unnoticed Murder of Palestinian Autistic Man Eyad Hallaq

By Robert Fantina, July 01, 2020

In 2015, Israel passed a law that states the penalty for throwing rocks at moving cars can be up to twenty years in prison. Palestinians living under occupation in Jerusalem and the West Bank have no weapons, although Israelis are allowed to carry any and all weapons they want. So, Palestinians use what they have to oppose the occupation, and that is generally rocks.

Is it “Canada Day” or “Dominion Day”? Stolen Indigenous Lands, First Nations’ “Idle No More” Calls for #CancelCanadaDay

By Kim Petersen, July 01, 2020

July 1 is celebrated by many Canadians as Canada Day. Originally it was called Dominion Day to commemorate the establishment of the Dominion of Canada. But not every inhabitant of “Canada” will be celebrating. On that day, the Indigenous activist organization, Idle No More, is calling for “3 hours of Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence!”

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A German equivalent to UK’s Financial Times and America’s Wall Street Journal is the Dusseldorf Handelsblatt or “Commerce Sheet,” which headlined on June 30th, “Former Chancellor Schröder: USA Ending Transatlantic Partnership”.

They reported:

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has condemned possible new US sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline as “deliberate termination of the transatlantic partnership.” A draft law currently under discussion in the US Congress is “a widespread, unjustified attack on the European economy and an unacceptable interference with EU sovereignty and the energy security of Western Europe,” Schröder writes in his statement for a public hearing of the Economic Committee scheduled for Wednesday in the Bundestag.

The article closes:

Gerhard Schröder profile 2014.jpg

Schröder sees the relations with the USA as “heavily burdened” by “escalating tariffs and going it alone” policy by the Americans. Schröder writes: “Economic fines against a NATO ally during the current economic recession are nothing other than a deliberate termination of the transatlantic partnership.”

This is as if Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama were to say that EU policymakers had a trade policy toward the U.S. that is so hostile and uncooperative that in order to comply with it, the U.S. would have to subordinate itself to the EU and lose some of its own sovereignty, and as if he were to tell the U.S. Congress that for them to okay the EU’s demands in this matter would be “nothing other than a termination of the transatlantic partnership.”

Congress has not yet passed this legislation (new economic sanctions legislation that is co-sponsored in the U.S. Senate by Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen) but it (“S.1441 – Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act of 2019”) enjoys strong bipartisan support and has been considered almost certain to be passed in both houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump. It is not a partisan issue in the United States.

Neither is it partisan in Germany. Both of Germany’s main political Parties (Schröder being SPD) support strongly the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which will be considerably more economical for supplying natural gas to the EU than would be the U.S. Government’s demand that American shipped fracked liquified natural gas be used, instead of Russian pipelined natural gas, in Europe. Though this U.S. legislative initiative is called “Protecting Europe’s Energy Security,” its overwhelming support in the U.S. Congress is instead actually for protecting U.S. fracking corporations. The bill’s title is only for ‘patriotic’ propaganda purposes (which is the typical way that legislation is named in the United States — as a sales-device, so as to sound acceptable not only to the billionaires who fund the Parties but also to the voters on election day).

Both of America’s political Parties are significantly funded by America’s domestic producers of fracked gas. One of the few proud achievements of U.S. President Obama that has been proudly continued by President Trump has been their boosting U.S. energy production, largely fracked gas, so as to reduce America’s foreign-trade deficit. However, if this control over the U.S. Government by frackers continues, then there now exists a strong possibility, or even a likelihood, that the transatlantic alliance will end, as a result.

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This article was originally published on The Saker.

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

Britain has “recognized” Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s president, the UK High Court has ruled, in case over who controls the country’s gold reserves stored in London.

High court judge Nigel Teare handed down a Judgment ruling that Britain’s government had formally recognized Guaido as the constitutional interim President of Venezuela, and that due to the ‘One Voice’ and ‘Act of State’ doctrines the Court is precluded from investigating the validity of Guaido’s acts.

Sarosh Zaiwalla, a lawyer representing the Nicolas Maduro-backed Venezuelan central bank in the case said the bank would be seeking leave of the court to appeal the judgment.

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Featured image is from France 24

On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.

Trump routinely talks up both sides of every issue, and the corporate media still judge him more by what he says (and tweets) than by his actual policies. So it isn’t surprising that he is still trying to confuse the public about his aggressive war policy. But Trump has been in office for nearly three and a half years, and he now has a record on war and peace that we can examine.

Such an examination makes one thing very clear: Trump has come closer to starting new wars with North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran than to ending any of the wars he inherited from Obama. His first-term record shows Trump to be just another warmonger in chief.

A Bloody Inheritance

First, let’s look at what Trump inherited. At the end of the Cold War, US political leaders promised Americans a “peace dividend,” and the Senate Budget Committee embraced a proposal to cut the US military budget by 50 percent over the next ten years. Ten years later, only 22 percent in savings were realized, and the George W. Bush administration used the terrorist crimes of September 11 to justify illegal wars, systematic war crimes, and an extraordinary one-sided arms race in which the United States accounted for 45 percent of global military spending from 2003 to 2011. Only half this $2 trillion spending surge (in 2010 dollars) was related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the US Navy and Air Force quietly cashed in a trillion-dollar wish list of new warships, warplanes, and high-tech weapons.

President Barack Obama entered the White House with a pledge to bring home US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to shrink the US military footprint, but his presidency was a triumph of symbolism over substance. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize based on a few speeches, a lot of wishful thinking, and the world’s desperate hopes for peace and progress. But by the time Obama stepped down in 2017, he had dropped more bombs and missiles on more countries than Bush did, and had spent even more than Bush on weapons and war.

The major shift in US war policy under Obama was to reduce politically sensitive US troop casualties by transitioning from large-scale military occupations to mass bombing, shelling, and covert and proxy wars. While Republicans derisively dubbed Obama’s doctrine “leading from behind,” this was a transition that was already underway in Bush’s second term, when he committed the United States to completely withdrawing its occupation troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Obama’s defenders, like Trump’s today, were always ready to absolve him of responsibility for war crimes, even as he killed thousands of civilians in air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including the gratuitous assassination of an American teenager in Yemen. Obama launched a new war to destroy Libya, and the United States’ covert role in the war in Syria was similar to its role in Nicaragua in the 1980s, for which, despite its covert nature, the International Court of Justice convicted the United States of aggression and ordered it to pay reparations.

Many senior US military and civilian officials deserve a share of the guilt for America’s systematic crimes of aggression and other war crimes since 2001, but the principle of command responsibility, recognized from the Nuremberg principles to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, means that the commander in chief of the US armed forces, the president of the United States, bears the heaviest criminal responsibility for these crimes under US and international law.

Is Trump Different?

In January 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, US forces in Iraq conducted their heaviest month of aerial bombardment since the “shock and awe” bombing during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This time, the enemy was the Islamic State (IS), a group spawned by the US invasion of Iraq and Obama’s covert support for Al Qaeda–linked groups in Syria. Iraqi forces captured East Mosul from the Islamic State on January 24, and in February, they began their assault on West Mosul, bombing and shelling it even more heavily until they captured the ruined city in July. A Kurdish Iraqi intelligence report recorded that more than forty thousand civilians were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.

Trump famously summed up his policy as “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State. He appeared to give a green light to the military to murder women and children, saying, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” Iraqi troops described explicit orders to do exactly that in Mosul. Middle East Eye (MEE) reported that Iraqi forces massacred all the survivors in Mosul’s Old City.

“We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier said. “Daesh (IS), men, women, children. We killed everyone.” An Iraqi major told MEE,

After liberation was announced, the order was given to kill anything or anyone that moved . . . It was not the right thing to do . . . They gave themselves up and we just killed them . . . There is no law here now. Every day, I see that we are doing the same thing as Daesh. People went down to the river to get water because they were dying of thirst and we killed them.\

By October 2017, Raqqa in Syria was even more totally destroyed than Mosul in Iraq. Under Obama and Trump, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in their campaign against the Islamic State, while US HIMARS rockets and US, French, and Iraqi heavy artillery killed even more indiscriminately.

The wholesale destruction of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and other major cities in Iraq and Syria cannot be legally justified under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, any more than the destruction of entire cities in past wars, like Hiroshima or Dresden. Despite the total lack of accountability, it is clear that American bombs, rockets, and shells killed thousands of civilians in each city and town captured. Obama and Trump share responsibility for these terrible crimes, but they are an escalation of the systematic war crimes the United States has committed since 2001 under three presidents.

In Afghanistan, as the Taliban gradually takes control of more of the country, Trump has resisted the temptation to send in tens of thousands more US troops, as Obama did, but he instead approved a major escalation in US bombing that made 2018 and 2019 the heaviest and deadliest years of US bombing in Afghanistan since 2001.

Trump has shrouded his war-making in even greater secrecy than Obama. The US military has not published a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, nor official troop deployment numbers for Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria for nearly three years. But the United States has dropped at least twenty thousand bombs on Afghanistan since Trump came to power, and there is no evidence of a reduction in bombing under the peace agreement the administration signed with the Taliban in February. Some US troops have been withdrawn under that agreement, but the remaining 8,600 are still being replaced as their tours end, keeping US troop strength at about the same level as when Obama left office.

Trump made a great show of repositioning US troops in Syria in October 2019, leaving the United States’ Kurdish allies in Rojava to confront the Turkish invasion alone. But there are still at least 500 US troops in Syria, and Trump deployed 14,000 more US troops to the Middle East in 2019, including to a new base in Saudi Arabia.

Trump has vetoed every bill passed by Congress to disengage US forces from the Saudi war in Yemen and to halt the sales of US-made warplanes and bombs, which the Saudis use to systematically kill Yemeni civilians. He created a new conflict with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal, and in January 2020, he capriciously flirted with a full-scale war on Iran by ordering the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Iraq.

Trump’s bizarre decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to a plot of land that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders — and partly on Palestinian territory that Israel is illegally occupying — quite literally took US international relations into uncharted territory. Then Trump unveiled a so-called peace plan based on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambition to annex the rest of Palestine into a “Greater Israel” with vastly expanded — but still unrecognized and illegal — international borders.

Trump has also backed a coup in Bolivia, staged several failed ones in Venezuela, and targeted even the United States’ closest allies with sanctions to try to prevent them from trading with US enemies. Trump’s brutal sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba are not a peaceful alternative to war, but a form of economic warfare just as deadly as bombs, especially during a pandemic and its accompanying economic meltdown.

A Boon to the Merchants of Death

Once the large-scale US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended under Obama, the US military budget fell to $621 billion by 2015. But since then, military spending for procurement, research and development (R&D), and base construction has risen by 39 percent. This has been a huge windfall for the Big Five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — whose arms sales revenues rose 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.

The 49 percent increase to more than $100 billion for R&D on new weapons systems in 2020, part of the enormous $718 billion Pentagon budget, is a down payment on trillions of dollars in future revenue for the merchants of death unless these programs are stopped.

The pretext for Trump’s huge investment in big-ticket, high-tech weapons, including a new Space Force with a $15 billion price tag for 2021, is the New Cold War with Russia and China that he officially unveiled in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Obama was already trying to shift away from the United States’ lost counterinsurgency wars in the greater Middle East through his “Pivot to Asia,” the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and the expansion of US land and naval forces encircling Russia and China.

But Trump has the same problem as Obama as he tries to wriggle out of the “forever wars”: how to bring US troops home without making it obvious to the whole world that this chronically weak imperial power and its extravagant multitrillion-dollar war machine has been defeated everywhere. Even the most expensive weapons still only kill people and break things. Establishing peace and stability require other kinds of power and legitimacy, which the United States does not possess and which cannot be bought.

Before President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he remarked, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Trump is obviously as dazzled by chests full of medals and whizz-bang technology as every other president since Eisenhower, so he will keep giving the Pentagon everything it wants to keep spreading violence and chaos around the world.

Just as Obama co-opted and muted liberal opposition to Bush’s wars and record arms spending, Trump has co-opted and muted conservative opposition to Obama’s wars. Now, with the outpouring of protests against domestic police repression and calls for defunding the police, there is a growing chorus to also defund the military. That is certainly not a call Trump would listen to, but would Joe Biden be more receptive to public calls for peace and disarmament than Obama and Trump?

Probably not, based on his long record in the Senate, his roles in authorizing war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, his close ties to Israel, and his failure to rein in US war-making as vice president, despite personally opposing Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. Biden is also trying to outdo Trump in his opposition to China. Like Obama and Trump, Biden would be mainly a new manager and salesman in chief to sell the military-industrial complex’s latest strategy for war and global military occupation to the corporate media and the American public.

We will not rescue our country from the iron grip of the military-industrial complex by picking the lesser evil and hoping for the best. That has not worked for sixty years, since Eisenhower defined the problem so clearly in his farewell address.

On the other hand, a civil society coalition, led by the Poor People’s Campaign and including CODEPINK, is calling for a $350 billion cut in the military budget to fund human needs and public services, and representatives Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a resolution in Congress to do just that.

At the margins, this campaign could have more impact on Biden than on Trump, but not if people sweep up the bunting on election night and think their job is done, as liberals did with Obama and anti-war conservatives did with Trump. Unless and until the American public applies overwhelming pressure to dismantle the US war machine and its futile bid for “full spectrum” global dominance, the US military will keep losing wars on its own terms, bleeding us dry (metaphorically), and bleeding our neighbors overseas dry (literally), until it loses a major war with mass US casualties or destroys us all in a nuclear war.

The US peace movement has always had huge passive public support, but it will take mass collective action, not just passive support, to secure a peaceful future for our children and grandchildren. Public outrage and activism are starting to take away the license to kill black and brown people with impunity from the militarized RoboCops on our streets. The same kind of collective political action can defund and disarm the US military and take away its license to kill black and brown people everywhere.

Building a new anti-war movement that is connected to the domestic anti-police struggle is the only thing that can rein in US militarism. Because reelecting a president with as much blood on his hands as Trump — or simply transferring the command of the war machine to Joe Biden — certainly won’t.

*

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This article was originally published on CODEPINK

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

Featured image is from InfoBrics

In an interview with a Lebanese-based media on Wed., Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad said, “Muslims must stop fighting among themselves and focus on ‘Israeli enemy’ instead.”

“I know that there are great powers that seek instability among Islamic countries, but we are actually helping Israel by fighting and dividing ourselves,” he emphasized.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the former Malaysian prime minister emphasized the non-recognition of the Zionist regime and added,

“from the beginning, we did not recognize the Israeli regime and there is no diplomatic relationship between Malaysia and the Israeli regime up to the present time. We have always condemned it [the Israeli regime] but unfortunately, some other countries have pursued different policies.”

He also suggested that Muslims should support the Black Rights Movement instead of attacking Western countries and the United States.

Mahathir Mohamad has always been a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights and during his tenure, he hosted the Islamic Conference and pursued widespread support for the Palestinian cause and freedom of Al-Quds [Jerusalem].

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Israel is currently in the process of implementing the illegal annexation of Palestinian lands. The issue of “illegality” must be put in context. We are dealing with a broader issue: Crimes against Humanity and Genocide against the People of Palestine.

Annexation is a crime against Humanity.

And the Western governments which support Israel’s actions or turn a blind eye are complicit. Donald Trump has given the Green Light to Netanyahu. Trump is responsible for supporting and endorsing an illegal and criminal undertaking. 

In 2013, under the helm of the former Prime Minister of Malaysia Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) passed a historic judgment against the State of Israel.

Extensive evidence and testimonies were submitted. The State of Israel was found “guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide.”

At this juncture (following recent statements of Tun Mahathir regarding the illegal Annexation of the West Bank), it is important that the evidence of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity be fully acknowledged. The Annexation Project should be abandoned. And reparations should be implemented.

***

The proceedings directed against the State of Israel were led by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) against the State of Israel

Members of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) are: Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad (Chairman), Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, Dr. Denis Halliday, Mr. Musa Ismail, Dr. Zulaiha Ismail, Dr. Yaacob Merican, Dr.  Hans von Sponeck.

Working in liaison with their Malaysian counterparts, Commissioners Dr. Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) were present in Kuala Lumpur throughout the proceedings. 

 

This important judicial process has received very little coverage in the Western media. 

Global Research will be publishing several reports following this historic judgment against the State of Israel.

Michel Chossudovsky, Member of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) November 25, 2013, revised July 2nd, 2020

***

December 2005: Founding members of the Kuala Lumpur Declaration to Criminalize War under the helm of Tun. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad

***

Text of the November 2013 Judgment against the State of Israel

KUALA LUMPUR: The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) today found former Israeli army general Amos Yaron and the State of Israel guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide stemming from the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.

KLWCT president Tan Sri Lamin Mohd Yunus, who headed a seven-member panel, said the tribunal was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that both the defendants were guilty as charged.

The other judges were Tunku Sofiah Jewa, Prof Salleh Buang, Prof Emeritus Datuk Dr Shad Saleem Faruqi, Datuk Saari Yusof, John Philpot and Tunku Intan Mainura.

Reading out the judgment for almost three hours, Lamin said the tribunal ordered that reparations commensurate with the irreparable harm and injury, pain and suffering undergone by the complainant, war crime victims be paid to them.

“While it’s constantly mindful of its stature as merely a tribunal of conscience with no real power or enforcement, this tribunal finds that witnesses in this case are entitled ex justitia to the payment or reparations by the two convicted parties,” he said.

Lamin said it was hoped that armed with the tribunal’s findings, the witnesses who were also the victims in the case, would, in the near future, find a state or an international judicial entity able and willing to exercise jurisdiction to enforce the tribunal’s verdict against the two convicted parties.

The tribunal also ordered that its award of reparations should be submitted to the War Crimes Commission to faciliate the determination and collection of reparations by the complainant war crime victims.

Lamin noted that the tribunal was fully aware that its verdict was merely declaratory in nature and had no power of enforcement.

“What we can do…is to recommend to the KLWCT to submit this finding of conviction by the tribunal, together with the record of these proceedings, to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations (UN) and the UN Security Council,” said the judge.

He also said the tribunal recommended that the names of the two convicted parties be entered and included in the commissions’s Registry of War Criminals and be publicised, accordingly.

Yaron was charged over his direct involvement in his capacity as the commanding general in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. This was the first time that Yaron had been charged for war crimes.

The second charge was against the state of Israel for the crime of genocide and war crimes on the Palestinians.

The charges were the result of complaints received by KLWCT from victims from Palestine (Gaza and West Bank) and the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon last year.

During the six-day trial, the tribunal heard 11 prosecution witnesses, including Palestinians from both Muslim and Christian descent, as well as Malaysian surgeon Dr Ang Swee Chai who served at the camp at the time of the massacre.

Six of the witnesses testified at the KLWCT while the other five gave evidence through Skype.

Lead prosecutor Prof Gurdial S. Nijar described the verdict as “significant” as this marked the first time that the Israel state had been found guilty of genocide.

He said today’s judgment would be submitted to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, UN and the UN Security Council for further action.

He added that the judgment would also be publicised and circulated to governments worldwide to allow all states to exercise their jurisdiction on genocide. —

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Killing Koalas: The Promise of Extinction Down Under

July 2nd, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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This video was first published on July 1st, 2021.

It describes the impacts of the March 11, 2020 lockdown.

In course of the year several of our video productions have been the object of online censorship

***

We are living one of the most serious crises in modern history. 

According to Michel Chossudovsky, the coronavirus pandemic is used as a pretext and a justification to close down the global economy, as a means to resolving a public health concern.  

A complex decision-making process is instrumental in the closing down of national economies Worldwide. We are led to believe that the lockdown is the solution to a public health crisis. 

Politicians and health officials in more than 150 countries obey orders emanating from higher authority.

In turn millions of people obey the orders of their governments without questioning the fact that closing down an economy is not the solution but in fact the cause of  global poverty and unemployment. 

What we are dealing with is a crime against humanity.

 

Fear, intimidation, media disinformation prevail. The Lie has become the Truth

This is an imperial project emanating from powerful economic interests.

A global fear campaign is sustained by the media. And now a so-called second wave is envisaged.

The social and economic impacts are beyond description.


FULL TRANSCRIPT

The 2020 Economic Crisis. Global Poverty, Unemployment and Despair
By Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

June 30, 2020

We are undoubtedly living (in) one of the most serious economic and social and crises in modern history. In some regards, we are living history and we are unable to comprehend the logic of the corona virus pandemic.

What is at stake is the pretext and the justification for closing down national economies worldwide based on a public health concern.

We have to understand the causalities. Closing down an economy, nationally and globally does NOT resolve the pandemic. In fact, it creates a situation of INSTITUTIONAL INSTABILITY.

It also results in massive unemployment, confinement of people in their homes, without employment, without food . . . That is what we’re living.

There is NO justification for closing down national economies based on a public health concern, which can be resolved, and SHOULD be resolved!

There is a very complex decision-making process, which has been PLANNED WELL IN ADVANCE. From ‘central authority’, governments are instructed to close down their economies and then, in turn, the governments instruct people to implement social engineering, not to meet, not to have family reunions . . .

And, essentially, what we do not understand, and which is fundamental, is that economic activity is the basis for the reproduction of real life. By that I mean, institutions, purchasing power of families, a whole series of activities, which have developed in the course of history – economic activity constitutes the foundation of all societies.

And what these measures have resulted in is a massive crisis, in which particularly small and medium sized enterprises are being precipitated into bankruptcy, millions of people have become unemployed, and in many countries this has resulted in mass poverty, famine, among certain groups of the population.

We have ample evidence to this effect and we have to understand that this process of closing down national economies is deliberate. IT’S A PLAN.

And, it’s co-ordinated with the financial crisis which took place in the month of February (2020), which led to massive collapse in banking institutions, stock markets and so on. Economists, conventional economists, have a tendency to say that there’s no relationship between the corona pandemic crisis and the financial crash in February. That is utterly mistaken. The fear campaign, the disinformation campaign, have facilitated the MANIPULATION OF STOCK MARKETS. And we’re (I’m) talking about the use of very sophisticated derivatives, speculative instruments and so on.

What is now happening is that governments have been indebted up to their ears. They’re paying out compensation to companies which have been affected; in some cases it’s generous bailouts, in other cases it’s part of a social safety net coming to the rescue of workers and small-scale enterprises.

And the next stage is the MOST SERIOUS DEBT CRISIS IN WORLD HISTORY. In other words, the levels of employment have crashed and companies are bankrupt. We will have a fiscal crisis of the state. In other words, a dramatic decline in (income) tax revenues due to the collapse in employment, and the  companies (which have not gone bankrupt) are going to deduct corporate losses, of course (on their tax statements). How will the governments around the world continue to govern, finance social programs and so on?

It will ultimately be through a gigantic global debt operation implemented both in the so-called ‘developed’ countries – e.g. Italy, France, United States, Canada – and in the developing countries where it will be more the international financial institutions, the World Bank, the IMF, the regional development banks.

Now, the problem of Western governments is that that debt is NOT REPAYABLE. The Italian government has issued bonds with the support of Goldman Sachs and so on; that was done a couple of months back. And what has happened? Italy’s debt is categorized (by Standard and Poor). . . these Italian bonds, are classified ‘BB’, which essentially means junk bond status. In other words, that means that an entire state apparatus is now in the hands of the creditors. And these creditors are the financial institutions, the banks and so on.

And the next stage is ultimately the confiscation of the State! THE STATE WILL BE PRIVATIZED. All the programs will be under the helm of the creditors. We can say, “Goodbye” to the welfare state in Western Europe. Why? Because the creditors will immediately, following what they did in Greece a few years back . . . they will immediately impose austerity measures, and the privatization of social programs, the privatization of anything that can be privatized – cities, land, public buildings.

And, in other words, we are living a very important evolution because the State, as we know it, will no longer exist. It will be run by private banking interests, who will . . . and they’re already doing that . . . APPOINT their governments, or their politicians, their corrupt politicians, and essentially they will take over the whole political landscape.

That is happening in a number of countries. And in some countries they have even instructed the governments NOT to debate (in parliament) the enormous debts which have been accumulated in the last few months as a result of the pandemic, which now are the object of financing by these powerful financial institutions. In Canada there was an agreement between Prime Minister Trudeau on the one hand and the leader of the opposition – NO DEBATE in parliament on $150 billion of debt, which then has to be covered through public debt operations and loans from financial institutions.

And essentially the scenario that we are living. . . which is unfolding is that, on the one hand, the real economy in the course of the last few months starting in March, well, in fact, starting in February with the stock market crash is in a state of crisis, production activity has been affected, trade has been affected. Millions and millions of people are going to be unemployed, without earnings, and it’s not only poverty – it’s poverty and despair. It’s the marginalization of large sectors of the world population from the labour market. There are figures on that, published by the ILO (International Labour Organization) that in fact, at this stage, it is premature to even start estimating these impacts.

We can look at it country by country. We can see, for instance, that in developing countries the informal sector, let’s say in India or in certain countries in Latin America, (such as) Peru, a large sector of the labour force is involved in what is called the ‘informal sector’; self-employed, small-scale industries and so on. Well, this has been COMPLETELY WIPED OUT and the people affected are left very often, homeless. The only choice they have is to do it to go back to their home villages and in the process they are the victims of famine and a situation of TOTAL MARGINALIZATION.

That is the scenario. It’s beyond global poverty. It’s mass unemployment. It is something which has been ENGINEERED, it’s not something which is accidental. And it’s certainly not something which has been used to resolve a global health crisis.

The global health crisis pertaining to covid has been MULTIPLIED. People have been confined, they have fallen sick, they have lost their jobs, and at the same time the whole health apparatus has been in crisis, unable to function.

What we have to understand is that this process HAS TO BE CONFRONTED! There has to be an organized opposition. This is a neo-liberal project! It’s neo-liberalism to the extreme.

Now, bear in mind that today, what we have, (is that) in some regards, the stock market crash used speculative instruments, insider trading, but also the fear campaign to implement what is THE MOST SIGNIFICANT TRANSFER OF WEALTH IN WORLD HISTORY! In other words, everybody loses money in the stock market crash and the money goes into the hands of, you know, a limited number of billionaires. And there have been estimates as to the enrichment of this class in the course of the last three months. I won’t get into details. So that, this, in a sense, this crisis of February, the stock market crisis, sets the stage for the lockdown.

And on (the topic of) the lockdown, we can call it by another name. The lockdown is the CLOSURE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY! It is an act which instructs national governments to close down their economy, and they obey! That’s what we call, ‘global governance’. But it’s an imperial project. They obey and they close down everything.

And then they they try to convince their citizens that this is all for a good cause, we are closing down the economy so that we can save lives due to covid-19. That is a very strong statement and at the same time the statistics on covid-19 are the source of manipulation.

I won’t get into that particular dimension but I can say in all certitude that the impact of this crisis is so dramatic, the economic crisis, that it DOESN’T COMPARE to the impact of covid-19, which, according even to people like Anthony Fauci, is comparable to the seasonal influenza. They’ve written that in their peer-reviewed articles.

What they say online, on CNN is a different matter. But they do not consider covid-19 as an ultimate danger of all dangers. It’s not. There are many other health pandemics affecting the world. That does not mean that we shouldn’t take it seriously but we should understand, it’s common sense, it’s not by closing down the global economy that you’re going to resolve this pandemic.

So somebody’s lying, somewhere. And in fact, the lies are ‘becoming the truth’, they’re becoming part of the ‘consensus’ and THAT IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

Because when the lie becomes ‘the truth’, there’s no turning backwards.

And we notice how independent scientists, independent analysts, are being CENSORED,  that we have many doctors and nurses and scientists, virologists as well as economists who are speaking out. And you just have to look at the figures, the millions and millions of people who are unemployed as a result of this.

So, what we really need is a historical understanding of what’s going on, because closing down the economy through orders from ‘somewhere up there’ . . .

First of all, it’s DISTINCT FROM ANY PREVIOUS CRISIS. But secondly, we have to RESIST THAT MODEL. And it’s not by changing the paradigm, no. It’s a mass movement; it’s a mass movement against our governments, it’s a mass movement against the architects of this diabolical project . . .

And we can’t ask the Rockefellers, “Please lend us the money” to pay for our expenses, we have to do that on our own.

And that’s why all these NGOs, which are funded by corporate foundations Cannot  . . . I’m not saying . . . some of the things they do are fine but they cannot wage a campaign against those who are sponsoring them, that’s an impossibility.

So we have to implement a grassroots movement, nationally and internationally, to CONFRONT THIS DIABOLICAL PROJECT and to restore our national economies, our national institutions. And, to DENY THE LEGITIMACY OF THE DEBT PROJECT. And to investigate the elements of corruption which have led to this diabolical adventure, which is affecting humanity in its entirety.

This is a war against humanity, implemented through complex economic instruments.

Goodbye and we will continue our battle and our analysis to the best of our abilities at Global Research.

***

Our thanks to Chris Green for the Transcript of the above video.

CAPS indicate emphasis


The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order

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Reviews:

“This concise, provocative book reveals the negative effects of imposed economic structural reform, privatization, deregulation and competition. It deserves to be read carefully and widely.”
– Choice, American Library Association (ALA)

“The current system, Chossudovsky argues, is one of capital creation through destruction. The author confronts head on the links between civil violence, social and environmental stress, with the modalities of market expansion.”
– Michele Stoddard, Covert Action Quarterly

CLICK HERE FOR A SPECIAL INSIDE LOOK AT THE PREFACE

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca. He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

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In November 2019, the Washington Post and other major news media accused Children’s Health Defense (CHD) of using Facebook advertisements to spread “misinformation” about vaccines. The basis for these accusations, which have since continued, is a study published in the prestigious medical journal Vaccine that named CHD as a top buyer of vaccine-related Facebook ads. What the media failed to inform the public, however, is that the government-funded authors of this study failed to identify even a single example of a Facebook ad from CHD that contained any misinformation.

CHD has now published a detailed response to this baseless accusation showing that the real story here is how inconveniently truthful information about vaccines is being censored and how our right to informed consent is under assault.

The authors of the study did not trouble themselves to determine the truthfulness of vaccine-related Facebook advertisements. Instead, they simply categorized any ads that did not conform with the public policy goal of sustaining or increasing vaccination rates as “anti-vaccine”. Under their adopted criteria, even the simple act of advocating the right to informed consent constituted “anti-vaccine” behavior.

Then the authors lazily and dogmatically equated anything “anti-vaccine” with “misinformation”, which label they used euphemistically to mean any information, no matter how factual and well-grounded in science, that might cause people to question the wisdom of strictly complying with the vaccine recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

By this means, the study authors ludicrously equated advocacy of the right to informed consent with the propagation of “misinformation” about vaccines.

Ironically, while failing to provide any evidence to support their accusation against Children’s Health Defense, the study authors presented an example of an ad categorized as “pro-vaccine” that did misinform Facebook users. That ad promoted the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine as proven to prevent cancer even though—as the authors of a study published in January 2020 in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine pointed out—none of the clinical trials used by the manufacturers to obtain licensure were designed to determine the vaccine’s effectiveness against cervical cancer, and whether the vaccine prevents cancer remains unknown.

The authors of the Vaccine study, however, failed to identify that ad as having misled Facebook users—which is unsurprising since their effective definition of “misinformation” precluded them from doing so.

They also declared no conflicts of interest despite their study having been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which itself develops vaccine technology and licenses it for use by pharmaceutical corporations. For example, the NIH patented technology that was sold under a co-exclusive license to Merck and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for use in the development of their respective HPV vaccines.

While media reports about the Vaccine study characterized any discussion of corruption within the government and medical establishment as “conspiracy theory”, in fact, even the US Congress has acknowledged this problem within agencies like the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the existence of pervasive corruption and conflicts of interest within the scientific community and the medical establishment is recognized in the medical literature as an uncontroversial fact.

Even more preposterously, media reports characterized so-called “anti-vaccine” groups as part of an “industry” that has “more resources” than public vaccine policy proponents. While one of the study’s authors acknowledged in an interview that these groups reached relatively large Facebook audiences in terms of just “a few thousand dollars” in ad spend, their own data showed that “pro-vaccine” ad buyers both bought more ads and collectively had higher budgets. A top “pro-vaccine” buyer, for example, appeared to have been the CDC, which ran “HPV Vaccine is Cancer Prevention” ads with budgets of up to $50,000.

Children’s Health Defense, in its efforts to combat government and media misinformation about vaccines and the erosion of our fundamental human rights, is standing up against the trillion-dollar global pharmaceutical industry, including a global vaccine market that’s estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

In 2016, Big Pharma is estimated to have spent nearly $30 billion in marketing in the US, primarily targeting medical professionals, including through ads in peer-reviewed journals and direct-to-physician payments. Approximately $6 billion was spent on direct-to-consumer advertising, with pharmaceutical ads representing an estimated 8 percent of total ad revenue for major news networks like CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN.

Additionally, the industry has been shifting its focus from television and print ads to online ads. Top beneficiaries of this shift include WebMD and Medscape, which Google often features in its “answer box” for health-related search queries. Facebook, too, has been competing for pharma ad dollars, by rolling out a new feature enabling pharmaceutical companies to promote their products with Facebook ads while remaining in compliance with regulations that require the disclosure of important safety information, which is accomplished by having the safety information appear in a scrolling section featured below the ad.

And, of course, with Big Pharma spending tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress each year, it’s little wonder that we’ve seen efforts to censor information and eliminate choice. For example, Congressman Adam Schiff last year sent letters to the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Amazon calling on these companies to do more to stop the spread of what he euphemistically called vaccine “misinformation”, by which he simply meant any information, no matter how factual, that could cause parents “to disregard the advice of their children’s physician and public health experts and decline to follow the recommended vaccination schedule.”

In adopting the same euphemistic use of language, the authors of the Vaccine study were simply following Congressman Schiff’s example—just as when the major media misinform the public about what the science tells us about vaccines, they are simply following the example set by the CDC.

In the face of efforts to manufacture consent for government policies through deceitful propaganda, censor truthful information about vaccines, and eliminate parents’ ability to meaningfully exercise their right to informed consent, Children’s Health Defense is on the front lines, speaking out and standing up for health freedom, including through litigation.

Unlike the authors of the Vaccine study, CHD is not funded by taxpayers’ dollars. Unlike the major media, it is also not funded by pharmaceutical ad dollars. Far from being backed by some powerful “industry”, CHD’s grassroots efforts would not be possible without the voluntary financial contributions of readers like you.

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The 1968 My Lai Massacre: The Scene of the Crime

July 1st, 2020 by Seymour M. Hersh

This article was originally published on The New Yorker in March 2015.

There is a long ditch in the village of My Lai. On the morning of March 16, 1968, it was crowded with the bodies of the dead—dozens of women, children, and old people, all gunned down by young American soldiers. Now, forty-seven years later, the ditch at My Lai seems wider than I remember from the news photographs of the slaughter: erosion and time doing their work. During the Vietnam War, there was a rice paddy nearby, but it has been paved over to make My Lai more accessible to the thousands of tourists who come each year to wander past the modest markers describing the terrible event. The My Lai massacre was a pivotal moment in that misbegotten war: an American contingent of about a hundred soldiers, known as Charlie Company, having received poor intelligence, and thinking that they would encounter Vietcong troops or sympathizers, discovered only a peaceful village at breakfast. Nevertheless, the soldiers of Charlie Company raped women, burned houses, and turned their M-16s on the unarmed civilians of My Lai. Among the leaders of the assault was Lieutenant William L. Calley, a junior-college dropout from Miami.

By early 1969, most of the members of Charlie Company had completed their tours and returned home. I was then a thirty-two-year-old freelance reporter in Washington, D.C. Determined to understand how young men—boys, really—could have done this, I spent weeks pursuing them. In many cases, they talked openly and, for the most part, honestly with me, describing what they did at My Lai and how they planned to live with the memory of it.

In testimony before an Army inquiry, some of the soldiers acknowledged being at the ditch but claimed that they had disobeyed Calley, who was ordering them to kill. They said that one of the main shooters, along with Calley himself, had been Private First Class Paul Meadlo. The truth remains elusive, but one G.I. described to me a moment that most of his fellow-soldiers, I later learned, remembered vividly. At Calley’s order, Meadlo and others had fired round after round into the ditch and tossed in a few grenades.

Then came a high-pitched whining, which grew louder as a two- or three-year-old boy, covered with mud and blood, crawled his way among the bodies and scrambled toward the rice paddy. His mother had likely protected him with her body. Calley saw what was happening and, according to the witnesses, ran after the child, dragged him back to the ditch, threw him in, and shot him.

The morning after the massacre, Meadlo stepped on a land mine while on a routine patrol, and his right foot was blown off. While waiting to be evacuated to a field hospital by helicopter, he condemned Calley. “God will punish you for what you made me do,” a G.I. recalled Meadlo saying.

“Get him on the helicopter!” Calley shouted.

Meadlo went on cursing at Calley until the helicopter arrived.

Meadlo had grown up in farm country in western Indiana. After a long time spent dropping dimes into a pay phone and calling information operators across the state, I found a Meadlo family listed in New Goshen, a small town near Terre Haute. A woman who turned out to be Paul’s mother, Myrtle, answered the phone. I said that I was a reporter and was writing about Vietnam. I asked how Paul was doing, and wondered if I could come and speak to him the next day. She told me I was welcome to try.

The Meadlos lived in a small house with clapboard siding on a ramshackle chicken farm. When I pulled up in my rental car, Myrtle came out to greet me and said that Paul was inside, though she had no idea whether he would talk or what he might say. It was clear that he had not told her much about Vietnam. Then Myrtle said something that summed up a war that I had grown to hate: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.”

Meadlo invited me in and agreed to talk. He was twenty-two. He had married before leaving for Vietnam, and he and his wife had a two-and-a-half-year-old son and an infant daughter. Despite his injury, he worked a factory job to support the family. I asked him to show me his wound and to tell me about the treatment. He took off his prosthesis and described what he’d been through. It did not take long for the conversation to turn to My Lai. Meadlo talked and talked, clearly desperate to regain some self-respect. With little emotion, he described Calley’s orders to kill. He did not justify what he had done at My Lai, except that the killings “did take a load off my conscience,” because of “the buddies we’d lost. It was just revenge, that’s all it was.”

Meadlo recounted his actions in bland, appalling detail. “There was supposed to have been some Vietcong in [My Lai] and we began to make a sweep through it,” he told me. “Once we got there we began gathering up the people . . . started putting them in big mobs. There must have been about forty or forty-five civilians standing in one big circle in the middle of the village. . . . Calley told me and a couple of other guys to watch them.” Calley, as he recalled, came back ten minutes later and told him, “Get with it. I want them dead.” From about ten or fifteen feet away, Meadlo said, Calley “started shooting them. Then he told me to start shooting them. . . . I started to shoot them, but the other guys wouldn’t do it. So we”—Meadlo and Calley—“went ahead and killed them.” Meadlo estimated that he had killed fifteen people in the circle. “We all were under orders,” he said. “We all thought we were doing the right thing. At the time it didn’t bother me.” There was official testimony showing that Meadlo had in fact been extremely distressed by Calley’s order. After being told by Calley to “take care of this group,” one Charlie Company soldier recounted, Meadlo and a fellow-soldier “were actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.” When Calley returned and said that he wanted them dead, the soldier said, “Meadlo just looked at him like he couldn’t believe it. He says, ‘Waste them?’ ” When Calley said yes, another soldier testified, Meadlo and Calley “opened up and started firing.” But then Meadlo “started to cry.”

Mike Wallace, of CBS, was interested in my interview, and Meadlo agreed to tell his story again, on national television. I spent the night before the show on a couch in the Meadlo home and flew to New York the next morning with Meadlo and his wife. There was time to talk, and I learned that Meadlo had spent weeks in recovery and rehabilitation at an Army hospital in Japan. Once he came home, he said nothing about his experiences in Vietnam. One night, shortly after his return, his wife woke up to hysterical crying in one of the children’s rooms. She rushed in and found Paul violently shaking the child.

I’d been tipped off about My Lai by Geoffrey Cowan, a young antiwar lawyer in Washington, D.C. Cowan had little specific information, but he’d heard that an unnamed G.I. had gone crazy and killed scores of Vietnamese civilians. Three years earlier, while I was covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press, I had been told by officers returning from the war about the killing of Vietnamese civilians that was going on. One day, while pursuing Cowan’s tip, I ran into a young Army colonel whom I’d known on the Pentagon beat. He had been wounded in the leg in Vietnam and, while recovering, learned that he was to be promoted to general. He now worked in an office that had day-to-day responsibility for the war. When I asked him what he knew about the unnamed G.I., he gave me a sharp, angry look, and began whacking his hand against his knee. “That boy Calley didn’t shoot anyone higher than this,” he said.

I had a name. In a local library, I found a brief story buried in the Times about a Lieutenant Calley who had been charged by the Army with the murder of an unspecified number of civilians in South Vietnam. I tracked down Calley, whom the Army had hidden away in senior officers’ quarters at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. By then, someone in the Army had allowed me to read and take notes from a classified charge sheet accusing Calley of the premeditated murder of a hundred and nine “Oriental human beings.”

Calley hardly seemed satanic. He was a slight, nervous man in his mid-twenties, with pale, almost translucent skin. He tried hard to seem tough. Over many beers, he told me how he and his soldiers had engaged and killed the enemy at My Lai in a fiercely contested firefight. We talked through the night. At one point, Calley excused himself, to go to the bathroom. He left the door partly open, and I could see that he was vomiting blood.

In November, 1969, I wrote five articles about Calley, Meadlo, and the massacre. I had gone to Life and Look with no success, so I turned instead to a small antiwar news agency in Washington, the Dispatch News Service. It was a time of growing anxiety and unrest. Richard Nixon had won the 1968 election by promising to end the war, but his real plan was to win it, through escalation and secret bombing. In 1969, as many as fifteen hundred American soldiers were being killed every month—almost the same as the year before.

Combat reporters such as Homer Bigart, Bernard Fall, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, Frances FitzGerald, Gloria Emerson, Morley Safer, and Ward Just filed countless dispatches from the field that increasingly made plain that the war was morally groundless, strategically lost, and nothing like what the military and political officials were describing to the public in Saigon and in Washington. On November 15, 1969, two days after the publication of my first My Lai dispatch, an antiwar march in Washington drew half a million people. H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s most trusted aide, and his enforcer, took notes in the Oval Office that were made public eighteen years later. They revealed that on December 1, 1969, at the height of the outcry over Paul Meadlo’s revelations, Nixon approved the use of “dirty tricks” to discredit a key witness to the massacre. When, in 1971, an Army jury convicted Calley of mass murder and sentenced him to life at hard labor, Nixon intervened, ordering Calley to be released from an Army prison and placed under house arrest pending review. Calley was freed three months after Nixon left office and spent the ensuing years working in his father-in-law’s jewelry store, in Columbus, Georgia, and offering self-serving interviews to journalists willing to pay for them. Finally, in 2009, in a speech to a Kiwanis Club, he said that there “is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse” for My Lai, but that he was following orders—“foolishly, I guess.” Calley is now seventy-one. He is the only officer to have been convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre.

In March, 1970, an Army investigation filed charges ranging from murder to dereliction of duty against fourteen officers, including generals and colonels, who were accused of covering up the massacre. Only one officer besides Calley eventually faced court-martial, and he was found not guilty.

A couple of months later, at the height of widespread campus protests against the war—protests that included the killing of four students by National Guardsmen in Ohio—I went to Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to give a speech against the war. Hubert Humphrey, who had been Lyndon Johnson’s loyal Vice-President, was now a professor of political science at the college. He had lost to Nixon, in the 1968 election, partly because he could not separate himself from L.B.J.’s Vietnam policy. After my speech, Humphrey asked to talk to me. “I’ve no problem with you, Mr. Hersh,” he said. “You were doing your job and you did it well. But, as for those kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’ ” Humphrey’s fleshy, round face reddened, and his voice grew louder with every phrase. “I say, ‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’ ”

visited My Lai (as the hamlet was called by the U.S. Army) for the first time a few months ago, with my family. Returning to the scene of the crime is the stuff of cliché for reporters of a certain age, but I could not resist. I had sought permission from the South Vietnamese government in early 1970, but by then the Pentagon’s internal investigation was under way and the area was closed to outsiders. I joined the Times in 1972 and visited Hanoi, in North Vietnam. In 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon, I travelled again to Vietnam to conduct interviews for a book and to do more reporting for the Times. I thought I knew all, or most, of what there was to learn about the massacre. Of course, I was wrong.

My Lai is in central Vietnam, not far from Highway 1, the road that connects Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is now known. Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the My Lai Museum, is a survivor of the massacre. When we first met, Cong, a stern, stocky man in his late fifties, said little about his personal experiences and stuck to stilted, familiar phrases. He described the Vietnamese as “a welcoming people,” and he avoided any note of accusation. “We forgive, but we do not forget,” he said. Later, as we sat on a bench outside the small museum, he described the massacre, as he remembered it. At the time, Cong was eleven years old. When American helicopters landed in the village, he said, he and his mother and four siblings huddled in a primitive bunker inside their thatch-roofed home. American soldiers ordered them out of the bunker and then pushed them back in, throwing a hand grenade in after them and firing their M-16s. Cong was wounded in three places—on his scalp, on the right side of his torso, and in the leg. He passed out. When he awoke, he found himself in a heap of corpses: his mother, his three sisters, and his six-year-old brother. The American soldiers must have assumed that Cong was dead, too. In the afternoon, when the American helicopters left, his father and a few other surviving villagers, who had come to bury the dead, found him.

The ditch where Lieutenant Calley ordered the killing of dozens of civilians.

The ditch where Lieutenant Calley ordered the killing of dozens of civilians. (Photograph by Katie Orlinsky)

Later, at lunch with my family and me, Cong said, “I will never forget the pain.” And in his job he can never leave it behind. Cong told me that a few years earlier a veteran named Kenneth Schiel, who had been at My Lai, had visited the museum—the only member of Charlie Company at that point to have done so—as a participant in an Al Jazeera television documentary marking the fortieth anniversary of the massacre. Schiel had enlisted in the Army after graduation from high school, in Swartz Creek, Michigan, a small town near Flint, and, after the subsequent investigations, he was charged with killing nine villagers. (The charges were dismissed.)

The documentary featured a conversation with Cong, who had been told that Schiel was a Vietnam veteran, but not that he had been at My Lai. In the video, Schiel tells an interviewer, “Did I shoot? I’ll say that I shot until I realized what was wrong. I’m not going to say whether I shot villagers or not.” He was even less forthcoming in a conversation with Cong, after it became clear that he had participated in the massacre. Schiel says repeatedly that he wants to “apologize to the people of My Lai,” but he refuses to go further. “I ask myself all the time why did this happen. I don’t know.”

Cong demands, “How did you feel when you shot into civilians and killed? Was it hard for you?” Schiel says that he wasn’t among the soldiers who were shooting groups of civilians. Cong responds, “So maybe you came to my house and killed my relatives.”

A transcript on file at the museum contains the rest of the conversation. Schiel says, “The only thing I can do now is just apologize for it.” Cong, who sounds increasingly distressed, continues to ask Schiel to talk openly about his crimes, and Schiel keeps saying, “Sorry, sorry.” When Cong asks Schiel whether he was able to eat a meal upon returning to his base, Schiel begins to cry. “Please don’t ask me any more questions,” he says. “I cannot stay calm.” Then Schiel asks Cong if he can join a ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the massacre.

Cong rebuffs him. “It would be too shameful,” he says, adding, “The local people will be very angry if they realize that you were the person who took part in the massacre.”

Before leaving the museum, I asked Cong why he had been so unyielding with Schiel. His face hardened. He said that he had no interest in easing the pain of a My Lai veteran who refused to own up fully to what he had done. Cong’s father, who worked for the Vietcong, lived with Cong after the massacre, but he was killed in action, in 1970, by an American combat unit. Cong went to live with relatives in a nearby village, helping them raise cattle. Finally, after the war, he was able to return to school.

There was more to learn from the comprehensive statistics that Cong and the museum staff had compiled. The names and ages of the dead are engraved on a marble plaque that dominates one of the exhibit rooms. The museum’s count, no longer in dispute, is five hundred and four victims, from two hundred and forty-seven families. Twenty-four families were obliterated—–three generations murdered, with no survivors. Among the dead were a hundred and eighty-two women, seventeen of them pregnant. A hundred and seventy-three children were executed, including fifty-six infants. Sixty older men died. The museum’s accounting included another important fact: the victims of the massacre that day were not only in My Lai (also known as My Lai 4) but also in a sister settlement known to the Americans as My Khe 4. This settlement, a mile or so to the east, on the South China Sea, was assaulted by another contingent of U.S. soldiers, Bravo Company. The museum lists four hundred and seven victims in My Lai 4 and ninety-seven in My Khe 4.

Hersh at work in North Vietnam in 1972 three years after he broke the massacre story.

Hersh at work in North Vietnam, in 1972, three years after he broke the massacre story. Courtesy Seymour M. Hersh

The message was clear: what happened at My Lai 4 was not singular, not an aberration; it was replicated, in lesser numbers, by Bravo Company. Bravo was attached to the same unit—Task Force Barker—as Charlie Company. The assaults were by far the most important operation carried out that day by any combat unit in the Americal Division, which Task Force Barker was attached to. The division’s senior leadership, including its commander, Major General Samuel Koster, flew in and out of the area throughout the day to check its progress.

There was an ugly context to this. By 1967, the war was going badly in the South Vietnamese provinces of Quang Ngai, Quang Nam, and Quang Tri, which were known for their independence from the government in Saigon, and their support for the Vietcong and North Vietnam. Quang Tri was one of the most heavily bombed provinces in the country. American warplanes drenched all three provinces with defoliating chemicals, including Agent Orange.

On my recent trip, I spent five days in Hanoi, which is the capital of unified Vietnam. Retired military officers and Communist Party officials there told me that the My Lai massacre, by bolstering antiwar dissent inside America, helped North Vietnam win the war. I was also told, again and again, that My Lai was unique only in its size. The most straightforward assessment came from Nguyen Thi Binh, known to everyone in Vietnam as Madame Binh. In the early seventies, she was the head of the National Liberation Front delegation at the Paris peace talks and became widely known for her willingness to speak bluntly and for her striking good looks. Madame Binh, who is eighty-seven, retired from public life in 2002, after serving two terms as Vietnam’s Vice-President, but she remains involved in war-related charities dealing with Agent Orange victims and the disabled.

“I’ll be honest with you,” she said. “My Lai became important in America only after it was reported by an American.” Within weeks of the massacre, a spokesman for the North Vietnamese in Paris had publicly described the events, but the story was assumed to be propaganda. “I remember it well, because the antiwar movement in America grew because of it,” Madame Binh added, speaking in French. “But in Vietnam there was not only one My Lai—there were many.”

One morning in Danang, a beach resort and port city of about a million people, I had coffee with Vo Cao Loi, one of the few survivors of Bravo Company’s attack at My Khe 4. He was fifteen at the time, Loi said, through an interpreter. His mother had what she called “a bad feeling” when she heard helicopters approaching the village. There had been operations in the area before. “It was not just like some Americans would show up all of a sudden,” he said. “Before they came, they often fired artillery and bombed the area, and then after all that they would send in the ground forces.” American and South Vietnamese Army units had moved through the area many times with no incident, but this time Loi was shooed out of the village by his mother moments before the attack. His two older brothers were fighting with the Vietcong, and one had been killed in combat six days earlier. “I think she was afraid because I was almost a grown boy and if I stayed I could be beaten up or forced to join the South Vietnamese Army. I went to the river, about fifty metres away. Close, close enough: I heard the fire and the screaming.” Loi stayed hidden until evening, when he returned home to bury his mother and other relatives.

Two days later, Vietcong troops took Loi to a headquarters in the mountains to the west. He was too young to fight, but he was brought before Vietcong combat units operating throughout Quang Ngai to describe what the Americans had done at My Khe. The goal was to inspire the guerrilla forces to fight harder. Loi eventually joined the Vietcong and served at the military command until the end of the war. American surveillance planes and troops were constantly searching for his unit. “We moved the headquarters every time we thought the Americans were getting close,” Loi told me. “Whoever worked in headquarters had to be absolutely loyal. There were three circles on the inside: the outer one was for suppliers, a second one was for those who worked in maintenance and logistics, and the inner one was for the commanders. Only division commanders could stay in the inner circle. When they did leave the headquarters, they would dress as normal soldiers, so one would never know. They went into nearby villages. There were cases when Americans killed our division officers, but they did not know who they were.” As with the U.S. Army, Loi said, Vietcong officers often motivated their soldiers by inflating the number of enemy combatants they had killed.

The massacres at My Lai and My Khe, terrible as they were, mobilized support for the war against the Americans, Loi said. Asked if he could understand why such war crimes were tolerated by the American command, Loi said he did not know, but he had a dark view of the quality of U.S. leadership in central Vietnam. “The American generals had to take responsibility for the actions of the soldiers,” he told me. “The soldiers take orders, and they were just doing their duty.”

Loi said that he still grieves for his family, and he has nightmares about the massacre. But, unlike Pham Thanh Cong, he found a surrogate family almost immediately: “The Vietcong loved me and took care of me. They raised me.” I told Loi about Cong’s anger at Kenneth Schiel, and Loi said, “Even if others do terrible things to you, you can forgive it and move toward the future.” After the war, Loi transferred to the regular Vietnamese Army. He eventually became a full colonel and retired after thirty-eight years of service. He and his wife now own a coffee shop in Danang.

Almost seventy per cent of the population of Vietnam is under the age of forty, and although the war remains an issue mainly for the older generations, American tourists are a boon to the economy. If American G.I.s committed atrocities, well, so did the French and the Chinese in other wars. Diplomatically, the U.S. is considered a friend, a potential ally against China. Thousands of Vietnamese who worked for or with the Americans during the Vietnam War fled to the United States in 1975. Some of their children have confounded their parents by returning to Communist Vietnam, despite its many ills, from rampant corruption to aggressive government censorship.

Nguyen Qui Duc, a fifty-seven-year-old writer and journalist who runs a popular bar and restaurant in Hanoi, fled to America in 1975 when he was seventeen. Thirty-one years later, he returned. In San Francisco, he was a prize-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, but, as he told me, “I’d always wanted to come back and live in Vietnam. I felt unfinished leaving home at seventeen and living as someone else in the United States. I was grateful for the opportunities in America, but I needed a sense of community. I came to Hanoi for the first time as a reporter for National Public Radio, and fell in love with it.”

Duc told me that, like many Vietnamese, he had learned to accept the American brutality in the war. “American soldiers committed atrocious acts, but in war such things happen,” he said. “And it’s a fact that the Vietnamese cannot own up to their own acts of brutality in the war. We Vietnamese have a practical attitude: better forget a bad enemy if you can gain a needed friend.”

During the war, Duc’s father, Nguyen Van Dai, was a deputy governor in South Vietnam. He was seized by the Vietcong in 1968 and imprisoned until 1980. In 1984, Duc, with the help of an American diplomat, successfully petitioned the government to allow his parents to emigrate to California; Duc had not seen his father for sixteen years. He told me of his anxiety as he waited for him at the airport. His father had suffered terribly in isolation in a Communist prison near the Chinese border; he was often unable to move his limbs. Would he be in a wheelchair, or mentally unstable? Duc’s father arrived in California during a Democratic Presidential primary. He walked off the plane and greeted his son. “How’s Jesse Jackson doing?” he said. He found a job as a social worker and lived for sixteen more years.

Some American veterans of the war have returned to Vietnam to live. Chuck Palazzo grew up in a troubled family on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and, after dropping out of high school, enlisted in the Marines. In the fall of 1970, after a year of training, he was assigned to an élite reconnaissance unit whose mission was to confirm intelligence and to ambush enemy missile sites and combat units at night. He and his men sometimes parachuted in under fire. “I was involved in a lot of intense combat with many North Vietnamese regulars as well as Vietcong, and I lost a lot of friends,” Palazzo told me over a drink in Danang, where he now lives and works. “But the gung ho left when I was still here. I started to read and understand the politics of the war, and one of my officers was privately agreeing with me that what we were doing there was wrong and senseless. The officer told me, ‘Watch your ass and get the hell out of here.’ ”

Palazzo first arrived in Danang in 1970, on a charter flight, and he could see coffins lined up on the field as the plane taxied in. “It was only then that I realized I was in a war,” he said. “Thirteen months later, I was standing in line, again at Danang, to get on the plane taking me home, but my name was not on the manifest.” After some scrambling, Palazzo said, “I was told that if I wanted to go home that day the only way out was to escort a group of coffins flying to America on a C-141 cargo plane.” So that’s what he did.

After leaving the Marines, Palazzo earned a college degree and began a career as an I.T. specialist. But, like many vets, he came “back to the world” with post-traumatic stress disorder and struggled with addictions. His marriage collapsed. He lost various jobs. In 2006, Palazzo made a “selfish” decision to return to Ho Chi Minh City. “It was all about me dealing with P.T.S.D. and confronting my own ghosts,” he said. “My first visit became a love affair with the Vietnamese.” Palazzo wanted to do all he could for the victims of Agent Orange. For years, the Veterans Administration, citing the uncertainty of evidence, refused to recognize a link between Agent Orange and the ailments, including cancers, of many who were exposed to it. “In the war, the company commander told us it was mosquito spray, but we could see that all the trees and vegetation were destroyed,” Palazzo said. “It occurred to me that, if American vets were getting something, some help and compensation, why not the Vietnamese?” Palazzo, who moved to Danang in 2007, is now an I.T. consultant and the leader of a local branch of Veterans for Peace, an American antiwar N.G.O. He remains active in the Agent Orange Action Group, which seeks international support to cope with the persistent effects of the defoliant.[1]

In Hanoi, I met Chuck Searcy, a tall, gray-haired man of seventy who grew up in Georgia. Searcy’s father had been taken prisoner by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, and it never occurred to Searcy to avoid Vietnam. “I thought President Johnson and the Congress knew what we were doing in Vietnam,” he told me. In 1966, Searcy quit college and enlisted. He was an intelligence analyst, in a unit that was situated near the airport in Saigon, and which processed and evaluated American analyses and reports.

“Within three months, all the ideals I had as a patriotic Georgia boy were shattered, and I began to question who we were as a nation,” Searcy said. “The intelligence I was seeing amounted to a big intellectual lie.” The South Vietnamese clearly thought little of the intelligence the Americans were passing along. At one point, a colleague bought fish at a market in Saigon and noticed that it was wrapped in one of his unit’s classified reports. “By the time I left, in June of 1968,” Searcy said, “I was angry and bitter.”

Searcy finished his Army tour in Europe. His return home was a disaster. “My father heard me talk about the war and he was incredulous. Had I turned into a Communist? He said that he and my mother don’t ‘know who you are anymore. You’re not an American.’ Then they told me to get out.” Searcy went on to graduate from the University of Georgia, and edited a weekly newspaper in Athens, Georgia. He then began a career in politics and public policy that included working as an aide to Wyche Fowler, a Georgia Democratic congressman.

In 1992, Searcy returned to Vietnam and eventually decided to join the few other veterans who had moved there. “I knew, even as I was flying out of Vietnam in 1968, that someday, somehow, I would return, hopefully in a time of peace. I felt even back then that I was abandoning the Vietnamese to a terribly tragic fate, for which we Americans were mostly responsible. That sentiment never quite left me.” Searcy worked with a program that dealt with mine clearance. The U.S. dropped three times the number of bombs by weight in Vietnam as it had during the Second World War. Between the end of the war and 1998, more than a hundred thousand Vietnamese civilians, an estimated forty per cent of them children, had been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance. For more than two decades after the war, the U.S. refused to pay for damage done by bombs or by Agent Orange, though in 1996 the government began to provide modest funding for mine clearance. From 2001 to 2011, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund also helped finance the mine-clearance program. “A lot of veterans felt we should assume some responsibility,” Searcy said. The program helped educate Vietnamese, especially farmers and children, about the dangers posed by the unexploded weapons, and casualties have diminished.

Searcy said that his early disillusionment with the war was validated shortly before its end. His father called to ask if they could have coffee. They hadn’t spoken since he was ordered out of the house. “He and my mother had been talking,” Searcy said. “And he told me, ‘We think you were right and we were wrong. We want you to come home.’ ” He went home almost immediately, he said, and remained close to his parents until they died. Searcy is twice divorced, and wrote, in a self-deprecating e-mail, “I have resisted the kind efforts of the Vietnamese to get me married off again.”

There was more to learn in Vietnam. By early 1969, most of the members of Charlie Company were back home in America or reassigned to other combat units. The coverup was working. By then, however, a courageous Army veteran named Ronald Ridenhour had written a detailed letter about the “dark and bloody” massacre and mailed copies of it to thirty government officials and members of Congress. Within weeks, the letter found its way to the American military headquarters in Vietnam.

On my recent visit to Hanoi, a government official asked me to pay a courtesy call at the provincial offices in the city of Quang Ngai before driving the few miles to My Lai. There I was presented with a newly published guidebook to the province, which included a detailed description of another purported American massacre during the war, in the hamlet of Truong Le, outside Quang Ngai. According to the report, an Army platoon on a search-and-destroy operation arrived at Truong Le at seven in the morning on April 18, 1969, a little more than a year after My Lai. The soldiers pulled women and children out of their houses and then torched the village. Three hours later, the report alleges, the soldiers returned to Truong Le and killed forty-one children and twenty-two women, leaving only nine survivors.

Little, it seemed, had changed in the aftermath of My Lai.

In 1998, a few weeks before the thirtieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, a retired Pentagon official, W. Donald Stewart, gave me a copy of an unpublished report from August, 1967, showing that most American troops in South Vietnam did not understand their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions. Stewart was then the chief of the investigations division of the Directorate of Inspection Services, at the Pentagon. His report, which involved months of travel and hundreds of interviews, was prepared at the request of Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Stewart’s report said that many of the soldiers interviewed “felt they were at liberty to substitute their own judgment for the clear provisions of the Conventions. . . . It was primarily the young and inexperienced troops who stated they would maltreat or kill prisoners, despite having just received instructions” on international law.

McNamara left the Pentagon in February, 1968, and the report was never released. Stewart later told me that he understood why the report was suppressed: “People were sending their eighteen-year-olds over there, and we didn’t want them to find out that they were cutting off ears. I came back from South Vietnam thinking that things were out of control. . . . I understood Calley—very much so.”

It turns out that Robert McNamara did, too. I knew nothing of the Stewart study while I was reporting on My Lai in late 1969, but I did learn that McNamara had been put on notice years earlier about the bloody abuses in central Vietnam. After the first of my My Lai stories was published, Jonathan Schell, a young writer for The New Yorker, who in 1968 had published a devastating account for the magazine of the incessant bombing in Quang Ngai and a nearby province, called me. (Schell died last year.) His article—which later became a book, “The Military Half”—demonstrated, in essence, that the U.S. military, convinced that the Vietcong were entrenched in central Vietnam and attracting serious support, made little distinction between combatants and noncombatants in the area that included My Lai.

Schell had returned from South Vietnam, in 1967, devastated by what he had seen. He came from an eminent New York family, and his father, a Wall Street attorney and a patron of the arts, was a neighbor, in Martha’s Vineyard, of Jerome Wiesner, the former science adviser to President John F. Kennedy. Wiesner, then the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also involved with McNamara in a project to build an electronic barrier that would prevent the North Vietnamese from sending matériel south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (The barrier was never completed.) Schell told Wiesner what he had seen in Vietnam, and Wiesner, who shared his dismay, arranged for him to talk with McNamara.

Soon afterward, Schell discussed his observations with McNamara, in Washington. Schell told me that he was uncomfortable about giving the government a report before writing his article, but he felt that it had to be done. McNamara agreed that their meeting would remain secret, and he said that he would do nothing to impede Schell’s work. He also provided Schell with an office in the Pentagon where he could dictate his notes. Two copies were made, and McNamara said that he would use his set to begin an inquiry into the abuses that Schell had described.

Schell’s story was published early the next year. He heard nothing more from McNamara, and there was no public sign of any change in policy. Then came my articles on My Lai, and Schell called McNamara, who had since left the Pentagon to become president of the World Bank. He reminded him that he had left him a detailed accounting of atrocities in the My Lai area. Now, Schell told me, he thought it was important to write about their meeting. McNamara said that they had agreed it was off the record and insisted that Schell honor the commitment. Schell asked me for advice. I wanted him to do the story, of course, but told him that if he really had made an off-the-record pact with McNamara he had no choice but to honor it.

Schell kept his word. In a memorial essay on McNamara in The Nation, in 2009, he described his visit to McNamara but did not mention their extraordinary agreement. Fifteen years after the meeting, Schell wrote, he learned from Neil Sheehan, the brilliant war reporter for the United Press International[2], the Times and The New Yorker, and the author of “A Bright Shining Lie,” that McNamara had sent Schell’s notes to Ellsworth Bunker, the American Ambassador in Saigon. Apparently unknown to McNamara, the goal in Saigon was not to investigate Schell’s allegations but to discredit his reporting and do everything possible to prevent publication of the material.

A few months after my newspaper articles appeared, Harper’s published an excerpt from a book I’d been writing, to be titled “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” The excerpt provided a far more detailed account of what had happened, emphasizing how the soldiers in Lieutenant Calley’s company had become brutalized in the months leading up to the massacre. McNamara’s twenty-year-old son, Craig, who opposed the war, called me and said that he had left a copy of the magazine in his father’s sitting room. He later found it in the fireplace. After McNamara left public life, he campaigned against nuclear arms and tried to win absolution for his role in the Vietnam War. He acknowledged in a 1995 memoir, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” that the war had been a “disaster,” but he rarely expressed regrets about the damage that was done to the Vietnamese people and to American soldiers like Paul Meadlo. “I’m very proud of my accomplishments, and I’m very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things I’ve made errors,” he told the filmmaker Errol Morris in “The Fog of War,” a documentary released in 2003.

Declassified documents from McNamara’s years in the Pentagon reveal that McNamara repeatedly expressed skepticism about the war in his private reports to President Johnson. But he never articulated any doubt or pessimism in public. Craig McNamara told me that on his deathbed his father “said he felt that God had abandoned him.” The tragedy was not only his.

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Notes

[1] An earlier version of this article misstated the organization for which Neil Sheehan was a reporter.

[2] Doubt has been cast on Palazzo’s account of his military service.

Featured image: Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the My Lai Museum, was eleven at the time of the massacre. His mother and four siblings died. “We forgive, but we do not forget,” he said.Photograph by Katie Orlinsky

History one day may explain that the US was its own worst enemy — along with being responsible for unparalleled harm to most people at home and abroad worldwide.

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Both China and the US are rivals, not partners, risking a clash of civilizations that could rupture the relationship or something worse — possible military confrontation by accident or design as the bilateral breach grows wider.

The latest shoe to drop came Tuesday. Trump’s FCC banned US companies from using its $8.3 billion Universal Service Fund to purchase equipment or technical services from Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE.

A statement by FCC chairman Ajit Pai said the following:

“Based on the overwhelming weight of evidence (sic),” the agency declared both companies and affiliated operations “national security risks to America’s communications networks – and to our 5G future (sic).”

US imports of their equipment and services were restricted or prohibited months earlier.

The same goes for obstructing their purchase of US high-tech parts and components from US companies without Washington’s approval.

Notably Huawei is leading the race globally to roll out 5G technology — with multi-trillion dollar market potential despite the serious risk to human health and welfare.

The Trump regime falsely claims Huawei and ZTE equipment can spy on US government and private entities, no evidence presented backing the accusation.

Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei and company chairman Ken Hu earlier stressed that the company “firmly stands on the side of customers when it comes to cyber security and privacy.”

No evidence disputes him. The real issue is the race for global 5G leadership.

The US and China are competing for which country will be the leader in this technology that’ll define the next generation of mobile Internet use, online-connected devices infrastructure to smart cities, and driverless cars.

Mobile Internet requires agreed on global standards, 5G specifications agreed on in late 2018.

The race is on between Chinese, US, and European firms for who’ll emerge as the 5G leader.

Huawei is far and away in the lead, why the Trump regime and Congress are waging war on the firm and China by other means.

It’s all about aiming to prevent China and other nations from challenging US political, economic, financial, technological and military supremacy — hardball its chosen strategy.

US policy under both wings of the one-party state want corporate America to have a competitive advantage over foreign firms.

Sino/US tensions continue to escalate — despite no threat to US national security by any foreign governments.

The tougher Washington gets on China, Russia, Iran, and other nations free from its control, the greater the risk of confrontation.

China will surely retaliate in its own way at its own time in response to hostile US actions, including the latest ones.

Washington’s drive for unchallenged global hegemony poses an unparalleled threat to peace, stability, and humanity’s survival.

The lesson of two global wars were forgotten or never learned.

Is a third one inevitable — potentially with super-weapons making long ago ones used seem like toys by comparison?

Will humans be the first species ever to destroy itself — and all other life forms with it?

What’s inconceivable is ominously possible because of US rage to dominate other nations worldwide — no matter the risk to survival.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

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Russia doesn’t exploit the Taliban as a proxy for killing Americans, but seeks to nurture equally close relations with it along the lines of the ones that it presently enjoys with Pakistan. Moscow seems to believe that the group will likely return to power one of these days (ideally through peaceful means), so it makes sense to get on its good side. Once the war finally ends, Russia will require the Taliban’s goodwill to ensure the security of any prospective trade corridor with Pakistan (“RuPak”/”N-CPEC+”) for accessing the Afro-Asian (“Indian”) Ocean.

The New York Times’ latest fake news provocation alleging that Russia’s military-intelligence agency GRU solicited the Taliban (officially designated as “terrorists” by Moscow) to assassinate American soldiers in Afghanistan has brought a lot of attention to Moscow’s ties with the militant group. The truth, however, is just as intriguing than the fake news about them. On the surface, it’s surprising enough that Russia has diplomatic contacts with the Taliban considering that the latter grew out of the 1980s Mujahiddin that defeated the USSR.

Casual observers could be forgiven for thinking that Russia still holds a grudge against the group, but astute followers of the country’s foreign policy have no such excuse. Russia’s 21st-century grand strategy is to become the supreme “balancing” force in Eurasia, to which end it’s sought to prioritize relations with non-traditional partners. The most prominent examples include Germany, Turkey, “Israel“, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, China, and Japan, all of which it has a long history of problems with stemming from the Old Cold War.

Nevertheless, Russia’s new partnerships with all of the aforementioned prove that it’s willing to let bygones be bygones and won’t judge any of them based on the policies that they pursued at that time. Instead, it wants to turn the page and move past their troubled histories in order to chart a new era of multipolar cooperation together. The Taliban is but the latest addition to Russia’s “balancing” network, but since it’s no longer a state actor, Moscow’s ties with the group are understandably limited to the Afghan peace process.

Russia, like every party to the Afghan peace process, has some degree of diplomatic contacts with the group through its Doha office, but that’s the full extent of it. The previous fake news allegations about its material support to the Taliban, to say nothing of the present provocation by the New York Times, are intended to delegitimize its diplomacy by falsely portraying it as pursuing aggressive ends instead of the peaceful “balancing” ones that it truly aspires to advance.

Moscow hosted Taliban representatives on several occasions as part of the peace process that it sought to resurrect over the past year, and even Trump himself planned to meet with its leaders at Camp David last September before an unexpected attack in Afghanistan made that politically impossible on the eve of commemorating 9/11. Even so, his administration clinched a deal with the group a few months back in February, which proved that it has much closer contacts with the Taliban than Russia does.

It can only be speculated upon at this point pending official confirmation from the parties involved, but there’s plausible reason to believe that Pakistan facilitated Russia’s engagement with the Taliban. The fast-moving rapprochement between these Old Cold War-era rivals was initially driven by their shared assessment of security threats emanating from Afghanistan following ISIS’ arrival in that theater. Both countries realize that the Taliban is the most effective anti-ISIS force in the country, hence their pragmatic interests in working with it.

The Taliban is an independent militant group fighting for national liberation from foreign occupation, but it historically has very close ties to Pakistan, hence why Moscow could have realistically used Islamabad’s diplomatic services to proverbially break the ice between it and the Taliban. The trust-based relations that have been on full display between Russia and Pakistan as evidenced by their yearly anti-terrorist drills and joint participation in the multilateral Afghan peace process testify to just how close they’ve become in recent years.

Russia doesn’t exploit the Taliban as a proxy for killing Americans, but seeks to nurture equally close relations with it along the lines of the ones that it presently enjoys with Pakistan. Moscow seems to believe that the group will likely return to power one of these days (ideally through peaceful means), so it makes sense to get on its good side. Once the war finally ends, Russia will require the Taliban’s goodwill to ensure the security of any prospective trade corridor with Pakistan (“RuPak”/”N-CPEC+”) for accessing the Afro-Asian (“Indian”) Ocean.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

As a Canadian author associated with a Canadian geopolitical magazine and a book series rooted in the thesis that Canada is still under the dominance of the British Empire to this very day, the July 1st holiday known as “Canada Day” is a bit of a strange thing to celebrate.

As I have recently written in my articles The Missed Chance of 1867 and the Truth of the Alaska Purchase, July 1st, 1867 was the day the British North America Act was established creating for the first time a confederacy in the Americas devoted to “maintaining the interests of the British Empire” (as our founding constitution makes explicit).

As I outlined above, the motive for this 1867 confederation was driven by the British Empire’s burning fear of losing its valuable possessions in the Americas during the course of the Civil War when Britain’s “other confederacy” operation against Lincoln’s union was obviously going to fail. The fact that the U.S.-Russian alliance that saved the Union in 1863 and led into the sale of Alaska in 1867 would also usher in an inevitable growth of rail development through the Bering Strait connecting both civilizations was a prospect devoutly to be feared by the City of London.

As Lincoln’s ally and father of the trans continental railway Governor William Gilpin laid out in his 1890 book The Cosmopolitan Railway, a new paradigm of win-win cooperation governed by national credit driven by rail construction and industry would soon replace the archaic system of empire forever. This project had vast support from the leadership of both the USA and Russia- including Sergei Witte, and Czar Nicholas II.

Many republican movements were alive in Canada during the turbulent Civil War years and whether Britain’s American possession would become 1) independent, 2) join the USA or 3) remain an appendage of the Empire was still very much uncertain.

Pro-Lincoln forces were found among Canada’s elite in the form of the great protectionist and nation builder Isaac Buchanan (President of Canada’s 1863 Executive Council) and a group of statesmen affiliated with Louis Joseph Papineau’s Canadian Institutes known as Les Rouges. A leading member of Les Rouges was a young Lincoln-loving lawyer named Wilfrid Laurier who later became Prime Minister from 1896-1911 where he often behaved as an uncooperative thorn in British colonial designs.

Neither Buchanan nor Laurier approved of annexation but rather desired that Canada become an independent republic free of British intrigues and friend of a pro-development version of America then much more alive than the Anglo-American beast which has run roughshod over the world in recent decades.

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While Buchanan fought for a North American Zollverein in 1863 against his enemies on the Grit “left” (George Brown) and Tory “right” (Sir John A. Macdonald), his efforts were sabotaged with his 1864 ouster. When his time finally came, Laurier fought hard to revive this Buchanan’s Zollverein plan years later. Unlike the perversion of NAFTA, the name Zollverein was derived from Frederick List’s 19th century program to unify Germany into a modern nation state under American System measures of protection, national credit, rail, industrial and infrastructure growth (not dissimilar in principle to the Belt and Road Initiative today). In Germany this program was supported most ardently by Lincoln ally Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

Without understanding this dynamic, or the British operation to get rid of Bismarck in 1890, there is no way to properly understand Britain’s obsession with manufacturing what later became known as World Wars one or two.

Laurier’s Zollverein revival of 1911 (aka: ‘Reciprocity Treaty’) proposed to lower protective tariffs with the USA primarily on agriculture, but with the intention to electrify and industrialize Canada, a nation which Laurier saw as supporting 60 million people within two generations. With the collaboration of his close advisors, Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton and later William Lyon Mackenzie King, Laurier navigated a complex mine field of British intrigue active throughout the Canadian landscape.

The Round Table and Fabian Society

During this post-Civil War period, three American presidents, one French President and two pro-American Czars were assassinated as the British Empire re-organized itself under the guiding influence of two new think tanks: 1) The Fabian Society and 2) The Round Table Movement.

While one group shaped an agenda more attractive to the left, centered in the London School of Economics (LSE), the other group shaped a program more conservative right guided by a manifesto laid out by South African race patriot Cecil Rhodes in his 1877 will and centered in Oxford (the center of Rhodes Scholarship brainwashing activities for the next century).

In his will Rhodes stated:

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, and for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”

The common denominators for both organizations were: 1) world government under the control of the City of London and Britain’s global shadow empire, 2) the abolishment of independent nation states and 3) a “scientifically managed population control agenda” run by a technocratic elite. While an air of ‘left’ and ‘right’ were projected for public consumption, their operations were always interwoven as we shall see with the example of Lord Milner and Lord Mackinder.

Lords Milner and Mackinder Come to Canada

A follower of Rhodes’ vision and leader of the Round Table Group founded in 1902 was named Lord Alfred Milner who devoted himself whole heartedly to the task of creating a new church of the British Empire. In 1908, Milner persuaded Lord Halford Mackinder to quit his job as director of the London School of Economics to help resolve the problems of North America (all paid for by the Rhodes Trust).

During his dozens of public and private lectures across Canada, Mackinder laid out his clear understanding of the geopolitical importance of Canada within Britain’s ‘Great Game’ that few then or even now recognized sitting as it does as a wedge between Eurasian powers and the USA… and whose forces of attraction were still great. Czar Nicholas himself had only recently commissioned a study of the Bering Strait rail tunnel in 1906- supported by leading representatives of the Lincoln and Czar Alexander II in both countries.

Upon his return to Britain, Mackinder delivered a report to Westminster in 1911 where he laid out the terms of this threat in stark reality:

“Ultimately we have to look to the question of power…and power rests upon economic development. If Canada is drawn into the orbit of Washington, then this Empire loses its great opportunity. The dismemberment of the Empire will not be limited to Canada. Australia will avail herself of the power of the American fleet in the Pacific, and she will not long depend on a decaying and breaking Empire. Then with the resources of this island country you will be left to maintain your position in India… That constitutes, in my opinion, the significance of the present crisis. We are at the turning of the tide.”

A devout race Patriot just like Rhodes and Mackinder, Lord Milner commented on the existential threat of losing economic control of Canada to an America which had still not been re-conquered. Writing to his partner Leo Amery in 1909, he said:

“As between the three possibilities of the future: 1. Closer Imperial Union, 2. Union with the U.S. and 3. Independence, I believe definitely that No. 2 is the real danger. I do not think the Canadians themselves are aware of it… they are wonderfully immature in political reflection on the big issues, and hardly realise how powerful the influences are… On the other hand, I see little danger to ultimate imperial unity in Canadian ‘nationalism’. On the contrary I think the very same sentiment makes a great many especially of the younger Canadians vigorously, and even bumptuously , assertive of their independence, proud and boastful of the greatness and future of their country, and so forth, would lend themselves, tactfully handled, to an enthusiastic acceptance of Imperial unity on the basis of ‘partner-states’. This tendency is, therefore, in my opinion rather to be encouraged, not only as safeguard against ‘Americanization’, but as actually making, in the long run, for a Union of ‘all the Britains’.”

Milner recognized that Britain’s best choice was to cultivate a special type of British-approved “nationalism” among the “wonderfully immature” minds of the Canadian descendants of United Empire Loyalists of 1776 who were ignorant to the powerful influences of history. This insight shaped the next 110 years of Canadian cultural engineering to a tee.

A Very Canadian Coup and the League of Nations

Despite these efforts, Laurier was able to finalize his long-sought for Reciprocity Treaty with the USA in 1911- Milner’s worst fear. Before it could be acted upon however, an orchestrated overthrow of his government was affected by the Masonic Orange Order and Round Table Group with Laurier saying ominously a few years later:

“Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table”, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.”

By 1916, the Milner Group effected a coup in Britain itself, in order to shape the terms of the post-WWI order at Versailles where the League of Nations was created to usher in a post-Nation State world. This was just another way of saying “New British Empire”.

When American statesmen resisted this new imperial organization, Roundtable Groups were set up across Anglo-Saxon nations during the 1920s to coordinate a new more fascist solution to the “national problem”. This took the form of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA/Chatham House) created in 1919, with Canadian and Australian branches set up soon thereafter in the form of the Canadian and Australian Institutes for International Affairs. An American branch of this group was created in 1921 under the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and through these groups (later to be known as the Five Eyes), fascism was sold as a solution to the Great Depression triggered by the financial blowout of 1929.

As Georgetown professor Caroll Quigley pointed out in his posthumously published Anglo-American Establishment, the Canadian leader of this group was a protégé of Milner named Vincent Massey who later became the nation’s first Canadian born Governor General and led the operation to create a new synthetic Canadian Nationalism in which peaked with the 1949 Massey Royal Commission on the National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences(heavily tied into a CIA/MI6 operation called the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe).

The effect of Massey’s report relieved the Rockefeller Foundation of the financial burden of funding Canadian history, humanities, arts and music by creating the Canadian Council of the Arts which it held alongside the Carnegie Foundation since their founding in 1905 and 1913 respectively.

Fascism or Freedom?

During the dark years of the Great Depression, “fascism” was sold as the economic miracle solution to desperate citizens across the trans Atlantic, and a new, harsher effort was made for a global Bankers Dictatorship under the Bank of England and Bank of International Settlements (the Central bank of Central Banks). In Canada, the groundwork for a scientifically managed society was established by a team of 5 Rhodes Scholars and one Fabian Society agent who founded the League of Social Reconstruction (LSR) in 1931. This eugenics-loving organization dubbed itself “the Canadian Fabian Society” and its leading operatives were all tied to Canada’s Round Table (The Canadian Institute for International Affairs (CIIA)). Rhodes Scholar Escott Reid, whom I introduced in my last paper on the Rhodes Scholar Roots of NATO, was the CIIA’s first Permanent Secretary and one of the leading co-founders of the LSR.

This group set up a political party known as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation which changed its name to the National Democratic Party in 1961.

While in Quebec, the fascist Adrien Arcand was set up to take power, on the Federal level the Canadian Fabian Society believed it could take charge.

The trouble here was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

By rejecting fascism, FDR thwarted a bankers dictatorship and forced through a revolutionary reform in banking that put a leash on the financial elite while forcing public credit to serve the Common Good through vast New Deal megaprojects. In a certain way, the America of Abraham Lincoln was consciously revived under FDR’s leadership. These positive effects were felt strongly in Canada and soon the “Laurier Liberals” took back power and in 1937, nationalized the Bank of Canada (previously modelled on the private Central Bank of England in 1934) with Prime Minister Mackenzie King stating:

“Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.”

One can only imagine the stress felt by London as FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace moved to revive the Bering Strait connection alongside Russian Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942. Describing this plan in 1944, Wallace said:

“Siberia and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow… When Molotov was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

The Anti-Colonial Spirit Struggles in the Post-War Years

Even though Rhodes Scholars flooded into the upper echelons of power with the untimely deaths of Skelton and Lapointe in 1941, C.D. Howe had created a strong machine committed to building large scale projects and continued to grow Canada’s scientific and technological potential in the post-war years with the Bank of Canada serving as a tool for this growth. Some of these projects included the AVRO Arrow supersonic jet program, Canada’s Atomic Energy Agency, the Trans Canada Highway and St. Laurence Seaway.

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When the Liberals fell from power in 1957 and a new Conservative government took over, the commitment to scientific and technological progress continued with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s planned Northern Vision to industrialize the Arctic as a sort of “Canadian manifest destiny”. This commitment to anti-Malthusian “open system” economics did not please London.

When the Diefenbaker administration fell in 1963 (after a Roundtable-steered coup), the Liberal Party that returned to power under Lester B. Pearson was a far cry from that which had fallen in 1957. During the 1957-63 period, the Liberal Party was re-organized directly by Walter Lockhart Gordon, the British Foreign Office’s leading agent working through the CIIA.

Walter Gordon and the Rise of a New Nationalism

During this period, Gordon proved to become the most powerful man in the Liberal Party and the controller of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.

Gordon led the cleansing of C.D. Howe Liberals and transformed the Party from the pro-development machine it had been since WW II into a radically anti-American, anti-progress colony under British financial control[1].

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This was done by essentially infusing the Fabians dominant in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (aka: the Fabian Society of Canada) into a Liberal host body (the CCF’s open connection to Marxism made it a hard sell on post-war Canadians). The recommendations that Gordon had made in his 1957 Royal Commission Report on Economic Prospects for Canada, especially those regarding restricting American investments and ownership of Canadian industry, would now, for the most part, be fully supported by the new government. A new synthetic Canadian identity would be crafted around a stark fear of the USA (then suffering its own regime change takeover, via the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy), and a new Orwellian age of endless war, nuclear terror, sex, drugs, MK Ultra and COINTEL PRO became the new norm for a generation of young baby boomers.

In his memoirs, John Diefenbaker noted the irony of Walter Gordon’s radical promotion of Canadian nationalism on the one side, yet hatred of the policies pushed by Diefenbaker which would provide the actual means of attaining those nationalist ends which Gordon apparently desired:

“One of the ironies of recent Canadian history is that Walter Gordon, a man whom I only met for a few minutes when he delivered to me his Royal Commission Report, has stated that he decided to do everything in his power to make Mr. Pearson Prime Minister because he hated me and feared that my policies would wreck Canada!” [p. 202]

Lester B. Pearson, an Oxford Massey Scholar and former assistant in London to Vincent Massey, became the vehicle Gordon selected to oversee the transformation of the Liberal Party and the purging of pro-development Liberals who would resist the isolationist monetary policies of Gordon. One of those who would suffer the purge was Henry Erskine Kidd, General Secretary for the Liberal Party who referred to the process led by Gordon as “a palace revolution”[2].

With this Palace Revolution, the Liberals swept back to power but now governed by an anti-growth technocratic ethic premised around the “scientific management of society” and a new “British-approved” nationalism was created beginning with a shiny new maple leaf flag which unlike most national flags, featured symbolism that signified absolutely nothing whatsoever.

When Pearson found himself too easily influenced by “American-styled” growth initiatives, Gordon broke with him, and as Privy Council President, worked alongside Canadian Privy Councillor Maurice Strong (then head of the Canadian International Development Agency) to promote a more effective replacement in the form of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. In Elaine Dewar’s 1995 book Cloak of Green, Maurice Strong exposed how both he and Gordon were on the selection committee in Mont Blanc that chose Fabian Society asset Pierre Trudeau as a new rising star of the reformed Liberal Party.

Another co-founder of this new Nationalism whose name is worth mentioning included a Canadian Rhodes Scholar named George Grant (a descendant of , who as I wrote in my George Grant’s Delphic Subversion of Canadian Nationalism, was little more than a Straussian follower of Aldous Huxley who drooled over a Canadian-modelled world government. Upon returning from Oxford, Grant was hired as a researcher on Massey’s 1949 Royal Commission.

Grant’s grandfather George Parkin was Milner’s inspiration as a lecturer at Oxford and co-founder of the Roundtable group in 1902.

Canada’s Future: Colonial Tool or New Silk Road?

As part of his 1908 Canada tour that led into the creation of the synthetic “new nationalism” outlined above, Halford Mackinder made a jarring forecast:

“We may picture to ourselves that Canada will not merely be an important part of the British Empire, but the very centre of that empire. Those who ask if Canada is to be loyal to the empire are forgetful of the fact, which I believe Canadians are beginning to realize, that Canada is probably to be the centre of the Empire.”

For those who want to raise a glass to Canada on July 1st, I’d recommend that in lieu of painting ridiculous maple leaves on your face, we instead celebrate those figures in Canada’s history that fought to correct the error of 1776- when Quebec failed to accept Benjamin Franklin’s offer to become a 14th member of the revolution. Instead of worshiping Maple Leaves and hockey, I suggest we take the time to raise a glass to the lives of those great statesmen like Louis-Joseph Papineau, Isaac Buchanan, Wilfrid Laurier, O.D. Skelton, C.D. Howe, W.A.C. Bennett, John Diefenbaker and Daniel Johnson Sr, who sacrificed their comfort, reputations and sometimes even their lives to bring Canada even just a few steps closer to attaining true independence of the British Empire.

As the spirit of Lincoln, Alexander II, FDR and Sun Yat-sen is revived in today’s Belt and Road Initiative and broader Multipolar Alliance led by Russia and China, Canada will again be forced to confront an existential choice: Will we make the right one?

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This article was originally published on The Saker Blog.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation 

All images in this article are from The Saker Blog

On this day in 1920, the first High Commissioner for Palestine Herbert Samuel, was handed the administration of the country by the British government and signed a receipt saying “one Palestine, complete”

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On this day in 1920, the first High Commissioner for Palestine, 1st Viscount Samuel, Herbert Samuel, was handed the administration of the country by the British government and signed a receipt acknowledging that he had received “one Palestine, complete”. It was still another three years before the Mandate for Palestine granted to Britain by the League of Nations came into effect.

What: Receipt of “one Palestine, complete”

Where: Palestine

When: 30 June 1920

Who was Herbert Samuel?

Herbert Samuel.jpg

The Liberal politician was the first nominally-practising Jew to serve as a cabinet minister and lead a major political party in Britain. Though not a member of the World Zionist Organisation himself, while Liberal Home Secretary in 1914 Samuel obtained the organisation’s latest publications. Not long after, he found himself campaigning for a Jewish national home in Palestine and “co-operating closely”’, as he wrote in his memoirs, with Zionist leaders to further their cause.

With the outbreak of World War One, Samuel’s involvement with Zionism grew exponentially. In 1915, he proposed the idea of establishing a British protectorate over Palestine after the war and argued for a homeland in the region for the Jews, who had waited for “over eighteen hundred years” to return [sic] to Palestine, a land to which their connection, he said, was “almost as ancient as history itself”. Palestine at the time formed part of the Ottoman Empire, with a majority Muslim indigenous population, having been under Muslim rule for centuries.

“Let a Jewish centre be established in Palestine,” Samuel urged in a cabinet memorandum that he drafted. “Let it achieve, as it may well achieve, some measure of spiritual and intellectual greatness, and insensibly the character of the individual Jew, wherever he might be, would be raised. The sordid associations which have attached to the Jewish name would be, to some degree at least, sloughed off, and the value of the Jews as an element in the civilisation of the European peoples would be enhanced.”

Samuel’s ideas increased the British government’s pro-Zionist orientation and paved the way for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British Foreign Secretary declared the government’s support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

What happened?

The Ottomans entered World War One in November 1914 on the side of the Central Powers, and the Ottoman Empire was dissolved in 1921 after their defeat. A mandate for the administration of the territories of Palestine was assigned to Britain by the League of Nations and came into effect on 29 September 1923.

Embroidered panel displaying a receipt by the first High Commissioner to the Palestine Mandate acknowledging he had received ‘one Palestine, complete’. [Courtesy of the Palestinian History Tapestry]

Embroidered panel displaying a receipt by the first High Commissioner to the Palestine Mandate acknowledging he had received ‘one Palestine, complete’. [Courtesy of the Palestinian History Tapestry]

In a series of letters exchanged during the war — known as the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence — the British government agreed to recognise and honour Arab independence after the war if the Arabs rose up against the Ottoman Empire. After the war, however, Britain and France divided up and occupied former Ottoman territory as agreed under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement and accepted the mandate system to govern Palestine. This was seen as a betrayal by the Arabs.

What happened next?

Viscount Samuel was appointed as the first High Commissioner for Palestine by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. On 30 June 1920, he signed a receipt (complete with “E&OE” – Errors and Omissions Excepted) addressed to him by the head of the British military administration in Palestine, Major General Sir Louis Bols, acknowledging that he had received “one Palestine, complete”. The receipt marked the handover of the land of Palestine from military to civilian administration.

In the eyes of Palestine’s indigenous population who were seeking their own independence and right of self-determination, Britain had handed over the territory to settler-colonial Zionists backed by Samuel, who governed the land until 1925. The people of Palestine had not been consulted about any of this.

According to Samuel in a speech that he delivered in Jerusalem in June 1921, the words of the Balfour Declaration,

“Mean that the Jews, a people who are scattered throughout the world, but whose hearts are always turned to Palestine, should be enabled to found here their home; and that some among them, within the limits which are fixed by the numbers and interests of the present population, should come to Palestine in order to help by their resources and efforts to develop the country to the advantage of all its inhabitants.”

Two months later, in a report reviewing his first year as High Commissioner, Samuel said that Zionists “sometimes forget or ignore the present inhabitants of Palestine… many of whom hold, and hold strongly, very different views.”

Britain’s policy of facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine with the stated goal of establishing a Jewish national home, and the disregard for the indigenous population and their national aspirations, resulted in the Great Revolt of 1936, a nationalist uprising by the Palestinians against the British administration, and Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine.

Britain decided to end its mandate in Palestine on 15 May 1948. David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organisation at the time and later the first Prime Minister of Israel, read the “Declaration of Independence” establishing the State of Israel one day before the mandate ended.

Zionist militias and terrorist gangs had already been committing atrocities against the people of Palestine and, indeed, the British authorities, leading to around 750,000 Palestinians being forced out of the nascent state. More than 400 Palestinian villages and towns were depopulated and destroyed; this figure now exceeds 530. This “ethnic cleansing” came to be known as the Palestinian Nakba, the Catastrophe. Despite its membership of the United Nations being conditional upon Israel allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and claiming their property, the first government in Tel Aviv passed a series of laws banning them from doing so. In the three years from May 1948 to the end of 1951, some 700,000 Jews settled in the new state.

Israel continues to ignore the legitimate right of return as established by UN Resolution 194 in 1948 and reaffirmed every year since. It was also mentioned specifically as an “inalienable right” by UN Resolution 3236 in 1974.

Less than two decades after the Nakba, in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the Six Day War and started constructing illegal settlements across the occupied Palestinian territories. Contrary to the Zionist narrative, Israel actually started hostilities by bombing and destroying the Egyptian Air Force on the ground.

Today, Israel continues to exercise military control over Palestinians in the occupied territories, and there are now an estimated 6.5 million refugees and their descendants.

100 years later

Marking 100 years since the handover of Palestine, the receipt signed by Herbert Samuel for “one Palestine, complete” has been included in a panel on the Palestinian History Tapestry, which tells the story of the indigenous people of Palestine through skilled, traditional Palestinian embroidery.

“The real lesson of the story of ‘one Palestine, complete’,” says Palestinian author and patron of the Tapestry project Dr Ghada Karmi, “is the light it throws on Zionism’s influence over the development of British policy, as early as 1920.”

Such influence continues to this day, arguably more than ever.

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Cameroon and Nigeria: The Risk of Breathing

July 1st, 2020 by J. B. Gerald

There is a long history of human rights violations by Cameroon’s government against its Anglophone people. Brutalized by war with Boko Haram the Cameroon military is now engaged in low intensity warfare against militant Anglophone separatists. On May 15, 2019 for instance, Cameroon’s military attacked Anglophone Separatist Bamenda, burning 70 dwellings and stores in retaliation for the killing of two government soldiers.(1) Under international pressure the Government is charging three of its military with the atrocity murder of 24 civilians in the Ngarbuh village massacre.(2) In the case of popular ‘pidgin’ language broadcaster Samuel Wazizi (Samuel Ajiekah Abuwe), arrested June 5th 2019 and tortured – accused of harboring separatist forces on his farm and advocating for their cause, the military has under pressure admitted that he died in custody August 17th 2019, ten months ago.(3) A recent article(4) notes a history of Cameroon’s reliance on Israel’s military and identifies Israelis as trainers of President Biya’s elite guard accused of atrocities. The U.S. has scaled back its training and arms supply due to reported military atrocities.

In separatist regions the people are at the mercy of separatist militias who refuse cooperation with the Government. Due to the separatist closing of Cameroon’s schools in the western Cameroon, 850,000 children aren’t receiving an education. In the region of Mamfe spiritualists initiate magic rituals to protect their communities from separatist informants and the violence. On May 10th separatists killed the mayor of Mamfe in southwest Cameroon.(5) Shortly after, the Chief of the Bakebe Telecentre was murdered.(6) After the mayor’s funeral 5 young people were massacred on the way home.(7) The attacks are reportedly accomplished by groups of heavily armed men in civilian clothes. In another area the Government’s chief of police was murdered in the marketplace.(8) A pastor and a nurse were found murdered.(9) In the northwest health care workers trying to prevent the spread of coronavirus are regularly attacked.(10) The victims are civilians considered cooperative with the government, and the police, and the military who attempt to reclaim separatist areas. Moderates are in danger. Among militants it’s unsafe to make peace.

A group of Nobel Laureates among others has called for a ceasefire in Cameroon so the coronavirus pandemic might be countered by the Government. The Separatist movement is composed of groups and factions who don’t always agree with each other. There’s doubt whether they’re able to make peace. And the Separatist cause which is many things at the same time is thriving beyond the borders of Cameroon, particularly in the domain of lawyers.

The longstanding simmering Anglophone Francophone conflict escalated sharply in 2016 when Anglophone lawyers struck for better legal rights. With the Francophone Government’s intransigence the movement became a larger strike and Government repression encouraged a portion of the Separatist movement to declare the Independence of Ambazonia in October 2017. Canadian NGOs concerned with human rights and the rights of lawyers have come to the defense of the Anglophone human rights lawyer, Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongo, one of the strike leaders, who advocates for separatist rights both at home and with the Anglophone diaspora abroad. As one of the initial striking barristers Mr. Nkongo was initially imprisoned on charges of treason but released through pressure from U.S. and Canadian NGOs and a professor from one of his old alma maters (Notre Dame). When he was recently fired from his position at the University of Buea – the only English speaking university in Cameroon, a center of Anglophone resistance – Canadian international lawyers, professors and educators wrote a letter to President Biya in English protesting that the firing was by government request.

Cameroon Barrister Charles Taku who has acted as a defense counsel at both the ICC and the African court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and has a penchant for quoting Justice Robert H. Jackson of the Nuremberg Trials (he has as well a Maryland Facebook page address), has called the Government’s treatment of Anglophone areas “a genocide”; although Cameroon hasn’t ratified the ICC Nigeria has and Cameroon’s deportations of refugees to Nigeria may have made it vulnerable to the Court.(11)

The New York City Bar’s Committee on African Affairs has sent the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee a letter and “Report by the African Affairs Committee,” supporting a very sound Senate Resolution #292(12) which concludes with a request for peace.(13) The Bar Committee report offers state of the art (and accurate) documentation in support of the Anglophone cause, and calls for sanctions against the Biya Government for its atrocities, though against non-government groups as well. Sanctions are suggested against foreign officials, “high-ranking military and government officials,” and the report asks they be held accountable not only for the military’s crimes against the Anglophones but against Boko Haram forces invading the north who are known for outrageous brutalities. The NYC Bar Committee also urges a UN fact finding investigation and the reform of Cameroon’s electoral process. This is very high powered expensive attention to a bush war and has been desperately needed in the defense of peoples in the eastern Congo where casualties have reached millions.

Cameroon is directly threatened by Boko Haram organizations and the jihadist Fulani tribesmen to the North. Across European made borders from the separatist claims is a Nigeria where a portion of the population is steadily but slowly being murdered to an extent that requires a genocide warning. The victims are usually Christian. The attacks are from Muslim extremists. Nearly 300,000 refugees from Nigeria currently seek asylum in Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

In Cameroon the Muslims and Christians are getting along, but when northern villages are raided by Boko Haram allied groups the targeted villages and victims are Christian. Anglophone human rights organizations consistently ignore the threat Boko Haram and Fulani interests present to Cameroon. So does Senate Resolution #292 and the well funded North American NGOs and Academic programs devoted to the prevention of genocide.

Why would Muslim extremists be killing Christians on one side of a European made border, while the two groups get along nicely on the other? To think tactically, Cameroon’s Anglophone separatists are opposing the same Cameroon military as the Muslim extremists from Nigeria and the north.

In the northeast of Nigeria there are several million internally displaced people. In the southeast of Nigeria there are about 58,000 refugees from Cameroon,(14) next to the Separatist declared “Ambazonia.”

So far this year 620 Christians in northern Nigeria have been killed by jihadist Fulani and Boko Haram related militants.(15) Throughout Nigeria which is nearly 50% Christian, since June 2015 four to five million Christians are estimated as displaced, 2000 churches have been destroyed.(16) The report by the Biafran human rights organization, International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, “Nigeria: a Killing Field of Defenseless Christians,”(17) finds about 12,000 Christians killed since the current government came to power in July of 2015. The largest percentage of deaths are by jihadist Fulani herdsmen who are permitted by government to carry AK-47s forbidden to citizens who aren’t in the military or security agencies. The country’s president is Fulani, and patron of the Nigerian cattle herders association. Christian casualties are also traced to Boko Haram, its ISIS affiliated Islamic State West Africa (ISWAP), and state security forces.(18) Recently Nigeria’s Anglican Archbishop of Jos, Benjamin Argak Kwashi, addressing the attacks on Christians said “This thing is systemic; it is planned; it is calculated.”(19)) A genocide warning for Nigeria’s Christians is ongoing.

This slow ethnic cleansing hasn’t reached the proportions of Nigeria’s actions against the mainly Christian Igbo peoples in the region adjacent to Cameroon’s Ambazonia, where the massacre of possibly 50,000 Igbo in 1966 was followed by Biafra’s attempt at Independence from 1967 until 1970. You may remember Biafra. The Igbo country was starved into submission by the Nigerian government with British support. One and a half million children starved to death. After the war the attempt at independence was used as an excuse to impoverish the Igbo people who make up the southern Christian portion of the country. A genocide warning for the Christian peoples of Nigeria should cover an overdue ongoing genocide warning for the Igbo peoples.

While Boko Haram was officially declared stopped in Nigeria about 2015, Boko Haram’s auxiliary, ISWAP has grown stronger with incursions into Cameroon, Tchad, and Niger. Norwegian Refugee Control notes 111,000 refugees from Nigeria who have fled to Cameroon; 490,000 people are displaced in Cameroon’s far north (in addition to the two million displaced across the border in Nigeria). NRC also notes that with the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the Central African Republic (a civil war between Christian and Muslim, initiated by a Muslim minority takeover of the CAR government), 270,000 refugees have found refuge on Cameroon’s eastern border.(20))

Due to valid grievances of neglect, dictatorial rule and discriminatory treatment by their government, portions of Cameroon’s Anglophone Separatist movement are committed to armed conflict. The choice of armed conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. It does nothing for the suffering of refugees hosted by Cameroon. It offers no protection to the northern villages under sporadic attack by Boko Haram organizations and herdsmen. To gain identity rights and self respect Separatism has set in motion an ethic where Africans kill Africans for the rights to assert their European language and cultural institutions, at a terrible expense to other Africans. It is so un-African that one looks for the point where the understandable yearning to breathe free was tripped into violence.

Biya government injustices toward the Anglophone community didn’t become unbearable suddenly. The ugliness of the Government response to dissent could be foreseen. It may help to review the little we know of Anglophone Separatist funding. Ambazonia adjacent to Anglophone Nigeria might expect a covert Nigerian supply of arms. Arms are available to the extremists who are murdering Nigeria’s Christians and occupying Igbo villages. Muhammadu Buhari, the Muslim President of Nigeria who years ago supported application of Sharia law for all Nigeria, is a thoroughly military man with his training in Africa, England, India, and from 1979 to 1980 at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania where through correspondence for another two years he received a masters degree in Strategic Studies. The War College’s alumni include others such as Paul Kagame and Norman Schwartzkof whose tactics have raised questions of genocide. Muhammadu Buhari’s domestic political base is the country’s predominantly Muslim north.

The Independence of Ambazonia was declared by the Cameroonian Sisiku Tabe, from within Nigeria, while teaching at the American University of Nigeria. Tabe is now in a Cameroon prison. Nigerians are not likely to be caught supplying the Ambazonian militants with arms which are regularly “stolen” from military facilities.

In a previous article(21)) Marshall Foncha was noted as chair of the Ambazonia Military Council, while he lives in the United States.(22)) Additionally, armed groups are allegedly funded by Lucas Ayaba Cho in Norway, Ebenezer Akwanga who leads the Southern Cameroons Defence Force from Maryland USA, Chris Anu – a Houston Texas pastor who leads a faction, and his brother who leads “The Red Dragons and Tigers” in-country.(23))

As the conflict in Cameroons unfolds the familiar mechanism of setting against each other groups with historical differences becomes more extreme and more usable to political interests. The newest African country, South Sudan with its non-African name and oil resources, found “independence” in 2011 with the substantial support of the United States. Now the ethnic conflict generated by destabilization has evolved into unending war. From this perspective, the genocide in Rwanda was the result of purposeful destabilization of groups which were historically at peace – to the service of foreign interests. Rwandan education was in French until U.S. supported Paul Kagame’s invasion from English speaking Uganda. After the genocide teaching was in English and French. Now the education is entirely in English.

With mounting international pressure on Cameroon’s President Biya to accommodate and respect the Anglophone minority, Cameroon Separatist refusal to negotiate peaceful improvements risks losing an entire people to brutal machinery and profiteers -which has become the standard result of destabilization, intervention and corporate acquisition. The genocide warning for Cameroon’s Anglophone population continues.

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J. B. Gerald writes on his blog site, Gerald and Maas Night’s Lantern, where this article was originally published.

Notes

1. “Cameroon: Bloodshed Escalates As World Turns Blind Eye,” Rosy Sadou, May 31, 2019, cajnews/AllAfrica.

2. “Cameroon: Three Soldiers Charged With Murder in Anglophone Village Massacre,” Radio France Internationale, June 11, 2020, AllAfrica.

3. “Cameroon: Journalist’s Death in Custody Shines Light On Cameroon’s War On Media and Sparks Protests,” Sumeya Gasa, June 10, 2020, AllAfrica.

4. “Making a Killing: Israel’s mercenaries in Cameroon,” Emmanuel Freudenthal & Youri Van der Weide, June 23, 2020, African Arguments.

5. “Cameroon: Human Rights Watch condemns killing of Mamfe Mayor,” May 12, 2020, JournalduCameroun.com.

6. “Cameroon: Another personality of SW region murdered by alleged Amba fighters,” May 11, 2020, JournalduCameroun.com.

7. “Outrage after five youth slaughtered in Cameroon’s restive Anglophone region,” June 11, 2020, JournalduCameroun.com.

8. “Cameroon:Ambazonia fighters kill gendarmerie commander in Njikwa,” June 5, 2020, JournalduCameroun.com.

9. “Cameroon: Pastor, nurse killed in fresh wave of violence in restive NW region,” March 27, 2019, JournalduCameroun.com.

10.”Cameroon: Rights Groups Condemn Attack on Aid Workers,” Moki Edwin Kindzeka, June 8, 2020, Voice of America.

11. “Chief Barrister Charles Taku speaks of the genocide in Southern Cameroons,” July 31, 2018, Cameroon Intelligence Report.

12. S.Res.292 – 116th Congress (2019-2020), July 30, 2019, U.S. Senate.

13. “Re. Support for Senate Resolution 292,” Committee on African Affairs, Feb. 27, 2020, New York City Bar.

14. “5 things you should know about the crises in Cameroon,” Itunu Kuku, June 11, 2020, Norwegian Refugee Council.

15. “New Report: More Than 600 Nigerian Christians Killed in 2020 ,” May 18, 2020, Catholic News Agency.

16. “Nigeria: a Killing Field of Defenseless Christians, a Special Report by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule of Law Intersociety, dedicated to victims of Islamic jihad in Nigeria,” March 8, 2020, https://www.africanewscircle.com/.

17. ibid..

18. ibid..

19. “Nigeria facing ‘systematic, planned, calculated’ genocide of Christians,” Charles Collins, June 29, 2020, Crux.

20. “5 things you should know about the crises in Cameroon,” Itunu Kuku, June 11, 2020, Norwegian Refugee Council.

21. “Genocide Warnings for Three African States,” J.B.Gerald, Sept. 17, 2019, nightslantern.ca.

22. “Cameroon’s Separatist Movement Is Going International,” Gareth Browne, May 13, 2019, Foreign Policy.

23. “The restive region taking teetering steps to statehood,” SCBC News, April 26, 2020, SCBC News The Voice of Ambazonia.

Featured image is from the author

Surprise, surprise, the European Commission (EC) had a “Roadmap on Vaccination” ready months before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

The Roadmap should lead to a “commission proposal for a common vaccination card / passport for EU citizens by 2022”.

Last updated during the third quarter of 2019, the 10-page document was followed, on September 12th, by a “global vaccination summit” jointly hosted by the EC and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Under the header “Ten Actions Towards Vaccination for All – Everyone should be able to benefit from the power of vaccination”, the summit manifesto laments that:

“Despite the availability of safe and effective vaccines, lack of access, vaccine shortages, misinformation, complacency towards disease risks, diminishing public confidence in the value of vaccines and disinvestments are harming vaccination rates worldwide.”

And with them, arguably, the pharmaceutical companies’ profits.

In July 2017, for example, Italy made 12 vaccinations compulsory for children. In the aftermath, the prices of these very vaccines went up by 62%: from an average price per dose of € 14.02 up to € 22,74.

The global vaccination market is currently worth USD 27 billion a year. According to WHO estimates, it will reach USD 100 billion by 2025.

Since the EC-WHO global vaccination summit also discussed a renewed immunization agenda for 2030, the big pharma’s shareholders need not worry for the long-term performance of their stock.

One ought really not to “harm vaccination rates worldwide”.

The manifesto of the global vaccination summit goes on to list 10 “lessons (…) and actions needed towards vaccination for all”.

Each “lesson” is a gem of what the Italian neo-Marxist philosopher Diego Fusaro calls “the therapeutic capitalism”.

The wording is peremptory and leaves no room for nuance and debate. Adjectives such as “all” “everyone” “indisputably” abound. Statements in the conditional mood are absent.

More than a cautious, scientifically inspired and open-to-doubt plan of action, the tone – “to protect everyone everywhere”, “to leave no one behind” – is unsuitably messianic.

What about those who do not want to be “protected” that way? In Germany alone, roughly 10% of the whole population, or 8 million people, are strongly against a Corona vaccination.

But let’s look at what we can learn, so to speak, from these “lessons”.

Lesson 1 begins with: “Promote global political leadership and commitment to vaccination” – this seems what we are witnessing now, with governments worldwide suggesting that masks and social distancing will remain in place until a vaccine for Corona-Sars2 is found.

And what about those politicians who are against vaccinations?

Will their voters be told, as the EU budget commissioner Gunther Oettinger (in)famously did with Italian Lega voters in 2018, that “markets will teach them to vote for the right thing?”.

Will a new pandemic break out to teach people to vote for the right thing?

Lesson 4, “Tackle the root-causes of vaccine hesitancy, increasing confidence in vaccination,” looks like the blueprint for a major propaganda campaign, one that foresees – we read on the EU Roadmap on Vaccinations – the “development of e-learning training modules targeting GPs and primary healthcare providers focused on improving skills to address hesitant populations and promote behavioral change”.

Lesson 5, “Harness the power of digital technologies, so as to strengthen the monitoring of the performance of vaccination programs”, raises, in times of tracing apps and electronic wristbands, legitimate concerns over the further encroachment of technology in our lives – and bodies.

Which digital technologies are we talking about? Maybe a subcutaneous chip, like the one recently patented with the satanic-sounding number 060606 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?

Lesson 9 is, for the non-mainstream journalist, and for freedom of speech in general, the most threatening [the bolded type is mine]:

“Empower healthcare professionals at all levels as well as the media, to provide effective, transparent and objective information to the public and fight false and misleading information, including by engaging with social media platformsand technological companies.”

There we go: the fight against so-called Fake News is back. More work for Facebook’s self-appointed “Facts-Checkers”.

Fake News is of course Orwellian Newspeak for any non-aligned information, no matter its contents, origins and verifiability.

Indeed, the global vaccination manifesto provides no definition for “objective information”, or for “false and misleading information”.

If vaccines are as safe as the EU and WHO claim without offering any evidence, why then did the U.S. government create, already in the 1980’s, a body called National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)?

To provide, we read in the VICP’s official website, “a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury petitions.”

Quite successfully, it would seem.

In the period between 10/01/1988 (when the VICP begun awarding damage compensation) and 06/01/2020 (last available data), the VICP has awarded a total of USD 4,385,672,580.43 in compensation.

This figure excludes the compensation resulting from actual legal action, notably class actions, against Big Pharma.

But, as the Italian documentary-maker Massimo Mazzucco explains, the U.S. authorities did not stop there to protect Big Pharma from legal action.

In 2010, a landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court quoted the U.S. Code Title 42 thus:

“The Act eliminates manufacturer liability for a vaccines unavoidable, adverse side effects.”

The same ruling further elaborates:

“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after Oct.1, 1988…

…if the injury or death resulted from side-effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings”

1988 was of course the year in which the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program begun awarding compensations to the victims of vaccine injury – sparing legal headaches to Big Pharma in the process.

As system biologist Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai points out, the impossibility to sue pharmaceutical companies over vaccines, combined with falling profits from drug sales, turned vaccines into Big Pharma’s new business model.

And now the EU and the Bill Gates-financed WHO go along with it.

“The government of the modern state,” Karl Marx famously wrote in his Communist Manifesto, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”.

Were Marx alive today, he might have concluded that governance by international organization is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the global elites.

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With tensions between the US and China at an all-time high, experts warn the two powers are closer to a military confrontation than ever before. A war with China should be unthinkable in Washington since the conflict could be catastrophic to the entire world as the threat of it erupting into a full-blown nuclear war is very real. But with a deteriorating trade relationship, tension over the Covid-19 pandemic, increased US Navy activity in the Pacific, new sanctions aimed at Chinese officials, and hostile rhetoric coming from the Trump administration, the unthinkable is becoming more and more likely.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced new sanctions on Friday aimed at “current and former” Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, accusing them of violating Hong Kong’s autonomy. Hong Kong has served as a stage for recent US meddling, with Washington openly supporting the protests that rocked the city since March 2019. The Trump administration accused Beijing of violating Hong Kong’s autonomy with a new national security law made for the city, a bill designed to quell protests.

Some Chinese officials justified passing the law by pointing to the foreign interference in the demonstrations – that interference included Congress hosting protest leaders and passing legislation to confront Beijing over the former British colony. China’s concern with foreign interference is clearly outlined in the national security bill, which includes “collusion with foreign and external forces” on a list of criminal offenses the bill aims to combat.

The Senate just passed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which would sanction “foreign individuals and entities that materially contribute to China’s failure to preserve Hong Kong’s autonomy.” The new legislation is the Senate’s response to the Hong Kong national security law. Congress is also keen on confronting China militarily, with lawmakers working out a plan to give the Pentagon funds to increase its footprint in the region, a plan dubbed the “Indo-Pacific Deterrence Initiative.” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has repeatedly identified China as the Pentagon’s number one priority.

President Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act into law on June 17th, a bill that will enable even more sanctions against Chinese officials over China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang province. The Trump administration published a document last week that listed 20 Chinese companies and accused them of being arms of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Although nothing in the document substantiated the claim, it opens the possibility of Washington taking actions against the companies listed, like sanctions, which have become a staple of the administration.

The telecommunications company Huawei was included in the list of companies allegedly run by the PLA. Huawei, a major player in 5G technologies, has been banned from the US. The Trump administration is working hard to prevent other countries from doing business with Huawei and continues to pressure its allies into not accepting the company’s 5G technology. The common accusation against Huawei is that its equipment could be used to spy on other countries, an accusation that rings hollow coming from the US, a country that can track cell phones all over the world, as revealed by the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

These latest economic provocations came after the US and China signed the Phase One trade deal in January. According to The Wall Street Journal, when Mike Pompeo met with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Hawaii on June 18th, Yang warned Washington’s recent meddling in Beijing’s affairs could jeopardize the trade deal. Yang listed Hong Kong and Taiwan as areas where the US meddles and expressed “strong dissatisfaction” with President Trump’s signing of the Uyghur Human Rights Act.

The increase in tensions between the US and China is due in large part to the Covid-19 pandemic. Top officials in the White House, including the president, have accused Beijing of a cover-up in the early days of the outbreak. In an interview with Fox News last week, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was asked if the phase one trade deal was over. Navarro responded, “it’s over,” his reasoning being the fact that the Chinses officials who signed the agreement in Washington on January 15th did not mention the pandemic. Navarro claims the White House first heard of the pandemic after the Chinese diplomats’ plane took off, although Covid-19 was already in the news days before.

Navarro quickly recanted his statement on the trade deal and said he was taken “wildly out of context” in the interview.

“I was simply speaking to the lack of trust we now have of the Chinese Communist Party after they lied about the origins of the China virus and foisted a pandemic upon the world,” Navarro said.

President Trump took to Twitter to ensure that the trade deal is still “fully intact.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, Navarro and former White House strategist Steve Bannon fought hard to push President Trump to put tariffs on Chinese goods, a battle they won. Bannon, a self-described ultra-hawk when it comes to China, has been crusading against the CCP since he left the White House. In a recent interview with Asia Times, when asked if Washington should pursue regime change in Beijing, Bannon said,

“I don’t think Asia can be free, until we’ve had regime change in Beijing. And I am an absolute advocate of that.”

Bannon denied rumors that he was joining the Trump campaign for 2020 but ensured many of his friends and colleagues will be on the president’s team.

“One hundred and twenty percent of my time right now is spent on taking down the Chinese Communist Party, with the Committee on the Present Danger,” Bannon said.

The Committee on Present Danger: China (CPD) is an incredibly hawkish think-tank started by Bannon and neoconservative Frank Gaffney in 2019.

On June 5th, the CPD published an essay titled “To the Americans Who Are on Their Knees,” which Gaffney and CPD chair Brian Kennedy called “the single most important call in a generation aimed at enabling our countrymen and women to recognize and respond appropriately to a present danger.” The essay addresses the protests that erupted across the US in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The author claims the American left leading the movement is the “catspaw” of foreign powers. “First, the police will be defunded; second, the Revolution will defund the US military; third, the Chinese and Russians will bomb and invade the country,” the essay reads.

This tirade could be dismissed as the ramblings of a crazed hawk, but a link to the essay remains in prominence on the CPD’s front page, and the think-tank’s message gets through to the White House. The group recently sent a letter to President Trump, praising him for releasing the list of 20 companies that are allegedly run by the PLA and gave the president advice on possible steps forward.

Some of the tamer rhetoric coming from the CPD and right-wing populists like Bannon resonates with many Americans. There are real concerns regarding US reliance on Chinese manufacturing, something that was exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic when the US faced shortages of personal protective equipment. The loss of American jobs to China is another talking point that gets through to people on the right and the left. There is a consensus among both groups that corporations sold out the American people when they exported manufacturing to China.

Despite the rhetoric, the fact that the US and China are each other’s largest trading partners has its benefits. This fact is enough to discourage officials on both sides from turning this Cold War into a hot one. But as trade relations sour, and President Trump openly considers completely “decoupling” from China, the risk of a shooting war is much higher.

The prophetic Justin Raimondo put it best in a March 2008 column titled, “Why They Hate China.” Justin wrote:

“If goods don’t cross borders, then armies soon will – a historical truism noted by many before me, and with good reason. Let it be a warning to all those anti-free trade, antiwar types of the Right as well as the Left – you’ll soon be jumping on the War Party’s bandwagon when it comes China’s turn to play the role of global bogeyman. The way things are going, that day may come soon enough.”

Justin’s words are something to reflect on while the US and China are careening towards war and people on the left and the right continue to demonize Beijing. While there are real concerns to be had with China’s human rights abuses, US intervention will undoubtedly make the situation worse. And hawks like Steve Bannon disguise their neocon hopes of regime-change in a country of 1.4 billion people as populist rhetoric to fool Americans into consenting to this new Cold War. Washington has a history of stumbling into catastrophe in East Asia. From Manila to Pyongyang, US adventurism in the region has left millions dead in its wake, a war with China will kill millions more — a potential catastrophe that must be avoided.

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Dave DeCamp is assistant editor at Antiwar.com and a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY, focusing on US foreign policy and wars. He is on Twitter at @decampdave.

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (OCS), founded in 2001 by the Shanghai Five (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) and to which Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan were later added would be the ALBA and Iran countries. Hard core of resistance to world hegemony of the United States and Great Britain, so the avowed objective of the United States would be to dynamite said organization, having Baluchistan and Kashmir as scenarios for their destabilizing operations.

Baluchistan

China would be building an extensive port network, which would include ports, bases and observation stations in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Burma and of which the strategic port in Pakistan, Gwadar, (the “gorge” of the Persian Gulf), 72 kilometers away, would be a paradigm. from the border with Iran and about 400 kilometers from the most important oil transportation corridor and very close to the strategic Strait of Hormuz. The port was built and financed by China and is operated by the state-owned company China Overseas Port Holding Company (COPHC), since the region around the port of Gwadar contains two thirds of the world’s oil reserves and 30 percent passes through it. of the world’s oil and 80 percent of that received by China and is on the shortest route to Asia (Silk Road). However, Pakistan’s rapprochement with China would have accelerated the Pentagon’s doctrine of achieving the balkanization of Pakistan and its weakening as a state with Baluchistan as the insurgency’s field of operations.

Thus, the US announced the suppression of military aid to Pakistan in the amount of $ 300 million while promoting the independence movement in the province of Balochistan where the strategic port of Gwadar is located with the avowed objective of making the star project unfeasible. China, the “Belt and Silk Road Initiative” and later the CIA will resort to the endemic Kashmir dispute that will be a new local episode between a Pakistan allied with China and an India supported by Russia, with the aggravating circumstance of having both nuclear ballistic missile countries.

 

Kashmir

Kashmir would be the perfect paradigm for the implementation of Brzezinski’s theory of “constructive chaos” in the region, a concept that would be based on the maxim attributed to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar “divide et impera”, to achieve the establishment of a field of instability and violence (balkanization) and create chaos that would spread from Lebanon, Palestine and Syria to Iraq and from Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan, Kashmir and Anatolia (Asia Minor).

Kashmir would have become an explosive cocktail by combining ingredients as unstable as the Hindu-Muslim religious dispute, the territorial dispute and the icing on the cake of Kashmiri independence fighters supported by ex-jihadist fighters from Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, traditionally oppressed by an Indian Army that it would have about 500,000 soldiers deployed in Kashmir (1 soldier for every 9 inhabitants) and the nationalist government of Modi would have revoked the special status of Kashmir, which in practice results in the sine die detention of local Kashmir politicians and the strict control of Internet service.

On the other hand, in 1962 a confrontation broke out between India and China over the Chinese disagreement with the border line established in 1914 (McMahon Line), after which China gained control of the Aksai Chin plateau in addition to the Siachen Glacier, (territories which India continues to claim as its own.) China aspires to store the water from the sources of rivers such as the Brahmaputra to supply Chinese cities in the east of the country, which would have set off alarms in the Modi government, which fears a notable reduction in the flow of available drinking water so it does not They rule out bombing Chinese hydraulic installations and the recent armed incident in which several Indian soldiers were killed would have increased tension between the two countries.

This circumstance will be used by the United States to destabilize the border shared by both countries known as the Current Control Line (LAC), since an Indo-Pakistani armed confrontation would represent the first Russia-China military pulse in the form of a restricted nuclear collision. to the Indian-Pakistani geographical area.

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William L. Laurence earned the nickname “Atomic Bill” several times over. He was a Pulitzer-winning New York Times science reporter who became embedded with the Manhattan Project and followed its creation of the first atomic bombs at several sites around the United States. As the first use of the new weapon against Japan neared, seventy-five summers ago, he wrote several lengthy articles glorifying the Bomb and the men who made it, which were published, with overwhelming impact, by his newspaper (and others across the country) starting on August 7, 1945.

Then, on August 9, he observed the atomic bombing of Nagasaki from one of the support planes, another unique experience. Later he wrote about that for the Times – again, an account that required government clearance. It expressed wonderment and pride in the death-dealing device, without concern for the tens of thousands of civilians who died below. As always, Laurence provided colorful depictions of the bomb’s blast and visual effects with little focus on its startling radiation dangers.

Less well-known: Laurence continued his role as chief bomb cheerleader weeks after the Nagasaki bomb exploded.

To that point, U.S. officials had downplayed Japanese casualties in the two atomic cities and largely pooh-poohed Japanese “propaganda” claims on the lingering effects of radiation exposure and accounts of thousands perishing from some new “plague.”  A US general, Thomas Farrell, had toured the ruins in Hiroshima and wrongly claimed Japanese reports of at least 100,000 killed there were wildly inflated – and that only a handful died due to radiation effects.

It was the beginning of the decades-long official suppression of key evidence and falsifications, including the sabotaging – by President Truman and the military – of the first movie drama on the bomb, from MGM, the subject of my new book The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Image on the right: William L. Laurence and General Leslie Groves

On September 9, 1945, Laurence toured the Trinity test site, in New Mexico, where the United States tested its first atomic weapon on July 16, with General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The top-secret area finally had been opened to journalists.

Two weeks earlier, President Truman’s secretary, Charles G. Ross, had sent a memo to the War Department urging the military to recruit a group of reporters to explore the test site.

“This might be a good thing to do in view of continuing propaganda from Japan,” Ross wrote.

Now General Groves, who believed the reports of radiation disease from Japan were a “hoax,” was personally escorting some of the newsmen near ground zero. His driver, a young soldier named Patrick Stout, spent several minutes in the crater of the blast and was photographed, smiling.

Laurence’s account of this visit (delayed three days until September 12  due to a censorship review) disclosed quite frankly why he and thirty other journalists had been invited: to “give lie to” Japanese “propaganda” that ” radiations were responsible for deaths even after” the Hiroshima attack, as he wrote.   He quoted General Groves calling any deaths by radiation in Japan as “very small.” (In truth, the total was probably 20,000 or more in the two bombed cities.)

General Groves had expressly asked the reporters to assist him in this effort, and they did not disappoint him. (He was also in the process of securing script approval on that MGM movie about the bomb.) Geiger counters showed that surface radiation, after nearly two months, had “dwindled to a minute quantity, safe for continuous human habitation,” Laurence asserted. He did introduce one bit of contrary information: the reporters had been advised to wear canvas overshoes to protect against radiation burns.

But Laurence was keeping a lot to himself. Embedded with the Manhattan Project for months, he was the only reporter who knew about the fallout scare surrounding the Trinity test: scientists in jeeps chasing a radioactive cloud, Geiger counters clicking off the scale, a mule that became paralyzed. Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.   In his report he repeatedly used the word “propaganda” to describe Japan’s claims, the debunking of reported symptoms of radiation disease, the explicit claim that the bomb had to be dropped to end the war.

The press tour, in fact, had “an oddly reassuring effect,” the New York Times observed in an editorial. Still, a scientist informed the young soldier, Patrick Stout, who stood in the crater during the press tour, that he had been exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity. Twenty-two years later Stout became ill and was diagnosed with leukemia. The military, apparently acknowledging radiation as the cause, granted him “service-connected” disability compensation. Stout died in 1969.

W.L. Laurence would win another Pulitzer for his Bomb-related reporting in 1945.

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including most recently The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall (Crown) and The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

It is sometimes difficult to comprehend the savagery of the Israeli police state. There may be two reasons for this: 1) because the actions of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and illegal settlers are so extreme and violent as to stagger the imagination, and 2) because their barbaric actions have become so commonplace.

But the murder of Eyad Hallaq, a 32-year-old autistic man, shot to death at point-blank range while lying immobilized from a shot to the leg, with his caregiver begging for his life, is the latest shocking savagery in a long line of crimes against humanity committed by Israelis.

Mr. Hallaq lived with his parents who devoted their life to his care. He had walked every morning for six years to a vocational training program at the El Quds center in Jerusalem. Israeli police had seen him regularly during that time. Yet on this fateful day, May 30, 2020, Israeli police shouted ‘Terrorist’ at him, then shot him in the leg. Moments later, terrified and helpless, with his caregiver screaming that he was disabled, he was executed.

The caregiver, Warda Abu-Hadid, devastated and horrified by the cruel scene she had just witnessed and had been unable to prevent, was then taken to a police facility, strip-searched for a weapon which she didn’t have, and questioned for hours. Witnesses to Mr. Hallaq’s murder corroborated her testimony that she told the Israeli assassins that he was disabled, but to no avail.

Can one expect any justice for Mr. Hallaq? Based on historical evidence, it is highly unlikely.

In 2016, Abdul Fatah al-Shari was shot and badly injured by Israeli soldiers. As he lay on the ground, completely immobilized, another soldier, 19-year-old Elor Azaria, approached him, pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger, killing him instantly. This horrendous crime was captured on video. Yet Azaria, hailed as a hero among the Israel community, was only sentenced to eighteen months in prison, a sentence later reduced to fourteen months; he was paroled after nine months.

In 2015, Israel passed a law that states the penalty for throwing rocks at moving cars can be up to twenty years in prison. Palestinians living under occupation in Jerusalem and the West Bank have no weapons, although Israelis are allowed to carry any and all weapons they want. So, Palestinians use what they have to oppose the occupation, and that is generally rocks.

Consider that a Palestinian teenager can spend as much as twenty years in prison for throwing a rock at a car, while an Israeli teen can spend nine months in prison for the cold-blooded murder of a Palestinian, a murder captured on video and widely seen.

There are some people who take great umbrage at the suggestion that Israel is an apartheid regime. Israel has roads on which Palestinians can’t drive; there are numerous, arbitrarily-manned checkpoints that Palestinians must pass through within Palestine. These are not checkpoints that border Palestine and Israel: these are checkpoints that Palestinians must cross to move from one part of Palestine to another. And laws, such as the one mentioned above, all demonstrate the clear fact that Israel is a brutal, racist, apartheid regime.

Anyone one with any degree of feeling mourns the tragic death of Mr. Hallaq; his blood cries out for justice, justice that will not be satisfied. The United States government officials proclaim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, using their narrow and twisted view that if a nation votes, it is democratic, and that Israel will investigate any such crimes as the killing of Mr. Hallaq. That is similar to a belief that the fox can be relied on to assure that any raid of the henhouse will be impartially investigated.

The bizarre and erratic U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing for further injustices by Israel by encouraging the annexation of large areas of the West Bank. This, apparently, is to please his equally bizarre evangelical base, the members of which seem to believe that God is a real estate agent who has sold Palestine to Europeans and Americans of Jewish descent. This annexation, which would violate international law and has been condemned my even most of Israel’s allies, will be just the latest in a long series of crimes committed by the Israeli occupation forces.

Mr. Hallaq’s grieving family cannot expect justice; the loss of their treasured son and brother, and his savage murder, will be felt until they die. Ms. Abu-Hadid will spend the rest of her life haunted by the scene of unspeakable brutality that she witnessed and tried to prevent, knowing that the perpetrators will experience no consequences from their actions.

The savage murder of Mr. Hallaq at the hands of so-called law-enforcement personnel occurred five days after the savage murder in the U.S. of George Floyd, also by so-called law-enforcement officers. But Mr. Floyd’s death made international headlines and sparked worldwide demonstrations against racism and police brutality. It is possible that his death may bring some change in U.S. policies on justice and race.

Why, then, did the media basically ignore Mr. Hallaq’s murder? Two innocent men were murdered by government officials: the name of one is now known globally, but the survivors of the other are left to grieve alone.

The forthcoming U.S. election does not bode well for any significant change in U.S. policy towards Palestine. Democratic candidate Joe Biden is a long time ally of Israel who has stated that he will neither move the U.S. embassy back to Tel Aviv, nor withhold any U.S. foreign aid to Israel. One can imagine that Israeli polices would change overnight if the U.S. withheld the $4 billion it gives to that racist regime annually. But no, powerful pro-Israel lobbies which finance the campaigns of U.S. politicians must not be displeased; human rights and international law are not considered when the risk of reduced campaign contributions exists.

It is long past time for the global community to put human rights and international law above power and political expedience. People around the world are protesting the racism and police brutality that are endemic in U.S. society; they must expand their efforts to protect the people of Palestine. Black Lives Matter and Palestinian organizations have the same goal: by joining forces at this critical time, the effectiveness of both will increase. It must happen now; more killing and oppression must be prevented.

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This article was originally published on Peace Data.

Robert Fantina is an activist and journalist, working for peace and social justice. A U.S. citizen, he moved to Canada shortly after the 2004 presidential election, and now holds dual citizenship. He serves on the boards of Canadians for Palestinian Rights, and Canadians for Justice in Kashmir, and is the former Canadian Coordinator of World Beyond War. He has written the books Empire, Racism and Genocide: A  History of U.S. Foreign Policy and Essays on Palestine. 

Featured image: A mural depicting the martyr Iyad Al Hallaq on the apartheid wall in the city of Bethlehem. Iyad is a young autistic Palestinian who was killed by the Israeli police in Jerusalem. (Source: Seka Hamed / Flickr)

July 1 is celebrated by many Canadians as Canada Day. Originally it was called Dominion Day to commemorate the establishment of the Dominion of Canada. But not every inhabitant of “Canada” will be celebrating. On that day, the Indigenous activist organization, Idle No More, is calling for “3 hours of Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence!”

Resurgence indeed.

Back in 2014, Gord Hill, Kwakwaka’wakw author of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (see review), when questioned about Idle No More, said:

Flowing from [Idle No More’s] reformist strategy was an emphasis on “peaceful” protests, pacifism, and the “flash mob” round dances in malls. So while we took one step forward with the INM mobilizations, we also took two steps back in that pacifism and “peaceful rallies” was widely promoted on a national level. This is in contrast to decades of grassroots Indigenous resistance that has used militant actions such as blockades and even armed resistance. I’m glad that the INM mobilization occurred, but I’m also glad that it had a relatively short life and hopefully those that were mobilized will learn and grow from this experience.

Black Lives Matter, whose activist credentials have also been called into question, has reemerged as a prominent protest movement following the videotaped police killing of George Floyd.

The United States has a deplorable history of genocide.[1] But Canada is no exemplar as far as the killing of Blacks and other ethnic groups. Genocide is also a historical fact in Canada. Racism is deeply embedded in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), especially against Indigenous peoples who also suffer high levels of incarceration. [2]

A Small Sampling of Recent Cases of RCMP Racism against First Nations

The above were just two video samples. With the ubiquity of cell phones, there is an abundance of police criminality captured on video available for viewing online.

Thus Idle No More will oppose Canada Day:

We will not celebrate stolen Indigenous land and stolen Indigenous lives. Instead we will gather to honour all of the lives lost to the Canadian state – Indigenous lives, Black lives, Migrant lives, Women and Trans and 2Spirit lives – all of the relatives that we have lost. We will use our voices for MMIWG2S, child welfare, birth alerts, forced sterilization, police/RCMP brutality and all of the injustices we face. We will honour our connections to each other and to the water, land, and sky.

Idle No More asks its supporters,

Find or organize a #CancelCanadaDay action in your community and join Idle No More for a live #CancelCanadaDay broadcast on July 1.

Source: author

Celebrating Genocide

Would anyone knowingly eat, dance, sing, play, and watch fireworks in celebration of the day that First Nation’s peoples were denationalized through genocide? Because that is the flip side of the colonialism. In order for the nation of Canada to come into being, on “home and native land” (as the lyrics of the Canadian anthem state), the other nations had to be subsumed, assimilated, and otherwise disappeared. [3]

And this process of dispossession is not confined to the past. Witness the Canadian state wielding the RCMP to thwart the unrelenting resistance of the Wet’suwet’en traditional chiefs and people opposed to a pipeline being constructed through their unceded territory.

Today’s email from the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade f the Wet’suwet’en read: “Cancel Canada Day Rally tomorrow in Vancouver and many other cities!”

“canada day” is a day of celebration for some. For those who know the history of so-called “canada”, it’s obvious this is not a day of celebration. It’s a day that represents an ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.

“canada” was stolen at gunpoint. Any and all treaties made, have been broken. The colonial system has been imposed through attempts of forced assimilation.

Suppression and oppression of Indigenous peoples came through land theft enforced by the #NorthwestMountedPolice (today known as the BC RCMP), weaponized starvation, #ResidentialSchools (the “kill the Indian in the child” method), medical testing without anaesthesia, beatings when people spoke our languages, the #SixtiesScoop, forced or coerced sterilization, inaction in regards to Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls #MMIW #MMIWG, mass incarceration, criminalization of culture #PotlatchBan, criminalization of #LandDefenders & #WaterProtectors, ongoing displacement to reserves, boil water advisories, enabled & encourage racially motivated violence (by elected officials), and no justice when attacks occur… and so much more.

These are not part of a “proud past”. These are acts of genocide that continue today – via forced assimilation & colonization only through which the state can exist. These are the reasons we need to #CancelCanadaDay

The hurtful, racist symbols and nomenclature of colonialism need to be dealt with promptly. The argument about preserving history does not supersede the commission of genocide and other crimes against humanity. It is past time that people of conscience join the resistance against colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and racism.

It is well understood that for people to overthrow the systems of oppression that solidarity is a must, and a sustained solidarity it must be.

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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen.

Note

  1. See, e.g., Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Review.
  2. See Kim Petersen, “Land and Jail,” The Dominion, Part I, Part II, and Part III.
  3. See Bruce Clark, Ongoing Genocide caused by Judicial Suppression of the “Existing” Aboriginal Rights (2018). Review; Bruce Clark, Justice in Paradise (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); Splitting the Sky with She Keeps the Door, The Autobiography of Dacajeweiah, Splitting the Sky, John Boncore Hill: From Attica to Gustafsen Lake (John Pasquale Boncore, 2001). Tamara Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State (Clarity Press, 2018). Review; Tom Swanky, The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations Resistance(Burnaby, BC: Dragon Heart Enterprises, 2012). Review; James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (University of Regina Press, 2013); Robert Davis and Mark Zannis, The Genocide Machine in Canada (Black Rose, 1973).
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The Houthis have captured over 400km2 from Saudi-backed forces in their recent advance on the administrative border of the Yemeni provinces of al-Bayda and Marib. According to Brigadier General Sare’e, a spokesman for the Armed Forces loyal to the Houthi government, the most intense clashes took place in the Soq Qaniya area, where Houthi forces captured a large number of weapons, ammunition, vehicles and artillery pieces left behind by fighters loyal to the Saudi-backed government of Mansur Hadi.

It also should be noted that the Houthis are once again actively using military equipment and improvised multiple rocket launching systems. This indicates that they have been able to overcome the lack of spare parts, fuel and ammunition caused by the maritime, air and land blockade on the country.

Saudi sources claim that Saudi-led coalition airstrikes and Hadi forces inflicted heavy losses on the Houthis in the recent clashes. According to reports, at least 50 Houthi fighters were neutralized in the recent series of Saudi airstrikes in central and northern Yemen. However, Saudi sources provide little visual evidence to confirm these claims. In turn, their own defeats are carefully documented by the Houthi media wing.

The developments on the ground in the previous months demonstrated that the Houthis are unable to reach the Marib provincial capital in the near future because they lack resources to do this.

At the same time, they appear to be more than capable of developing offensives and making gains on other fronts. Currently, Houthi forces have been advancing near the Affar crossroad, which is located on the road to Al Bayda city. If the situation develops in the same direction and the Saudi-led coalition continues to crumble under the pressure of internal contradictions, Houthi forces will have an opportunity to besiege the city and take control of it. After this, they will once again turn their focus to Marib.

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“Not Blood Diamonds”

Diamonds represent ‘forever’—so begins the brand statement of any generic diamond company leaning in on the mythological status of deep time and the alchemical compression of history. From encrusting royal jewelry, to the consumer rite of passage for engaged couples, to adorning the regalia of the entertainment industry, diamonds are at their zenith as ornamental objects, serving as the brand of an elite class.  Reacting to decades of pressures, mining companies and politicians are suddenly keen on telling us that we must treat diamonds with responsibility. But what does that responsibility look like, and whose calls for responsibility are we not hearing? 

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As one of the largest diamond producers alongside Russia and Canada, Botswana has been the site of some of the most significant rare diamond discoveries in the world. Individual diamonds are given a kind of celebrity status, like the prized “Okavango Blue” diamond that was discovered in 2019 by Botswana’s Okavango Diamond Company.

Prospecting continues to yield new deposits and discoveries, while companies from Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada have been among the top investors to cash in on Botswana’s riches. Canadian investment in Botswana’s mining industry was reported in 2017 to be over $376 million. Apart from diamonds, Botswana is known for its gold, and copper and nickel deposits — all of which are known to produce environmentally devastating pollution through open-pit mining. The private investment arm of the British multinational Barclays Bank, for example, operates the Khoemacau copper mine in the renowned Kalahari copper belt through Cupric Canyon Capital.

But it is diamonds after all that have made Botswana a destination for what are known as “junior” Canadian firms — recently formed mining companies seeking to cash in on the kimberlite pipes off of which heavyweights like De Beers have been profiting for decades since Botswana’s independence.

Pangolin (“our target is wealth!”) is one such Canadian mining company based out of Toronto and Francistown, Botswana, near the border with Zimbabwe. In March 2019, Pangolin was looking at acquiring a promising kimberlite pipe in Orapa in northeastern Botswana, where De Beers operates the largest diamond mine in the world. On May 7, 2020, Pangolin Diamonds also reported signs of a diamond deposit from its exploration of the Kweneng Project, which is located about 20 km north of Botswana’s capital, Gaborone.

But one of the most active Canadian companies in Botswana’s mining industry is Vancouver-based Lucara Diamond Corp. Established in 2004, Lucara has conducted exploration projects across Botswana, as well as Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Cameroon. Lucara’s current operations in Botswana include the Karowe mine in central Botswana’s village of Letlhakane, and a kimberlite pipe in Orapa. Over the years, Lucara has also led a swathe of acquisitions, including that of Boteti Mining (a joint venture between African Diamonds plc and De Beers) in 2018, and, prior to that, African Diamonds itself in 2010 — the latter of which was co-founded by Pangolin’s own CEO Leon Daniels.

Lucara Forecasts Increased Revenue in 2020 | Diamond sale ...

Lucara’s discoveries have included some of the largest and most expensive diamonds in the world, and many of them have come from Karowe. This mine is described on the company’s website as “one of the world’s foremost producers of large, high-quality, Type IIA diamonds in excess of 10.8 carats”. Among the enormous diamonds found at Karowe is the second-largest diamond in history at 1,111 carats, known as Lesedi La Rona, which was discovered in 2015 and later sold for $53 million (USD). For comparison, the average size of a single diamond is 1.08-1.2 carats. Obviously encouraged by its discoveries of enormous diamonds at Karowe, Lucara announced in November 2019 that it would be expanding the Karowe mine.

In February 2020, Lucara found an unbroken 549-carat white diamond that the company claimed to be “of exceptional purity”. But most notably, Lucara discovered a rare rough diamond in April 2019 at Karowe. The 1,758 carat diamond — named Sewelô (meaning “rare find” in Setswana) — was acquired in January 2020 by the luxury French fashion house Louis Vuitton. After its acquisition of the diamond, Louis Vuitton signed a deal with Antwerp’s HB Company for cutting.

Sewelô is now destined to become jewelry for the fashion house, which recently started pushing into the jewelry industry after its parent company LVMH — which is owned by French billionaire Bernard Arnault — acquired the jewelry company Tiffany & Co. in November 2019. This acquisition of the jewelry company only further adds to the LVMH conglomerate’s colossal annual revenues from luxury goods, which reached $59 billion (USD) in 2019 alone.

The Sewelô diamond was depicted in Louis Vuitton ads completely removed from its context: a raw, earthly but alien-looking material, held by an airbrushed, porcelain white hand that is unmarked by a single speck of manual labour. Of course this is how the diamond industry wants to be seen. Diamond advertising has often relied on the tantalizing imagery of glaciers and water, evoking pristine purity, indulgence, sensuality — associations with anything but the hard labour of the miners, and the dirt out of which the gems are ripped. So long as there isn’t wholesale slaughter of workers that’s acknowledged by the entire world, it’s a black and white, ‘clean’ and ‘ethical’ business.

While the price paid by Louis Vuitton to Lucara for the Sewelô diamond has not been revealed by either company, it is estimated to be worth up to $19.5 million (USD). According to Lucara’s CEO Eira Thomas, Louis Vuitton and HB will apparently give 5% of profits from the jewelry collection to Lucara’s own “community-based initiatives” in Botswana. The Canadian mining company pats itself on the back for contributing “direct benefits to our local communities of interest”, but nowhere is there critique that Botswana’s communities should be at the charity of luxury French fashion houses and Canadian mining companies.

Like his predecessors, Botswana’s current president Mokgweetsi Masisi has depicted the diamond industry as good for the country’s business, stating at a 2019 jewelry conference in Las Vegas that that it “propels [Botswana] toward a knowledge economy”.

The diamond industry makes up at least 80% of the country’s exports and, according to the World Bank, is the “single largest contributor to government revenues”. This dependency of the government on diamond revenues, and further financing of Botswana’s education and road construction by private mining companies like Lucara, has created an over-dependency on the mining sector. Masisi has also referred to how the diamond industry has been crucial to combatting the HIV and AIDS crisis in Botswana.

This central role of the diamond industry in funding Botswana’s government creates a dangerous over-dependency on the whims of private, foreign companies.

This over-dependency also carries potentially devastating risks, as seen with the coronavirus crisis currently taking a toll on the country’s economy. Botswana’s Finance Minister Thapelo Matsheka projected this past April that the country’s GDP would drop by 13%, attributed to the inability for diamond buyers to visit Botswana to make their purchases and for mining companies to continue their operations at full capacity. This strain is already visible on the private sector, as by May 8, Lucara had lost $3.2 million for the first three months of the year, compared with a net income of $7.4 million from the same period last year.

Image on the right: Louis Vuitton diamond padlock pendant (Source: Pinterest)

Louis Vuitton Diamond Padlock Pendant | The House of Beccaria ...

Yet with so many extraordinary mining discoveries in Botswana that bring unfathomable benefits to multi-billion dollar French luxury brands, Botswana must still contend with rampant income inequality — despite years of questionable claims that poverty levels are decreasing. As Louis Vuitton’s designers indulge their elite customers with the promise of luxury watches, rings, and other embellishments, Botswana’s unemployment rate hovers around 20 percent, and access to education in rural areas has been shown to do little to affect poverty rates.

With such dependence on the diamond industry, employment opportunities are ultimately shaped by luxury companies and markets far outside of Botswana.

Prior to Masisi’s re-election in October 2019, this inequity proved to be a campaign issue for Masisi’s opposition Duma Boko, leader of the socialist coalition known as the Umbrella for Democratic Change. While Masisi’s Democratic Party has faced critique for increasing authoritarianism — including from his predecessor Ian Kharma — Boko and the UDC have called for more fair economic agreement with De Beers, as Botswanans find that few outside of the elite class actually benefit from the country’s diamond industry.

De Beers, which is owned by London-based mining conglomerate Anglo American plc., is a giant in Botwana’s diamond industry, having established itself in the country shortly after Botswana achieved independence in 1966. The company owns four diamond mines in the country and operates through a joint venture with Botswana’s government called Debswana. This includes the Jwaneng mine, which is considered the world’s richest diamond mine.

While the bulk of De Beers’ global diamond production is in Botswana, the company is notorious for being historically embroiled in the blood diamond industry — and continues to function like a cartel, dominating the diamond mining industry and determining global prices. The company built its wealth on the back of South African apartheid, and was known to profit from smuggling rings run by warlords, fueling conflicts fought by child soldiers. Since the public controversy and diamond boycotts of the early 2000s, De Beers has continued to make statements about having a plan to deal with conflict diamonds on the global market — but current industry regulations are found to be ineffective in protecting human rights, and Belgian authorities have continued to find blood diamonds passing through Antwerp’s lucrative diamond market through companies and bank accounts registered in Switzerland.

In comparison to Botswana’s neighbouring countries South Africa and Zimbabwe, Botswana’s diamond mining industry is represented by its government as “clean”, with no acknowledged human rights abuses. The Marange diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe (state-owned by Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company), for example, are still plagued with human rights abuses.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported in 2018 that Marange’s private security was involved in human rights violations including beating women, injuring children, and setting dogs loose to maul on “unauthorized” miners. The diamond mine itself has used forced labour and torture. HRW found that the Kimberley Process, intended to control export and import of rough diamonds, was ineffective in stemming the rampant human rights abuses in the Marange diamond fields. Such reports only conclude that the violence around Zimbabwe’s mining industry has continued, largely unchanged for over a decade since the 2008 massacre of over 200 people (“illegal miners”) at the Marange diamond fields. Of course, there was little concern about labeling and murdering locals as “illegal miners”, and multinational conglomerates as rightfully entitled to Zimbabwe’s diamonds.

With clever branding, mining conglomerates have tried to detract from critiques of the industry, and of their neo-colonial expansion. De Beers’ parent company Anglo American plc goes by the motto “Re-imagining mining to improve peoples’ lives”. Lucara flaunts its participation in initiatives like the “Responsible Jewellery Council”. But while participation in such initiatives is supposed to present a “responsible” agenda, it certainly does not excuse these companies from the systemic exploitation within the industry. Human Rights Watch has also reported that despite supposed efforts by jewelry companies, like Chopard, on tracking chain of custody for jewels, these companies do not have sufficient transparency measures to identify countries of origin on individual diamonds, and routinely provide inadequate reporting regarding their supply chains.

Dividing the Land

Despite the mining lobby’s depiction of Botswana as the paragon among African states driven by the mining industry, no transnational mining company acts within an idyllic vacuum. Diamond mining companies operating in Botswana have taken advantage of the country’s reputation for not having a ‘blood diamond’ industry, to detract from the companies’ implication in displacement within Botswana’s landlocked borders.

Colonially-imposed borders across Africa have long stoked civil conflict, resulting in what has been described as partitioned ethnicities. State borders cross the traditional territories of communities that are now separated between states, and whose relationship to their territory differs from colonial concepts of nations.

Such was the case, for example, with a slim slice of land known as Caprivi that is located along Botswana’s northern border. Namibians have long fled regional instability and military conflict between Namibian and secessionist forces who did not consider Caprivi to be part of Namibia — the modern form of the state having been heavily shaped by early 20th century German occupation and genocide of ethnic groups, which included the San. Botswana, in turn, faced scrutiny in September 2019 for evicting 709 Namibian refugees from the Dukwi Refugee Camp.

But within state borders, the hand of the mining industry has left a heavy imprint in the division of land, and continues to push the tide of displacement.

The Khoisan are traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherers whose ancestral homelands cross national borders between Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. They are among the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa, and even the term used to refer to them, “Khoisan”, is a modern invention that functions like an umbrella term to encompass multiple tribes.

As such, the displacement of the Khoisan by state borders, as well as internal territorial divisions within southern African countries, cannot be seen as isolated from the displacement being experienced in Botswana’s neighbouring countries. Not only are the Khoisan experiencing state-imposed restrictions to movement, but their lifestyles and worldviews — so incompatible with the ravages of neoliberalism and the values of Big Capital — are threatened with disappearance by encroaching industry and so-called “development”.

Survival International, a London-based NGO campaigning on behalf of the Khoisan, has described Botswana’s diamonds as “conflict diamonds”, attributing much internal displacement to diamond mining. The Botswana Centre for Human Rights, Dishwanelo, has campaigned against the forced relocation of Khoisan into cordoned camps where they cannot practice their lifestyles.

Game parks and nature reserves have also imposed their own restrictions. The Khoisan are often not permitted to hunt in their traditional lands because some are designated as ‘nature reserves’.

The Khoisan’s ancestral living and hunting grounds in Botswana are situated at the heart of what is now the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. A court case from 2002 details how land was forcibly taken from the Khoisan, and restrictions were placed on their entry into the Kalahari reserve. According to Survival International, Botswana’s government — which was under the Democratic Party’s President Ian Khama at the time — chose to ignore a landmark court ruling from 2006 that deemed the Khoisan’s eviction to be illegal, and granted legal right to return.

Years after the ruling, however, Botswana’s government continued with its evictions from the Kalahari, and did everything possible to prevent access to the Khoisan’s lands, including pouring cement over water boreholes, sweeping arrests, and a restrictive permit system for Khoisan to visit family. Khoisan peoples are not protected with Indigenous status, as Botswana considers all citizens to be Indigenous, without special status.

For societies that take wildlife and natural habitats for granted, ‘natural parks’ are a feel-good solution to environmental preservation.

They trace the boundaries of the Great Outdoors, of distant and untouchable nature that is supposedly unspoiled by human consumption (totally unaffected by the ranging contamination of waterbeds, soil, or air). They offer an ‘alternative’ to unbridled urban sprawl and, with much pageantry, are used by mining companies and developers as  a compensatory form of land-reclamation after their depleted mines have laid waste to their surroundings. But natural parks are ultimately a product of the neoliberal imagination that sees all land as proprietary, and perpetuates the delusion that humanity, and the consequences of urban and industrial development, are all somehow separate from the rest of the planet and its ‘natural resources’.

Through Debswana, the mining company jointly-owned with Botswana’s government, De Beers established the Jwana Game Park on its former mining licensing areas. The park is adjacent to the Jwaneng diamond mine, which has produced the bulk of Botswana’s diamonds since 1982. De Beers has also partnered with the Botswana government to extend the Orapa Game Park, which conveniently includes an airport.

But none of these actions flaunting the creation or expansion of nature reserves account for the Khoisan peoples, who are Indigenous to the lands but who are not protected by Botswana’s government from foreign corporations deciding what to do with their land, and where they should live.

Restrictions on the Khoisan’s movement are regularly enforced with the threat of violence. Paramilitary police patrol the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, and laws have notoriously permitted the execution of people found in violation of hunting restrictions. These “shoot-to-kill” permits are one aspect of the militarization of park patrols, in no small part arising out of a legitimate concern for criminal networks of ivory and horn poaching.

Nevertheless, simply for hunting for food on their own land, the Khoisan have experienced beating by paramilitary police, under the pretext of this “anti-poaching patrol”. Survival International has also reported on police violence against the Khoisan for many years, and numerous illegal arrests have also been documented. In some cases, Khoisan have also been shot from helicopters.

This threat of state violence faced by the Khoisan is important in the context of Canada’s trade with Botswana.

Canada’s Global Affairs notably loosened a number of regulations around military exports by adding Botswana to the Automatic Firearms Country Control List (AFCCL) in 2001. This allowed for the export of CF-5 aircraft to Botswana (a NATO ally) and has more recently allowed the export of assault rifles manufactured in Canada. In 2018, Canada approved the export of 250 assault rifles (Colt Canada C7) to Botswana, a deal worth almost $2.3 million (CAD). The transfers are described by Global Affairs as intended “for police or military” use.

Far from acting as an arms control measure for accountability, the AFCCL more cynically acts like a floodgate, making it easier to approve previously restricted arms trade.

And this opportunism in arming Botswana with Canadian-made assault rifles should raise concern around whether Canada is enabling police violence and abuse of militarized patrols against Khoisan in their own lands.

The fate of the Khoisan should resonate deeply with the colonial displacement and the impacts of mining industries experienced by Indigenous peoples across Canada. The displacement of the Khoisan recalls the struggle of First Nations against the Diavik mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The Diavik mine contains the largest deposit of diamonds found in Canada. The mine has been contested since 1999 by the Akaitcho Dene and Tlicho First Nations for violating self-governance and resource rights on Indigenous-owned land, and dumping kimberlite and other tailings into nearby water.

Disputes such as these are often superficially addressed with forms of ‘self-governance’, charitably bestowed onto the original inhabitants of a land by a more powerful occupying government. South Africa, for example, introduced the Bantustan Bills which have received criticism for imposing a “coercive” system on traditional governments, providing traditional leaders with “impunity to profit from, and keep secret, lucrative mining and other investment deals on people’s land”. In Botswana too, the government has been selective about recognizing tribal governance outside of eight Tswana tribes — and even then, state-recognized leaders are often appointed by higher levels of government, rather than elected by the people.

Representation is often given to unelected chiefs who hold the power to sell land rights to mining companies. Certainly this symbolic ‘self-governance’ resonates with the contentious legacy of Canada’s selective recognition of First Nations governance in Canada, where state-recognized representatives run against traditional governance that may be opposed to mining infrastructure, by cozying up to state and industry officials, voting in favour of extractive projects, and pocketing their dividends.

Similarly, the use of nature reserves to displace Indigenous peoples from their homelands is a common colonial practice — as Canadians would be due to remember in the Ipperwash Crisis of September 1995, when the Canadian government sought to evict Stoney Point Ojibwe from their homes in what Ontario designated as the Ipperwash Provincial Park.

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Much like the South African Cullinan diamond (or “The Great Star of Africa”) — found in 1905, the largest ever discovered — now sits in the Crown Jewels of the British royals, Botswana’s ‘not-blood-diamonds’ play a part in a transnational form of colonialism. State borders are shown to be arbitrary and permeable only for the right class of people. Mining executives move freely across oceans and continents, following the siren call of favourable investment conditions. Government officials build glass castles of economic futures that collapse at the puff of a pandemic. All the while, people who have called their trampled lands home for millennia are treated as a charity case by the mining companies that displaced them, and hounded and murdered by their governments. While Botswana’s diamond projects may not have the same reputation as those of its neighbours, the nature of their profits transcends state borders, and the price is a universal cost paid by all humanity.

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The article was originally published on The Sparkplug.

Lital Khaikin is an author and journalist based in Montréal, Canada. Her journalism has been published in Canadian Dimension, Toward Freedom, Warscapes, Briarpatch, and the Media Co-op. She has also published poetry and prose in literary publications like 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, Tripwire, and Black Sun Lit’s “Vestiges” journal, among others.

Defending Australia: The Deputy Sheriff Spending Spree

July 1st, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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June 30th, 2020 by The Global Research Team

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Was Canada defeated in its bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council because of Justin Trudeau’s effort to overthrow Venezuela’s government? Its intervention in the internal affairs of another sovereign country certainly didn’t help.

According to Royal Military College Professor Walter Dorn,

“I spoke with an ambassador in NYC who told me that yesterday she voted for Canada. She had also cast a ballot in the 2010 election, which Canada also lost. She said that Canada’s position on the Middle East (Israel) had changed, which was a positive factor for election, but that Canada’s work in the Lima Group caused Venezuela to lobby hard against Canada. Unfortunately (from her perspective and mine), Venezuela and its allies still hold sway in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM or G77).”

The only country’s diplomats — as far as I can tell — that publicly campaigned against Canada’s bid for a seat on the Security Council were Venezuelan. Prior to the vote Venezuela’s Vice-Minister of foreign relations for North America, Carlos Ron, tweeted out his opposition:

With its deafening silence, Canada has de facto supported terrorists and mercenaries who recently plotted against Venezuela, threatening regional peace and security. The UNSC is entrusted with upholding the United Nations Charter and maintaining International Peace and Security: Canada does not meet that criteria.”

The post was re-tweeted by Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza, who has 1.6 million followers, and numerous Venezuelan diplomats around the world, including the Venezuelan ambassador to the UN. Joaquín Pérez Ayestarán added,

“Canada recognizes an unelected, self-proclaimed President in Venezuela, in complete disregard for the will of the voters. It also tries to isolate Venezuela diplomatically & supports sanctions that affect all Venezuelans. Is the Security Council the place for more non-diplomacy?”

After Canada lost its Security Council bid Ron noted,

“not surprised with UN Security Council election results today. A subservient foreign policy may win you Trump’s favor, but the peoples of the world expect an independent voice that will stand for diplomacy, respect for self-determination, and peace.”

He also tweeted an Ottawa Citizen article titled “Why Black and brown countries may have rejected Canada’s security council bid.”

For his part, UN ambassador Ayestarán tweeted,

“losing two consecutive elections to the Security Council of United Nations within a 10-years period is a clear message that you are not a reliable partner and that the international community has no confidence in you for entrusting questions related to international peace and security.”

Over the past couple of years the Trudeau government has openly sought to overthrow Venezuela’s government. In a bid to elicit “regime change”, Ottawa has worked to isolate Caracas, imposed illegal sanctions, took that government to the International Criminal Court, financed an often-unsavoury opposition and decided a marginal opposition politician was the legitimate president.

Canada’s interference in Venezuelan affairs violates the UN and OAS charters. It is also wildly hypocritical. In its bid to force the Maduro government to follow Canada’s (erroneous) interpretation of the Venezuelan constitution Ottawa is allied in the Lima Group with President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who openly defied the Honduran Constitution. Another of Canada’s Lima Group allies is Colombian President Ivan Duque who has a substantially worse human rights record.

Reflecting the interventionist climate in this country, some suggested Canada’s position towards Venezuela would actually help it secure a seat on the Security Council. A few weeks before the vote the National Post’s John Ivison penned a column titled “Trudeau’s trail of broken promises haunt his UN Security Council campaign” that noted

“but, Canada’s vigorous participation in the Lima Group, the multilateral group formed in response to the crisis in Venezuela, has won it good notices in Latin America.”

(The Lima Group was set up to bypass the Organization of American States, mostly Caribbean countries, refusal to interfere in Venezuela’s affairs.) A Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East factsheet regarding “Canada’s 2020 bid for a UN Security Council seat” echoed Ivison’s view. It claimed,

Canada also presents a positive image to Latin American states, likely reinforced by its leadership of the Lima Group in 2019 and by its promise to allocate $53 million to the Venezuelan migration crisis.”

While it is likely that Lima Group countries voted for Canada, a larger group of non-interventionist minded countries outside of that coalition didn’t. Venezuelan officials’ ability to influence Non-Aligned Movement and other countries would have been overwhelmingly based on their sympathy for the principle of non-intervention in other countries’ affairs and respect for the UN charter.

The Liberals’ policy towards Venezuela has blown up in its face. Maduro is still in power. Canada’s preferred Venezuelan politician, Juan Guaidó, is weaker today than at any point since he declared himself president a year and a half ago. And now Venezuela has undermined the Liberals’ effort to sit on the Security Council.

Will Canada’s defeat at the UN spark a change in its disastrous Venezuela policy?

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US policy toward China shifted over time from the 19th century’s “yellow peril” to today’s public enemy No. 1 — unrelated to any threat, none posed by its ruling authorities.

As the US declines, its grip on world leadership eroding, steadily going the way of all earlier empires because of its counterproductive policies, Ellen Brown earlier explained that its neoliberal model “met its match in China.”

The US lost its competitive edge to a superior economic system. Beijing maintained a high level of growth for decades — compared to US stagnation and decline.

Washington wants China and other countries it doesn’t control transformed into client states — Beijing well aware of its history and hostile strategy.

Its ruling authorities aren’t about to let their geopolitical/economic system fall into the US trap that made other nations subservient to Washington’s will.

US policymakers consider China an existential threat because of its rising prominence on the world stage — why it’s targeted by Washington, wanting its economic, industrial and technological development undermined.

It’s a prescription for unending US hostility toward the country over cooperative relations.

Last week, Trump’s national security advisor Robert O’Brien said

“(t)he days of American passivity and naivety regarding the People’s Republic of China (sic) are over.”

He slammed Beijing with a familiar laundry list of false accusations, including by comparing its ruling authorities to Stalin and Mao, adding:

Beijing’s “actions…threat(en) our very way of life (sic)…(President) Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor (sic).”

“Individuals do not have inherent value under” China’s system (sic).

“They exist to serve the state. The state does not exist to serve them (sic).”

Beijing’s “goal (is) to remake the world according to” its system (sic).

Its economic system is vastly superior to the predatory/exploitive US-led Western model.

Its rise on the world stage exposed US/Western flaws.

O’Brien’s remarks added fuel to the fire of undeclared US war on China by other means that risks turning hot by pushing things too far.

The Trump regime is dropping one shoe after another on China that’s all about wanting its development sabotaged.

Its government is responding to external threats in its own way at times of its choosing.

On Tuesday local time, Beijing’s National People’s Congress  Standing Committee (NPCSC) unanimously adopted the nation’s new national security law as expected.

The measure aims to counter months of US orchestrated violence, vandalism and chaos that rocked Hong Kong — led by 5th column elements.

It’s responding to prevent acts of treason, secession, sedition, and subversion against the state, what all governments prohibit.

It’s all about protecting China’s national security, US rage to dominate the country its greatest threat.

According to the South China Morning Post, the law in its entirety will be published by Xinhua at a later date.

It’s effective on July 1, the 23rd anniversary of the city’s handover from British colonial control to Chinese rule over its own territory.

Its formal adoption came a day after Beijing announced visa restrictions on US officials.

They’re in retaliation against their imposition on Chinese nationals by the Trump regime, along with its unacceptable actions toward Hong Kong, “egregiously” interfering in Beijing’s internal affairs — a statement by Foreign Ministry spokesan Zhao Lijian, adding:

“No matter how Hong Kong separatists squawk, and no matter what kind of pressure is exerted by external anti-China forces, their scheme to obstruct the passage of the Hong Kong national security law will never succeed…”

Pompeo responded, saying the US is “retool(ing) its relationship with” Hong Kong.

The Trump regime revoked its special status as expected, banning or restricting US exports of defense related equipment and other sensitive technologies to the city.

Pompeo falsely claimed the move is “to protect US national security” that’s been free from external threats throughout the post-WW II period.

He warned of further Trump regime actions against China.

An undeclared US Cold War exists against China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and other nations not willing to subordinate their sovereign rights to Washington’s interests.

For the second time this month, two US navy aircraft carrier groups are conducting provocative military exercises in the South China Sea near its waters.

If Chinese military vessels conducted similar exercises in the Gulf of Mexico or in international waters off the US East or West coast, Washington would likely consider them an act of war.

Yet the Pentagon time and again threatens other nations by conducting provocative military exercises near their borders — notably threatening China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

US hostility toward all nations it doesn’t control risks possible nuclear war if things are pushed too far against China, Russia or Iran.

Their ruling authorities seek peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other nations, hostility toward none.

Yet their good faith efforts are undermined by US rage to dominate other countries by whatever it takes to achieve its aims — including preemptive wars of aggression.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Featured image: President Donald J. Trump, joined by newly named White House National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien, disembarks Marine One Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019, prior to boarding Air Force One at Los Angeles International Airport for his flight to San Diego, Calif. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

French President Emmanuel Macron created a stir last November when he said that NATO is experiencing a “brain death.” This single comment created a flurry of reactions as Member States attempted to justify the existence of NATO. Macron’s comments must be taken seriously when we consider that France in 1959 withdrew its Mediterranean Fleet from NATO command and in 1966 the French military left NATO’s integrated military command and demanded all foreign NATO soldiers to leave France. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk attempted to guilt the highly independent French President Charles de Gaulle for his decision to kick out foreign soldiers by asking if “the bodies of American soldiers in France’s cemeteries” who died in the two world wars also had to leave.

It was the Anglo-American hegemony that de Gaulle resisted, and it can be argued that Macron is attempting to re-establish France’s independence after former French President Nicolas Sarkozy reintegrated France into NATO in 2009. A clear indicator that Macron is following in the steps of de Gaulle is when he furthered the former president’s famous phrase that Europe stretches “from Lisbon to the Urals” in Russia by saying Europe’s territory stretches all the way to Vladivostok near the Chinese and North Korean borders.

However, Macron’s stinging attacks against NATO did not end with that single comment from November 2019. Last week Macron said that the Franco-Turkish naval incident was “one of the most beautiful demonstrations that there is a brain death” of NATO. A Turkish warship harassed a French navy vessel participating in a NATO mission, prompting France’s defence ministry to say that

“this is an extremely aggressive act that is unacceptable by an ally against a NATO ship. We consider this an extremely grave matter. We cannot accept that an ally behaves this way, that it does this against a NATO ship, under NATO command, carrying out a NATO mission.”

NATO is certainly “brain dead” as it primarily exists to pressurize Russia despite the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly three decades ago. To justify its existence, it has gone on campaigns of aggression by destroying Yugoslavia and Libya, and supporting reactionary forces like jihadist groups in Syria. It is now strongly suggested that France wants to embark on an independent path, especially as a lack of comradery is found within the Alliance.

Turkey, leveraging its large military, geostrategic positioning on the crossroads of Europe and Asia, and controlling the Straits into the Black Sea, is attempting to balance its relations with NATO and Russia to pursue its own ambition to dominant the entire region, including the Eastern Mediterranean. Moscow wants to strengthen relations with Turkey knowing it will antagonize NATO, while NATO continues to tolerate Turkey’s unilateral and aggressive actions. NATO’s tolerance to Turkish aggression is so high that it is always silent on Turkey’s daily violations of Greek maritime and airspace, despite Greece being a fellow NATO member.

The Turkish aggression against France in the Mediterranean a few weeks ago was one that could not be ignored. As Greece is not as geostrategically important to NATO in comparison to Turkey, aggression against it is always ignored and tolerated by NATO. However, Turkish aggression against a nuclear power like France was never going to be sidelined and ignored. Ankara made a blunder thinking that the same aggression it does against Greece would be tolerated by France.

As Turkey is propping up and protecting the Muslim Brotherhood Government of National Accords based in the Libyan capital of Tripoli and their jihadist allies, France is backing its rival, the Libyan National Army. This has been another cause of division between France and Turkey, prompting Macron to say yesterday:

“I think this is a historic and criminal responsibility for someone who claims to be a member of NATO.”

He made the comments after holding talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, considered Turkey’s closest ally in Europe. He added that Turkey’s conduct in Libya is “unacceptable to us” and that Ankara needs to “urgently clarify” its stance.

Macron is not hiding his contempt for the Turkish government and NATO at all. He is also the only major Western leader that is open to friendly relations with Russia. France is now pushing for a “European Army” outside of NATO. As the Alliance continues to tolerate Turkey’s aggressive actions in the Mediterranean, this could push France further away from NATO, an interesting turn of events considering the past two years there were endless speculations that it was Turkey being pushed away from NATO over its acquisition of the Russian S-400 missile defense system.

NATO’s continued appeasement of Turkish aggression that even threatens Member States could be the very catalyst that will see France once again leave the Alliance. Although a Pew survey from February found that only 37% of Greeks were favorable towards NATO, the second lowest surveyed, the Greek political elite will continue to be subservient to NATO, counter to Greece’s own interests and defense concerns. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that Greece would leave NATO. The same survey found that only 49% of French people were favorable towards NATO, which surely has dropped even further after Macron’s most recent statements and Turkish actions against the French Navy. Effectively, as NATO continues to appease Turkish aggression against even fellow Member States, the Alliance is only pushing France out as Macron sets himself up to be the Charles de Gaulle of the 21st century.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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The imposition of the nationwide lockdowns required elite consensus. There’s no way that a project of that magnitude could have been carried out absent the nearly universal support of establishment elites and their lackeys in the political class. There must have also been a fairly-detailed media strategy that excluded the voices of lockdown opponents while– at the same time– promoting an extremely dubious theory of universal quarantine that had no basis in science, no historical precedent, and no chance of preventing the long-term spread of the infection. All of this suggests that the lockdowns were not a spontaneous overreaction to a fairly-mild virus that kills roughly 1 in 500 mainly-older and infirm victims, but a comprehensive and thoroughly-vetted plan to impose “shock therapy” on the US economy in order to achieve the long-term strategic ambitions of ruling class elites. As one sardonic official opined, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

It was clear from the beginning, that the lockdowns were going to have a catastrophic effect on the economy, and so they have. As of today, 30 million people have lost their jobs, tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses have been shuttered, second quarter GDP has plunged to an eye watering -45.5 percent (Atlanta Fed), and the economy has experienced its greatest shock in history. Even so, pundits in the mainstream media, remain steadfast in their opposition to lifting the lockdowns or modifying the medical martial law edicts that have been arbitrarily imposed by mainly-liberal governors across the country.

Why? Why would the so-called “experts throw their weight behind such a sketchy policy when they knew how much suffering it was going to cause for ordinary working people? And why has the media continued to attack countries like Sweden who merely settled on a more conventional approach instead of imposing a full-blown lockdown? Swedish leaders and epidemiologists were unaware that adopting their own policy would be seen as a sign of defiance by their global overlords, but it was. Elites have decided that there can be no challenge to their idiotic lockdown model which is why Sweden had to be punished, ridiculed, and dragged through the mud. The treatment of Sweden further underscores the fact that the lockdown policy (and the destruction of the US economy) was not a random and impulsive act, but one part of a broader plan to restructure the economy to better serve the interests of elites. That’s what’s really going on. The lockdowns are being used to “reset” the economy and impose a new social order.

But why would corporate mandarins agree to a plan that would shrink their earnings and eviscerate short-term profitability?

Why? Because of the the stock market, that’s why.

The recycling of earnings into financial assets has replaced product sales as the primary driver of profits. As you may have noticed, both the Fed and the US Treasury have taken unprecedented steps to ensure that stock prices will only go higher. To date, the Fed and Treasury have committed $8 trillion dollars to backstopping the weaker areas of the market in an effort to flood the market with liquidity. “Backstopping” is an innocuous-sounding term that analysts use to conceal what is really going on, which is, the Fed is “price fixing”, buying up trillions of dollars of corporate debt, ETF’s, MBS, and US Treasuries to keep prices artificially high in order to reward the investor class it secretly serves. This is why the corporations and Tech giants are not concerned about the vast devastation that has been inflicted on the economy.

They’ll still be raking hefty profits via the stock market while the real economy slips deeper into a long-term coma. Besides, when the lockdowns are finally lifted, these same corporations will see a surge of consolidation brought on by the destruction of so many Mom and Pop industries that couldn’t survive the downturn. No doubt, the expansion of America’s tenacious monopolies factored heavily into the calculation to blow up the economy. Meanwhile, the deepening slump will undoubtedly create a permanent underclass that will eagerly work for a pittance of what they earned before the crash. So, there you have it: Profitability, consolidation and cheap labor. Why wouldn’t corporate bosses love the idea of crashing the economy? It’s a win-win situation for them.

We should have seen this coming. It’s been clear since the Russiagate fiasco that elites had settled on a more aggressive form of social control via nonstop disinformation presented as headline news based on spurious accusations from anonymous sources, none of who were were ever identified, and none of whose claims could ever be verified. The media continued this “breathless” saturation campaign without pause and without the slightest hesitation even after its central claims were exposed as lies. If you are a liberal who watches the liberal cable channels or reads the New York Times, you might still be unaware that the central claim that the emails were stolen from the DNC by Russia (or anyone else for that matter) has not only been disproved, but also, that Mueller, Comey, Clapper etc knew the story was false way back in 2017. Let that sink in for a minute. They all knew it was a lie after the cyber security team (Crowdstrike) that inspected the DNC computers testified that there was no evidence that the emails had been “exfiltrated”. In other words, there was no proof the emails were stolen. There was no justification for the Mueller investigation because there was no evidence that the DNC emails had been hacked, downloaded or pilfered. The whole thing was a hoax from the get go.

There’s no way to overstate the importance these recent findings, in fact, our understanding of Russiagate must be applied to the lockdowns, the Black Lives Matter protests and other psychological operations still in the making. What’s critical to grasp is not simply that the allegations were based on false claims, (which they were) but that a large number of senior-level officials in law enforcement (FBI), intel agencies, media and the White House knew with absolute certainty that the claims were false (from 2017 and on) but continued to propagate fake stories, spy on members of the new administration and use whatever tools they had at their disposal to overthrow an elected president. The guilty parties in this ruse have never admitted their guilt nor have they changed their fictitious storyline which still routinely appears in the media to this day. What we can glean from this incident, is that there is a vast secret state operating within the government, media and the DNC, that does not accept our system of government, does not accept the results of elections and will lie, cheat and steal to achieve their nefarious objectives. . That’s the lesson of Russiagate that has to be applied to both the lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter protests. They are just the next phase of the ongoing war on the American people.

The lockdowns are an Americanized version of the “Shock Doctrine”, that is, the country has been thrust into a severe crisis that will result in the implementing of neoliberal economic policies such as privatization, deregulation and cuts to social services. Already many of the liberal governors have driven their states into bankruptcy ensuring that budgets will have to be slashed, more jobs will be lost, funding for education and vital infrastructure will shrink, and assistance to the poor and needy will be sharply reduced. Shutting down the US economy, will create a catastrophe unlike anything we have ever seen in the United States. US Treasuries will likely loose their risk-free status while the dollar’s as days as the “world’s reserve currency” are probably numbered. That “exorbitant privilege” is based on confidence, and confidence in US leadership is at its lowest point in history.

It’s not surprising that the Black Lives Matter protests took place at the same time as the lockdowns. The looting, rioting and desecration of statues provided the perfect one-two punch for those who see some tactical advantage in intensifying public anxiety by exacerbating racial tensions and splitting the country into two warring camps. Divide and conquer remains the modus operandi of imperialists everywhere. That same rule applies here. Here’s more background from an article at the Off-Guardian:

“It is no coincidence that another Soros funded activism group Black Lives Matter has diverted the spotlight away from the lockdown’s broader impact on the fundamental human rights of billions of people, using the reliable methods of divide and rule, to highlight the plight of specific strata’s of society, and not all.

It’s worth pointing out that BLM’s activity spikes every four years. Always prior to the elections in the US, as African Americans make up an important social segment of Democrat votes. The same Democrats who play both sides like any smart gambler would. The Clintons, for example, are investors into BLM”s partner, the anti-fascist ANTIFA. While Hilary Clinton’s mentor (and best friend) was former KKK leader Robert Byrd.

BLM is a massively hyped, TV-made, politicized event, that panders to the populist and escapist appetite of the people. Blinding them from their true call to arms in defense of the universal rights of everyone. Cashing in on the youths pent-up aggression …. And weaponising the tiger locked in a rattled cage for 3-months, and unleashed by puppet masters as the mob…

As a general rule of thumb, it is safe to assume that if a social movement has the backing of big industry, big philanthropy or big politics, then its ideals run contrary to citizen empowerment.” (“The Co-opting of Activism by the State“, Off-Guardian)

Black Lives Matter protests provide another significant diversion from the massive destruction of the US economy. This basic plan has been used effectively many times in the past, most notably in the year following the invasion of Iraq. Some readers will remember how Iraqis militants fought US occupation forces following the invasion in 2003. The escalating violence and rising death-toll created a public relations nightmare for the Bush team that finally settled on a plan for crushing the resistance by arming and training Shia death squads. But the Bushies wanted to confuse the public about what they were really up to, so they concocted a narrative about a “sectarian war” that was intended to divert attention from the attacks on American soldiers.

In order to make the narrative more believable, US intel agents devised a plan to blow up the Shia’s most sacred religious site, the Golden Dome Mosque of Samarra, and blame it on Sunni extremists. The incident was then used to convince the American people that what was taking place in Iraq was not a war over foreign occupation, but a bitter sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shia in which the US was just an impartial referee. The killing of George Floyd has been used in much the same way as the implosion of the mosque. It creates a credible narrative for a massive and coordinated protests that have less to do with racial injustice than they do with diverting attention from the destruction of the economy and sowing division among the American people. This is a classic example of how elites use myth and media to conceal their trouble-making and escape any accountability for their actions.

Check out this excerpt from a paper by Carlo Caduff, an academic at King’s College London, in a journal called Medical Anthropology Quarterly. It’s entitled “What Went Wrong: Corona and the World After the Full Stop”:

Across the world, the pandemic unleashed authoritarian longings in democratic societies allowing governments to seize the opportunity, create states of exception and push political agendas. Commentators have presented the pandemic as a chance for the West to learn authoritarianism from the East. This pandemic risks teaching people to love power and call for its meticulous application. As a result of the unforeseeable social, political and economic consequences of today’s sweeping measures, governments across the world have launched record “stimulus” bills costing trillions of dollars, pounds, pesos, rand and rupees…. The trillions that governments are spending now as “stimulus” packages surpass even those of the 2008 financial crisis and will need to be paid for somehow. ... If austerity policies of the past are at the root of the current crisis with overwhelmed healthcare systems in some countries, the rapidly rising public debt is creating the perfect conditions for more austerity in the future. The pandemic response will have major implications for the public funding of education, welfare, social security, environment and health in the future.” (Lockdownskeptics.org)

This is precisely right.

The country has been deliberately plunged into another Great Depression with the clear intention of imposing harsh austerity measures that will eviscerate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other social safteynet programs that benefit ordinary working people, retirees, or anyone else for that matter. None of it is random, spontaneous or spur-of-the-moment policymaking.

It’s all drawn from a centuries-old Imperial Playbook that’s being used by scheming elites to implement their final plan for America: Tear down the statues, destroy the icons and symbols, rewrite the history, crush the populist resistance, create a permanent underclass that will work for pennies on the dollar, pit one group against the other by inciting racial hatred, political polarization and fratricidal warfare, promote the vandals who burn and loot our cities, attack anyone who speaks the truth, and offer unlimited support to the party that has aligned itself with the corrupt Intel agencies, the traitorous media, the sinister deep state, and the tyrannical elites who are determined to control the all the levers of state power and crush anyone who gets in their way.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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New York Times Takes Anti-Russian Hysteria to New Level with Report on Russian ‘Bounty’ for US Troops in Afghanistan

By Scott Ritter, June 30, 2020

As news reporting goes, the New York Times article alleging that a top-secret unit within Russian military intelligence, or GRU, had offered a bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed in Afghanistan, was dynamite. The story was quickly “confirmed” by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, and went on to take social media by storm. Twitter was on fire with angry pundits, former officials, and anti-Trump politicians (and their respective armies of followers) denouncing President Trump as a “traitor” and demanding immediate action against Russia.

IADL Calls on UK Court to Grant Bail to Julian Assange, Ill and Vulnerable to COVID-19

By IADL, June 30, 2020

Assange was too ill to attend his May 4 hearing, even by videoconference. In an open letter to The Lancet, 216 physicians and psychologists from 33 countries accused the UK and U.S. governments of exacerbating the psychological torture of Assange. Citing the Convention Against Torture, the signatories warned that UK officials could be held complicit and liable for their perpetration of, or silent acquiescence and consent to, Assange’s torture.

Lockdowns: Essential to the Master Plan

By Renee Parsons, June 30, 2020

While the Lockdown could have been a wake up call for humanity to change its consciousness with a paradigm shift –  whether it be a spiritual awakening, a political realignment or re-evaluating one’s own personal health choices, since, after all, humanity was locked in a major health crisis.  And most importantly, it was an opportunity to acknowledge that the planet itself is ailing from abuse and neglect with CV as a metaphor urging a personal reconnection with Nature.

America’s Revolutionary Founders Would be Anti-Government Extremists Today

By John W. Whitehead, June 30, 2020

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched by the police, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you’re at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

The Age of Chatham House and the British Roots of NATO

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, June 30, 2020

One America has been defended by great leaders who are too often identified by their untimely deaths while in office, who consistently advanced anti-colonial visions for a world of sovereign nations, win-win cooperation, and the extension of constitutional rights to all classes and races both within America and abroad. The other America has sought only to enmesh itself with the British Empire’s global regime of finance, exploitation, population control and never-ending wars.

The Media Sabotage of Hydroxychloroquine Use for COVID-19: Doctors Worldwide Protest the Disaster

By Elizabeth Woodworth, June 30, 2020

Four hundred years before randomized control trials existed, quinine, made from the “sacred bark” of the South American quina-quina tree, was used to treat malaria. Pharmacologically, it has been synthesized as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). This cheap abundant drug has been on the WHO list of essential medicines since the list began in 1977.

How a False Hydroxychloroquine Narrative Was Created. “Dangerous” When Used for Covid-19

By Dr. Meryl Nass, June 29, 2020

It is remarkable that a series of events taking place over the past 3 months produced a unified message about hydroxychloroquine, and produced similar policies about the drug in the US, Canada, Australia, NZ and western Europe.  The message is that generic, inexpensive hydroxychloroquine is dangerous and should not be used to treat a potentially fatal disease, Covid-19, for which there are no (other) reliable treatments.

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The international community’s rejection of Justin Trudeau’s UN Security Council bid should be a catalyst for a fundamental reassessment of Canada’s foreign policy and spur a corresponding drive to democratize international affairs.

In recent days, many commentators representing different political tendencies have called for a review or reset of Canadian foreign policy. Former ambassador to the UN Allan Rock, former cabinet minister Sheila Copps, Canadian Global Affairs Institute vice president David Perry, former senator Douglas Roche, former Stéphane Dion adviser Jocelyn Coulon, Rideau Institute president Peggy Mason and others have all expressed support for the idea.

As part of this push, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute released an open letter calling for a fundamental reassessment of Canadian foreign policy. The letter to Prime Minister Trudeau is signed by 200 politicians, artists, activists and academics. Signatories include sitting MPs Leah Gazan, Alexandre Boulerice and Paul Manly; former MPs Roméo Saganash, Libby Davies and Svend Robinson; David Suzuki, Naomi Klein, Linda McQuaig and Stephen Lewis; and Richard Parry of Arcade Fire and Black Lives Matter-Toronto founder Sandy Hudson.

The letter offers 10 questions as the basis of a wide-ranging discussion of Canada’s place in the world. This includes whether Canada should continue in NATO, back mining firms abroad and maintain its close alignment with Washington.

Beyond these and other important policy questions, the reassessment needs to grapple with two broader and interrelated questions: Why are Canadians so confused about their country’s place in the world? And how do we overcome the stark democratic deficit in international affairs?

Notwithstanding abundant evidence to the contrary, Canadians overwhelmingly believe their country is a benevolent international actor well liked around the world. But two consecutive failures to win international support for a UN Security Council seat suggest otherwise.

The gap between public perception of Canada’s role in the world and Ottawa’s actions abroad partially reflect the narrowness of the official debate. After the Security Council defeat, legacy media overwhelmingly turned to current and former Canadian diplomats to explain what had transpired. Imagine the Conservative party losing an election and the media asking only current and former leaders of the organization for their assessment.

Outside of diplomats and politicians, the media mostly sought commentary from think tanks and academic departments that are financed by and aligned with corporations and the Department of National Defence. The #NoUNSC4Canada campaign, which sent out multiple press releases and likely impacted the vote, was mostly ignored in coverage. So were dozens of grassroots international solidarity, mining injustice and peace groups across the country.

A fundamental reassessment of foreign policy requires an airing of all points of view, especially those of people living in Canada who feel passionately about related issues. What is Solidarité Québec-Haïti saying about Canada’s support for a repressive Haitian president? Does Rights Action’s criticism of Canadian mining practices in Central America have merit? How about the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War’s challenge to Canadian sanctions policy? Or Independent Jewish Voices’ position on Canadian charities in Israel? Or the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade’s complaints about Canadian firms producing components for U.S. weapon systems? Or the Louis Riel Bolivarian Circle’s criticism of Canada’s intervention in Venezuela?

Media outlets must be pressed to expand the discussion beyond groups funded by corporations and the Canadian government’s national defence and global affairs departments. The same goes for Parliament’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

When legacy media and politicians ignore credible grassroots voices, they are stunting democracy. Exclusion from prominent platforms makes it more difficult to fundraise, attract members and maintain one’s campaigning spirit. Any fundamental reassessment of Canadian foreign policy must include a discussion of the structures that preclude popular engagement on international issues.

The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute hopes to counter this exclusion by institutionalizing critical foreign policy activism and amplifying the work of antiwar, mining justice and international solidarity organizations.

It is important to see ourselves as part of a collective humanity. As anthropogenic global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic highlight, we are one world now more than ever before. A fundamental reassessment of Canadian foreign policy is one step towards making that a reality.

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Bianca Mugyenyi is an author and former co-executive director of The Leap. She currently coordinates the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute.

The Media Is Lying About the ‘Second Wave’

June 30th, 2020 by Rep. Ron Paul

For months, the Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media kept a morbid Covid-19 “death count” on their front pages and at the top of their news broadcasts. The coronavirus outbreak was all about the number of dead. The narrative was intended to boost governors like Cuomo in New York and Whitmer in Michigan, who turned their states authoritarian under the false notion that destroying people’s jobs, freedom, and lives would somehow keep a virus from doing what viruses always do: spread through a population until eventually losing strength and dying out.

The “death count” was always the headline.

But then all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about “cases” and has always been all about “cases.” Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant. Why? Because from the peak in April, deaths had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.

With massive increases in testing, the “case” numbers climbed. This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more “cases” you discover.

Unfortunately our mainstream media is only interested in pushing the “party line.” So the good news that millions more have been exposed while the fatality rate continues to decline – meaning the virus is getting weaker – is buried under hysterical false reporting of “new cases.”

Unfortunately many governors, including our own here in Texas, are incapable of resisting the endless lies of the mainstream media. They are putting Americans again through the nightmare of forced business closures, mandated face masks, and restrictions of Constitutional liberties based on false propaganda.

In Texas the “second wave” propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, “quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now.”

In fact, there has been much reporting that the “spike” in Texas cases is not due to a resurgence of the virus but to hospital practices of Covid-testing every patient coming in for any procedure at all. If it’s a positive, well that counts as a “Covid hospitalization.” Why would hospitals be so dishonest in their diagnoses? Billions of appropriated Federal dollars are being funneled to facilities based on the number of “Covid cases” they can produce. As I’ve always said, if you subsidize something you get more of it. And that’s why we are getting more Covid cases.

Let’s go back to the original measurements used to scare Americans into giving up their Constitutional liberties: the daily death numbers. Even though we know hospitals have falsely attributed countless deaths to “Covid-19” that were deaths WITH instead of FROM the virus, we are seeing actual deaths steadily declining over the past month and a half. Declining deaths are not a great way to push the “second wave” propaganda, so the media and politicians have moved the goal posts and decided that only “cases” are important. It’s another big lie.

Resist propaganda and defend your liberty. That is the only way we’ll get through this.

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The New York Times published an article claiming that Russia was paying out monetary bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan. There’s just one problem — none of what they reported was true.

As news reporting goes, the New York Times article alleging that a top-secret unit within Russian military intelligence, or GRU, had offered a bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed in Afghanistan, was dynamite. The story was quickly “confirmed” by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, and went on to take social media by storm. Twitter was on fire with angry pundits, former officials, and anti-Trump politicians (and their respective armies of followers) denouncing President Trump as a “traitor” and demanding immediate action against Russia.

Screenshot from The New York Times

There was just one problem — nothing in the New York Times could be corroborated. Indeed, there is no difference between the original reporting conducted by the New York Times, and the “confirming” reports published by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. All of the reports contain caveats such as “if confirmed” and “if true,” while providing no analysis into the potential veracity of the information used to sustain the report — alleged debriefs of Afghan criminals and militants — or the underpinning logic, or lack thereof, of the information itself.

For its part, the Russian government has vociferously denied the allegations, noting that the report “clearly demonstrates low intellectual abilities of US intelligence propagandists who have to invent such nonsense instead of devising something more credible.” The Taliban have likewise denied receiving any bounties from the Russians for targeting American soldiers, noting that with the current peace deal, “their lives are secure and we don’t attack them.”

Even more telling is the fact that the current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has come out to contradict a key element of the New York Times’ report—that the president was briefed on the intelligence in question. “I have confirmed that neither the president nor the vice president were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday,” Ratcliffe said in a statement. “The New York Times reporting, and all other subsequent news reports about such an alleged briefing are inaccurate.”

And one more tiny problem: Trump confirmed there was no such briefing, too.

Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — “The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.” That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels.

There was a time when the US military handled the bulk of detainee debriefings in Afghanistan. This changed in 2014, with the signing of the Bilateral Security Agreement. This agreement prohibits the US military from arresting or detaining Afghans, or to operate detention facilities in Afghanistan. As a result, the ability of the US military to interface with detainees has been virtually eliminated, making the Pentagon an unlikely source of the information used by the New York Times in its reporting.

The CIA, however, was not covered by this agreement. Indeed, the CIA, through its extensive relationship with the National Directorate of Security (NDS), is uniquely positioned to interface with the NDS through every phase of detainee operations, from initial capture to systemic debriefing.

Like any bureaucracy, the CIA is a creature of habit. Henry ‘Hank’ Crumpton, who in the aftermath of 9/11 headed up the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan, wrote that

“[t]he Directorate of Operations (DO) should not be in the business of running prisons or temporary detention facilities. The DO should focus on its core mission: clandestine intelligence operations. Accordingly, the DO should continue to hunt, capture, and render targets, and then exploit them for intelligence and ops leads once in custody. The management of their incarceration and interrogation, however, should be conducted by appropriately experienced US law enforcement officers because that is their charter and they have the training and experience.”

After 2014, the term “US law enforcement officers” is effectively replaced by “Afghan intelligence officers”— the NDS. But the CIA mission remained the same — to exploit captives for intelligence and operational leads.

The Trump administration has lobbied for an expanded mission for the CIA-backed NDS and other militia forces to serve as a counterterrorism force that would keep Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and Al-Qaeda from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan once US and foreign troops completed their planned withdrawal in 2021. But the CIA has raised objections to such a plan, noting that the NDS and other CIA-controlled assets were completely dependent upon US military air power and other combat service support resources, and that any attempt to expand the CIA’s covert army in Afghanistan following a US military withdrawal would end in disaster. Having the NDS fabricate or exaggerate detainee reports to keep the US engaged in Afghanistan is not beyond the pale.

Which brings up the issue of Russian involvement. In September 2015, the Taliban captured the northern Afghan city of Konduz, and held it for 15 days. This sent a shockwave throughout Russia, prompting Moscow to reconsider its approach toward dealing with the Afghan insurgency. Russia began reaching out to the Taliban, engaging in talks designed to bring the conflict in Afghanistan to an end. Russia was driven by other interests as well. According to Zamir Kabulov, President Vladimir Putin’s special representative for Afghanistan, “the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours” in the fight against Islamic State, which in the summer of 2014 had captured huge tracts of land in Syria and Iraq, including the city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest.

By 2017, Afghan and US intelligence services had assembled a narrative of Russian assistance to the Taliban which included the provision of advanced weaponry, training, and financial support. While Russia denied providing any direct military support to the Taliban, it maintained that the Taliban were the best way to deal with the growing threat of Islamic State. But even if the US reports were correct, and Russia was angling for a Taliban victory in Afghanistan, the last policy Russia would logically pursue would be one that had the US remain in Afghanistan, especially after pushing so hard for a negotiated peace. Russia’s interests in Afghanistan were — and are — best served by Afghan stability, the antithesis of the Afghan reality while the US and NATO remain engaged. Getting the US out of Afghanistan — not keeping the US in Afghanistan — is the Russian position, and any CIA officer worth his or her salt knows this.

It does not take a rocket scientist to read between the lines of the New York Times’ thinly sourced report. The NDS, with or without CIA knowledge or consent, generated detainee-based intelligence reports designed to create and sustain a narrative that would be supportive of US military forces remaining in Afghanistan past 2021. The CIA case officer(s) handling these reports dutifully submit cables back to CIA Headquarters which provide the gist of the allegations — that Russia has placed a bounty on US soldiers. But there is no corroboration, nothing that would allow this raw “intelligence”to be turned into a product worthy of the name.

This doesn’t mean that someone in the bowels of the CIA with an axe to grind against Trump’s plans to withdraw from Afghanistan, or who was opposed to Trump’s efforts to normalize relations with Russia, didn’t try to breathe life into these detainee reports. Indeed, a finished “product” may have made its way to the National Security Council staff — and elsewhere — where it would have been given the treatment it deserved, quickly discarded as unsubstantiated rumor unworthy of presidential attention.

At this point in time, frustrated by the inattention the “system” gave to the “intelligence,” some anonymous official contacted the New York Times and leaked the information, spinning it in as nefarious a way as possible. The New York Times blended the detainee reports and its own previous reporting on the GRU to produce a completely fabricated tale of Russian malfeasance designed to denigrate President Trump in the midst of a hotly contested reelection bid.

Too far-fetched? This assessment is far more fleshed out with fact and logic than anything the New York Times or its mainstream media mimics have proffered. And lest one thinks the GrayLady is above manufacturing news to sustain support for a war, the name Judith Miller, and the topic of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, should put that to rest. The reporting by the New York Times alleging the existence of a Russian bounty on the lives of US troops in Afghanistan is cut from the same piece of cloth as its pre-war Iraq drivel. As was the case with Iraq, the chattering class is pushing these new lies on an American audience pre-programmed to accept at face value any negative reporting on Russia. This is the state of what passes for journalism in America today, and it’s not a pretty sight.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

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The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) is a non-governmental organization with consultative status in ECOSOC and UNESCO. Founded in 1946 to promote the goals of the United Nations Charter, IADL and its affiliated organizations throughout the world have consistently fought to uphold international law, promote human rights and address threats to international peace and security. From its inception, IADL members have protested racism, colonialism, and economic and political injustice wherever they occur.

IADL is extremely alarmed at the psychological torture of Julian Assange and the serious threats to his health as a result of his continued incarceration.

After WikiLeaks published damning evidence of the United States’ commission of war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo prison, the U.S. government mounted a campaign to discredit and vilify Julian Assange. It worked with the Swedish and UK governments to detain Assange on trumped-up charges of sexual assault with the likely goal of extraditing him to the United States. Assange was granted asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London where he remained for 7 years until a US-friendly government came to power in Ecuador, withdrew his asylum and turned him over to the UK.

While Assange was living in the London embassy, he developed health conditions that required medical treatment. The UK government refused to allow him to go to a hospital without being arrested. Assange’s health severely deteriorated. Moreover, on May 31, 2019, UN Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer declared that Assange exhibited signs of prolonged exposure to psychological torture.

After Assange was arrested by the UK, he was convicted of a bail offense and sentenced to one year in jail. That charge was a minor offense but his unconscionable sentence gave the United States time to go after him. The U.S. government indicted him under the Espionage Act and asked the UK to extradite him to the U.S. for trial on the indictment. He faces 175 years in prison if convicted.

Assange’s extradition hearing in the UK will continue on September 7. Meanwhile, he remains confined at Belmarsh Prison in London. Assange spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, which amounts torture. During the other hour, Assange is confined in a small area with 40 inmates. The proximity to so many people, combined with his fragile health conditions, make Assange particularly vulnerable to contracting COVID-19.

Several Australian MPs, journalists and human rights advocates called on the government of Australia, of which Assange is a national, to intervene and request that Assange be granted bail, citing COVID-19. They wrote,

“The extradition hearings have been disrupted and delayed, leaving Mr. Assange unable to have his case heard until September 2020 at the earliest, while deaths within the UK prison populations and illness amongst judicial and penal staff cohorts continue to rise.”

Assange was too ill to attend his May 4 hearing, even by videoconference. In an open letter to The Lancet, 216 physicians and psychologists from 33 countries accused the UK and U.S. governments of exacerbating the psychological torture of Assange. Citing the Convention Against Torture, the signatories warned that UK officials could be held complicit and liable for their perpetration of, or silent acquiescence and consent to, Assange’s torture.

IADL strongly opposes the continued life-threatening incarceration of Julian Assange who only remains convicted of a bail offense. IADL calls on the UK court to grant bail forthwith to Julian Assange.

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The Iranian government on Monday issued an arrest warrant for U.S. President Donald Trump and recommended that he face “murder and terrorism charges” over the January assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani that brought the two nations to the brink of all-out war.

Ali al-Qasimehr, Tehran’s top prosecutor, said Iran is also seeking the arrest of 35 other unnamed officials the country believes were involved in the assassination of Soleimani, who was a leading commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

“The 36 individuals who were involved in the assassination of Qasem Soleimani have been identified and they include political and military officials from the U.S. and other governments,” al-Qasimehr said during a meeting of the Iranian judiciary Monday. “At the top of the list is U.S. President Donald Trump, and his prosecution will be pursued even after the end of his term in office.”

U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook dismissed the arrest warrants as a “propaganda stunt.”

Iran has reportedly requested that the France-based International Criminal Police Organization—commonly known as Interpol—assist with the effort to arrest Trump, who ordered the drone strike that killed Soleimani. Al-Qasimehr said Iran has urged Interpol to put out a “red notice” for the arrest of Trump and the other officials.

As Al-Jazeera explained:

Under a red notice, local authorities make the arrests on behalf of the country that requested it. The notices cannot force countries to arrest or extradite suspects, but can put government leaders on the spot and limit suspects’ travel.

After receiving a request, Interpol meets by committee and discusses whether or not to share the information with its member states. Interpol has no requirement for making any of the notices public, though some do get published on its website.

Soleimani’s Jan. 2 killing by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad was condemned by human rights advocates and legal experts at the time as a violation of international law.

Agnes Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said on Jan. 7 that “it is hard to imagine how” Soleimani’s killing could be legally justified.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Part I. The Virus King is naked

This is now recognized by all those who have the courage to face facts. I will not enumerate in this article the immense body of evidence that exists. All of you have probably done, are doing, or will do your own research. I will only quote a report that was issued by the German Department of Interior: 

“The corona virus is a global false alarm. The danger of the virus has been overestimated (no more than 250,000 deaths worldwide with Covid-19, compared to 1.5 million for the 2017-18 seasonal flu)“.

Yet, the purpose of this article is not to focus on this topic. Like many others, during the last two months, I gathered enough information that allowed me to understand how serious was this “pandemic.”

So, let’s start with this question: If the lethal pandemic  is neither lethal nor pandemic, then why the need for a global lockdown?

Incompetence? Blindness? Conspiracy?

It’s important to answer this question thoroughly by using a fact-based approach. How did the world go crazy? Who decided the lockdown? Who justified it? Who thought it up?

Let’s start with the last question. To my knowledge, no medical textbook has ever recommended quarantining healthy populations, let alone entire countries. It has neither been practiced nor recommended. This idea comes out of a military mindset…

In 2005, under the aegis of Donald Rumsfeld, head of the Pentagon under Bush Jr., Dr. Hatchett, current CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), created a plan for the total containment of the American population in the event of a bio-terrorist attack.

This idea was then reshaped by the Rockefeller Foundation think-tank in 2010. It issued a document called “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” One of the four scenarios depicted a global authoritarian containment that could last 10 to 20 years due to a pandemic; this scenario was shown as an imminent possibility for humanity.

So, who did imagine this containment policy? The military and “philanthropists.” No scientists. No doctors.

Now let’s take a look at who did justify and advocate for this containment.

But first, it is important to find out more about Neil Fergusson, the director of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the United Kingdom. In 2002, he calculated that the mad cow disease would kill about 50,000 British people and another 150,000 once it was transmitted to sheep. There were only 177 deaths. In 2005, he predicted that the bird flu would kill 65,000 Britons. The total was 457 deaths.

Another important player in this game is the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2009, it issued the H1N1-flu pandemic warning, triggering the purchase of millions and millions of vaccines by governments ($10 a dose). The pandemic never happened. These expensive vaccines were destroyed because they were unused. In addition, these vaccines contained mercury, which created many cases of chronic narcolepsy and other health problems among those vaccinated, including children. Yet, no government ever complained officially to the organization for the “ill-advice” that cost them billions, nor did anyone asked anything from the pharmaceutical companies that produced the toxic vaccine.

In March this year, the WHO launched its ‘Pandemic!’ cry, despite the fact that the number of cases and deaths was much lower than that of the seasonal flu. The WHO was assisted by the unreliable virological tests used worldwide.

Neil Fergusson, on the other hand, true to his alarmist mindset, predicted with his “mathematical model” that 550,000 British people would die from Covid, as well as more than 2 million Americans, if a fierce lockdown did not come into effect. Shortly before, he had shared the same figures with President Macron. Overnight, Great Britain implemented Dr. Hatchett’s plan (CEPI), as many countries had done before. Total lockdown. It didn’t matter that the SAGE revised its numbers sharply downwards afterwards, or that Fergusson was fired. WHO, SAGE and CEPI have justified the containment in front of the closed eyes of the world.

An interesting detail: Who do you think is the very generous funder of these three institutions with their sexy acronyms? Bill Gates.

Incompetence? Blindness? Conspiracy? Coincidence?

We now know who devised the containment, who justified it and who applied it. But there remains one fundamental question.

Why did people accept it without flinching (at least at first)? The answer lies in four letters: FEAR.

A fear skillfully orchestrated by the main-stream media, with its wonderful harmoniously tuned choir. By the way, who is the generous philanthropist who gave millions of dollars to the most important European’s newspapers? Bill Gates, again. But let’s not get ourselves lost in details, and let’s go back to fear. First of all, fear of what? Fear of dying, of course! Without this fear, nothing would have been possible. Fear has paralyzed many thinkers… Fear… We’ll get back to that.

And so, the picture is getting more complete. As in a theatre play, now we can present the characters…

“Lockdown Party”

An anonymous play

Directed by Bill Gates and his Little Friends

Choir of narrators – CNN, NYT, BBC, Le Monde, Der Speigel and others.

The black longsword knight disguised as a shepherdthe government

Sheepus

The copsus

The ButchersBig Pharma and Big Tech

The crier in the deserthim, you, me.

The standing Menus.

The True Shepherdto be determined. 

Part II. The Great Cancer Future

Having said all this so far, we must recognize that there is a pandemic. But not exactly the one we are being told, not a corona virus pandemic. To understand it better, let’s draw a parallel with our wonderful human body.

Our body is made up of an incredible number of living cells. These are its smallest living and self-contained units. They all strive towards a single goal: to keep the whole organism (our body) alive and healthy, so that it can serve as a vehicle for a higher entity, which I would call our Self or Ego. These cells gather into organs, an intermediate level between the cell and the whole body. Now, what would happen if the cells stopped working for the Higher Entity and began to live only for themselves, selfishly stealing nutrients from the body for their own growth? They would then form what is called a tumor, a localized cancer. A cancer is a group of cells that do not work for the body but for themselves: they become parasites.

Now that this is understood, let’s move to onto the next step. Society is also a living and complex organism, just like the human body. It is made up of organs that carry out its physical functions: banks, schools, hospitals, companies, governments. The basic units are human beings, in other words, us.

  • Cells – Human beings
  • Organs – Institutions, companies, …
  • Human body – Social body (society)
  • Ego – ???

The selfishness of cells creates cancer. What does the selfishness of individuals create?

How many people in our society are at the service of a Good Higher Principle? In other words, who do you know whose life is focused on helping others? And how many people live exclusively focused on themselves?

If the human body had as many selfish cells as our society has selfish individuals, what would it be called? Apply that ratio among those you know… We most likely would easily reach the level of terminal cancer.

Do you see it the way I do? This materialistic selfishness afraid of death is the cancer of our society. For years it has advanced quietly, almost without symptoms. And now it’s starting to hurt. Our social life is full of malignant tumors. The largest ones, like the speculative economy, outrank our healthy organs like the real economy. The smaller tumors are living in our family and professional relationships, our culture and forms of government. The antisocial behaviours so common now-a-days have formed the ground for the Great Cancer to magnificently unveil and launch a general attack. Metastase.

It is fundamental to see this clearly. Yes, there are great selfish villains lurking arround. But they could not have done anything if we were not wickedly selfish and materialistic as well. It would feel good to point fingers at the main tumors, hoping for a revolution that would get rid of them all, like chemotherapy. But, I would be forgetting that it was my own cowardice that made their bed. Killing bad guys doesn’t make the evil go away. It will only jump from one person to another, from a Louis XVI to a Robespierre.

We are in a crisis that has no other choice but individual and social transformation. It is inspiring to see how some of those who “woke up” earlier transform themselves step-by-step in their fight against this Great Cancer.

And here it is where the real beauty unravels! Here it is where hope gets born! It is only when I reach the bottom that I can start to go back up again! What does cure cancer? Chemotherapy attacks it with its own weapons, but the principle of cancer remains in the body until it is reborn a little later, a little farther away. No, you can’t cure evil with evil. What cures cancer is “The Ego” that regains control over its cells. A connection is re-established between the cell and the Higher Principle. Either the cells resume their work in the service of the greater whole or else they die. It is similar for us as a society, but there are some differences. On one hand,   it is the same because what saves us from our own evil is the good done onto others. When I work for the Higher Good, I slowly unravel my sticky selfishness and link myself to the forces of a Superior Principle, to that which is most Human in man. On the other hand, it is different because this Superior Principle will never impose itself upon us and put us back on the right path. It respects our freedom. It IS our freedom. It is up to us to restore the relationship with Him.

So, what is Good? Goodness? For centuries, the Great Cancer has led us to believe that it does not exist, or that it is relative. Or that it resides in the selfish happiness of the many. Oh, materialistic illusion! But now the Great Cancer has come out of his lair, and the door has closed behind him. He has become extremely visible, and beside him – discreetly but very present, inviting but not constraining – is the loving Good.

So, how do you fight? It must be understood that this struggle is fundamental. Not fighting is to start dying. Actually, it is worse than dying: it means becoming evil – with small unconscious steps, slowly, like someone who, dizzy from the smoke of his burning house, goes to bed for a little nap. He’s so tired, poor thing! He’s just following his doctor’s advice.

How do you fight then? First, you must be able to see clearly what’s happening. The struggle has two directions. One toward the inner being of each and every one of us. Individual spiritual work is the key. Re-open ourself to the perception of the spiritual world, and gradually get rid of fear, selfishness, materialism, pride, and all those little things that make you an average person. As the ancient Greeks said: “Know thyself, and give thyself an afternoon kick!”

The second direction relies on knowing the world. Specifically, you need to know as much as you can about the Great Cancer: how it works, what it’s trying to achieve. Observe it, listen to those who have studied it or forseen it. Cross-check your information, think, observe again, think again, share the results with others.

For instance, let’s take a closer look at this containment that governments are so keen on maintaining, even when the so-called virus has gone on a holiday. What consequences do we observe? Here is a quick list.

  • High-speed installation of 5G antennas in most industrialized countries (all of them?), overriding the opposition of citizens and scientists.
  • Bankruptcy of many small businesses and producers. The big companies will most likely survive, but the small people will become more dependent on the state for their daily bread.
  • Fundamental rights (such as meeting, touching one another, protesting, etc.), are suspended.
  • Children are told that touching others is dangerous.  It doesn’t matter how vital this human contact is for their healthy development.
  • Screens monopolize our lives, as well as lives of small children, imposing its more-than-harmful effects .
  • More people die from containment than from the “virus.”
  • Censorship (from Youtube, Facebook, mainstream media, Twitter, etc.) silences those who question the benefits of vaccines, 5G, lockdown, or simply the official narrative.
  • Pharmaceutical and communication companies see their profits skyrocket.

Let’s now turn toward the future, and try to follow the logic behind this destruction of free men and women, so as to predict the next move – like in chess. What follows is hypothetical, a personal construction based on trends, based on technologies that already exist or are being developed, and on statements by governmental authorities or wealthy billionaires.

Let’s imagine that a second wave of this pandemic will come back in the near future. The confinement would be even worse. All the effects on the list increase. The state and big businesses become the “saviours” of the world. But to protect the population from itself, these self-appointed “saviours” put in place a health passport quickly integrated into a digital identity (Financed by whom? Take a guess!) that says who is healthy and who is not. Health is not a right anymore, it is a legal obligation. If you refuse the vaccine and the digital identity, how will the “good people” know that you are not a danger to them? You will no longer be allowed to be near them. No more trains, planes, supermarkets or banks. You are dangerous.

All this is on its way. Just look at what is happening in China, or what the World Economic Forum is openly saying on its own website.

What happens next? Health, communication, education, transportation have been sterilized and laid on the hands of the Orwellian State. What is left? Money, cash. And food.

Due to the consequences of repeated confinements, the food production and supply chains will be undermined. The state, once again dressed in the red underpants of Superman, the savior of humanity, will come to the rescue. It will prohibit, excuse me, “replace” organic/biodynamic agriculture under the pretext that they produce “too little,” in favor of intensive agriculture in the hands of companies that “know” what they are doing. Bayer (former Monsanto) for instance. And, what happens if you don’t agree? Well, don’t eat! Never again…

But maybe you don’t have to worry since you won’t have money anyway. Cash, this vehicle of patogens, will disappear. Virtual currencies, integrated into our digital identity (a number in a database containing your whole life), will become the only method of payment. And who will control them? Guess…

People who won’t bend over will need to exile themselves to low-tech, self-sufficient village-farms – like new Noah’s arks in a deluge of cancerous high-tech lies.

How depressing! We could easily be afraid of it, so disproportionately big the forces against us appear. And yet! And yet…

The Great Cancer has a weakness. A crunchy crack in his fiercelooking cardboard shield: he weakens each time he is seen. He hates the light. Like a fungus, he grows only in the darkness, in the pious-collective-unconsciousness.

And more good news, he has a powerful enemy: the Principle of Good. This spiritual entity has been given many names throughout history: God, Tao, Christ, Hado, The I-am, Aum, Divine Love, the Universe… The name doesn’t matter. What matters is the personal and social connection with Him. To make His home the center of our initiatives. To trust Him (Her? Them?). To actively look for a relationship with Them, to apply here and now what They are. This is what can allow us to get through the raindrops and prepare for the future.

The Roman Empire also had a terminal cancer. It was destroyed by the “barbarians” of the North, who were like the flu in comparison with the countless tribes that were conquered over a  thousand years. Islands of a new spirituality survived in the form of monasteries. From there emerged impulses that enabled Humanity in Europe to start blooming in a new way. Will this be repeated in a new form?

I know that the Great Cancer will be defeated. It will be painful, but mankind will survive and come out stronger and better. As for each one of us, the question is not so much whether we will survive or not. We know that we will all die sooner or later. What’s wrong with that? If the materialists are right, then it is dramatic, and we should fight against our own death even at the cost of the lives of others – and thus become the cancer.  If the Principle of Good and the spiritual world do exist, then the question is no longer whether we will die or not, but rather: HOW DID I LIVE? HOW DID I ALLOW OTHERS TO LIVE?

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Sergei Khrushchev: A Eulogy from His Close Student

June 30th, 2020 by Joshua Tartakovsky

Sergey Khrushchev, son of former USSR premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who relocated to the United States after the USSR collapsed and became a professor of international relations at Brown University, died several days ago at the age of 84. Mr. Khrushchev died from a gunshot to his head. The Rhode Island police that came to his home in Cranston, following a call by his wife, ruled out foul play.

What was the cause of Sergey Khruschhev’s untimely death?

The media in the US has been stating that Khrushchev died from a shot to his head. This was the claim made in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. But his wife, Valentina, claimed otherwise to the Russian media. RIA Novostoy [1] stated that Khrusuchev’s wife said that he died from old age. Which version is to be believed?

Khrushchev was a man of great humor and integrity. I was lucky to have taken his class on Post Soviet States at Brown University in Fall 2017. During the course and later, we became good friends. Khrushchev taught me many things. I visited his house on several occasions and kept in touch with him quite frequently.

Sergei loved his wife very much, and was loved by her. But he was also a stubborn and highly intelligent man, who did what he believed is right. It is fair to assume, that like his father, Nikita, he was a strict materialist who did not believe in God. He was not a huge fan of religion. His father’s funeral, Nikita Khrushchev, was meant to go through a church, since that was the only way to the cemetery. But, instead, mourners climbed over the gate with the coffin.

It was quite interesting taking a course with Sergei Khrushchev at Brown University. His wealth of knowledge regarding the entire Soviet Union was immense. He knew exactly where gas pipelines began and ended. The various personalities of contemporary Ukrainian politics. And Cuba, as a place where tropical socialism was enacted.

Khruschev’s classes were known for his wry humor. For example, he once said that Ukrainian leader Yulia Tymoshsnko is offering policies that simply cannot be put into practice. One day she may ‘disappear’ he said, matter of factly. The entire class went roaring with laughter. His sense of humor was not the kind we were used to, which made it all the more interesting.

Significantly, Khruschev, did not take the path many other dissidents took. While many Soviet dissidents chose to badmouth the Soviet Union upon entering the United States, Sergey Khrushchev never did so. To us, American students, he explained how Communists were good people who wanted to create a better society and made some mistakes. He did not fall for the anti-Soviet narrative, such an easy selling point in the west, and one to be welcomed by the US media and Central Intelligence Agency. Instead, he presented a complex and nuanced view, allowing us, if we were brave enough, to come to our own conclusions. He knew too much and saw too much to care what anyone thought of his view. Moreover, he was exceptionally intelligent. In his earlier career, he served as a ballistic missile specialist and scientist, and worked in Bushehr, Iran at one point.

Two other areas where Sergei Khrushchev presented a nuanced view were Israel and Iran. Having received a Zionist indoctrination in Israeli society, I had quite a few questions for Professor Khrushchev about his pro-Palestinian stance. But Khrushchev, in fact, was neither pro-Palestinian, nor pro-Israeli. He was simply a realist. He told me that Israel cannot afford to continuously making enemies in its neighborhood or it will face a grim future. It must make amends and make peace with its neighbors, he said. Khrushchev, was one of the few voices at Brown, who had the guts to criticize and make jokes regarding the Zionist establishment in the United States. He patiently answered my questions and despite my interruptions, answered my points lucidly and calmly. It was thanks to him that my eyes have been opened to the ugly realities of the Zionist regime. De-conditioning one from indoctrination is not an easy task. Khrushchev did it with me. Later, he commended me for my pro-Palestinian activism. He said I was very brave. Maybe in a 100 years I will appear in a sentence in a history book, he added wryly.

Another area regarding which Khrushchev spoke out was Iran. He explained how Iran was a rational actor, how most Iranians were educated and civilized, and how the US State Department was motivated by ignorance and by the Zionist lobby. I debated him many times in class, on this very issue. Each time, he would not mind my rude interruptions, and responded calmly, yet soberly. Lucidly.

Sergei Khrushchev loved the United States. It was his new home. But unlike Soviet emigres and other perverts, he did not see a need to hate the USSR or the post-Soviet space to love the US.

The US-backed coup in Kyiv, that appointed far-right Bandervitses in power in a lib-Nazi coalition, was not greeted by Sergey Khrushchev very favorably. I urged him to write on the issue but he was fearful. If I write about it, he confided in me, people will say that you are writing about it because of your father [of what he did]. As everyone knows, Nikita Khrushchev handed Crimea over to Ukraine as a prize of sorts, though of course, at the time of the gift ceremony, few expected the USSR would one day unravel. Still, on the basis of his own convictions, he went on to write scathing and powerful critiques on Al Jazeera [2]. I believe they will serve as a future record for generations to come.

When I told him, in an innocent dismay, typical to Americans which as an American I am too, that the CIA is supporting Privy Sector in Ukraine, he responded in an email, in his typical style: ‘Joshua, calm down. CIA has been supporting them for the past 70 years. They even bothered to deny it.’

I told him, later on, that my intention was to write as much as possible so that a Third World War will not be provoked between the US and Russia. He told me, in his placid style, ‘do the best you can.’

Sergei Khrushchev respected hugely his father. To such a degree, that due to my appreciation for him, I dared only once to raise questions about mistakes his father may have made. He saw his legacy as setting the record straight. He published one book on his father, than a trilogy on his father’s work. At the same time, here may be an opportunity for me to set the record straight. To my geopolitical judgment it appears that Nikita Khrushchev made a fatal mistake by denouncing Stalin. Eventually, the USSR, heavily intent on upgrading its missiles capacity, and due to the greed and corruption of its bureaucracy, it eventually collapsed. The singular decision to denounce Stalin probably was what led to the severing of ties between the Soviet Union and Maoist China. This in turn led to the US embrace of China. It may have prevented, a united- Maoist China-USSR front, that had within it, the potential power to bring down the United States. Indeed, Sergey Khruschev greatly respected Henry Kissinger. But, Khruschev believed that his father, Nikita, turned the USSR into a great power. He dedicated a significant part of his life to writing memoirs about his father that argue just that.

I was supposed to meet Sergey Khrushchev just about now, but the life of the materialist has ended. He was a loyal man, his dedication to his students, unquestionable.

At a visit to his home several years ago, when asked what he was reading recently, Khruschev responded that he was reading a book on ancient Chinese history. With a smirk on his face, Khruschev said how for the Chinese, historical lifespans run in thousands of years while America is a very young country. He seemed to admire their patience. On a side note, Sergey Khruschev had honest respect, not tainted by grudges, towards Henry Kissinger whose move of splitting the Soviet-Sino alliance he saw as brilliant.

In a related note, Khruschev believed that the unravelling of the USSR was not inevitable and that the Soviets could have reformed as the Chinese did, while keeping the super structure in tact. He believed that Putin was gradually turning Russia into a police state. It is not easy to come up with a new plan for Russia after the fight against corruption has been carried out, he explained. He urged the exploration of possibilities on how the Russian economy could be reformed and restructured.

Sergey Khrushchev essentially saw it as his life’s mission to correct his father’s name. His view, was that Nikita Khrushchev made the USSR a global power. This position is debatable. But, at the end of the day, the father is not the son, and the son is not the father. Sergey Khrushchev was a fascinating figure by his own right and by his own merit.

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Joshua Tartakovsky is an independent journalist and a graduate of Brown University (’08).

Regarding Gary Martin’s June 15 Review-Journal article, “Nuke test rumors spur Nevada lawmakers”: As a Shoshone, we always had horses. My grandfather always told me, “Stop kicking up dust.” Now I understand that it was because of the radioactive fallout.

To hide the impacts from nuclear weapons testing, Congress defined Shoshone Indian ponies as “wild horses.” There is no such thing as a wild horse. They are feral horses, but the Wild Horse and Burrow Acts of 1971 gave the Bureau of Land Management the affirmative act to take Shoshone livestock while blaming the Shoshone ranchers for destruction of the range caused by nuclear weapons testing. My livelihood was taken and the Shoshone economy destroyed by the BLM. On the land, radioactive fallout destroyed the delicate high desert flora and fauna, creating huge vulnerabilities where noxious and invasive plant species took hold.

Nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada National Security Site has left a dark legacy of radiation exposure to Americans downwind from the battlefield of the Cold War. Among the victims are the Shoshone people, whom, by no fault of our own, were exposed to radiation in fallout from more than 924 nuclear tests. The Shoshone people never consented to the nuclear weapons testing.

Photo from Nevada State Museum

Nuclear testing is a violation of the peace treaty with the Shoshone, the Treaty of Ruby Valley, and the U.S. Constitution, Article 6 Section 2, the treaty supremacy clause. Nothing in the treaty contemplated the secret massacre of Shoshone people with radioactive poison from nuclear weapons testing within our own homelands. My tribe and family are the victims.

The enduring purpose of nuclear technology is the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Their tests within the Shoshone homelands are deliberate acts that destroy the Shoshone people. No Shoshone, not one person, should be sacrificed for the benefit of some Americans and the profit of the military industrial complex.

Nuclear weapons development in Shoshone homelands violates humanitarian law, human rights law and environmental law and is racist. Racism is a crime. It is called genocide, “a crime against humanity.”

To prove intent to commit genocide, we have only to look at the culture of secrecy of the military occupation of Shoshone homelands during and since the Cold War at the test site. The acts committed in nuclear weapons development and testing against the Shoshone people benefit other Americans. The Shoshone people suffer without relief or acknowledgement of our silent sacrifice. Secrecy is not transparent. Secrecy is not democratic and is unconstitutional when the acts are conducted in and upon the Shoshone land and people.

Nothing in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as amended in 1987, considered the fact of Shoshone ownership of the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository. Almost $15 billion was spent to characterize the site, giving it the label as, “the most studied piece of real estate in the world.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission admitted in the licensing proceedings that the Department of Energy has not proven ownership.

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Nevada took hundreds of millions of dollars for characterization studies from the federal government in grants equal to taxes from Shoshone property and gave nothing to the Shoshone. A clear case of taxation without representation to defraud the Shoshone people of our property interests.

What is needed now are hearings on and support for the extension and funding of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 2019. The Shoshone people need DNA testing and funding for tribal community health education on radiation basics and information on appropriate protective behavior to mitigate radiation exposure.

The Shoshone people are committed to the enforcement of law in the service of justice and human dignity. That is human growth and development, not nuclear weapons.

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Ian Zabarte is Principal Man for the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians.

The UK Government has said that it will not align with EU chemicals policy, instead bringing in its own controversial system.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has confirmed that the UK will implement its own version of the EU chemical regulatory system, REACH, at the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December. The UK is still operating under EU REACH until then, but has no say on the regulations. Despite calls from industry to align with the European regulatory system, the UK Government will implement a UK REACH run by Defra and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), replacing the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The plans for UK REACH have previously been called “vague and insufficient”.

Philip Dunne, Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, wrote to George Eustice, Secretary of State for Defra on 30 April to ask for clarification on the future of chemicals regulation. In a reply to Dunne on 22 May, Rebecca Pow, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State of Defra said that the UK would not align with EU Reach.

Responding to Pow’s letter, Dunne said:

“It is imperative that the UK’s future chemicals strategy after Brexit maintains high environmental and safety standards. This is an issue the Committee will closely monitor over the coming months and as the new UK REACH system begins at the start of next year.

“The Secretary of State for Defra confirmed during the Committee’s evidence hearing that the UK REACH will mirror EU REACH, and we learnt from Minister Pow’s letter to the Committee that high standards of environmental and safety measures will continue. The Committee still requires information on how UK REACH will work in practice, and how Defra plans to address the concerns of those in the chemicals industry around the costs of access and challenges in supplying registration data.”

Both the Chemical Industries Association (CIA) and the Chemical Business Association (CBA) urged the Government to be transparent on how it estimates the cost to business with the new system. Commenting on Pow’s claim that “having control of our own laws outweighs the costs”, the CBA highlighted that the Government’s decision appears to be motivated by its desire to escape the jurisdiction of the European Courts of Justice (ECJ). However, in the ten years of EU REACH only one case involving a member state has been heard.

The CIA also raised the concern that attempts to make a parallel database with UK REACH will weaken competitiveness and reduce the number of chemicals on the UK market.

“In raising these concerns, we believe businesses have already complied and respected the ‘no data, no market’ principle of REACH once and therefore should not be forced to re-submit costly data. In the absence of an agreed shared database mechanism between the UK and EU, we urge that UK REACH acknowledges the level of work and expense already made with respect to EU-REACH by allowing those companies who deal in REACH-registered supply-chains to continue to do so without submitting a registration in the UK. Instead, UK manufacturers and importers of EU-REACH registered substances could notify the UK authority with key information.”

In response to the Defra letter, Michael Warhurst, Executive Director of CHEM Trust, said:

“We are deeply concerned about a number of features of a future UK REACH regime that will be weaker than the current protective framework of EU REACH and will result in divergence from the EU. Our analysis is that without action, the environment and human health will be left less protected from problem chemicals post-Brexit”.

Warhurst raised the point that the UK system will have limited information on chemicals due to lack of access to the ECHA database. He also expressed concern that Pow’s statement that the Government “will be looking at approaches taken by other chemicals regimes across the world” could mean that the Government may be planning to move to a weaker US-style system which would allow chemicals banned by the EU to be used in the UK.

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Sometimes listening to the morning news on television is a bit like entering into an alternate universe. Last Wednesday, the day after primary elections in New York State, CBS News reported that New York Congressman Eliot Engel was “facing a challenge” from Democratic Party challenger Jamaal Bowman. NBC News reported that Engel was “trailing.” The reality, according to the New York Times tally of the results that morning was that Bowman had beaten Engel by a margin to 60.9% versus 35.6% with more than 82% of votes counted. Even though it posted the numbers, the Times felt compelled to describe the apparently impending lopsided loss as if it were something less than that, as a “stiff challenge” for Engel.

The media deference to Engel derives from the fact that he is a protected species, possibly the leading Israel-firster in Congress. In 2003, Engel supported the invasion of Iraq and in the following year he organized a group of fellow congressmen to demand cuts in the U.S. contribution to the United Nations office that assists Palestinian refugees. He attended the infamous Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address to Congress in 2015 that many other Democratic lawmakers boycotted due to the insult to President Obama and afterwards called Netanyahu’s speech “compelling.”

Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Andrew Cuomo and Nancy Pelosi all had endorsed Engel, who has been in Congress for going on 32 years and currently heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Clinton explained that Engel “…is deeply committed to working with our allies to maintain American leadership on the global stage.” She was, of course, referring to Israel.

Engel was also endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus even though Bowman is black, a demonstration of how politics in Washington works. Engel will in any event likely be replaced to chair the Foreign Affairs committee by a similar Jewish Israel-firster Brad Sherman of California, but his imminent defeat has already sent a shockwave through the centers of pro-Israel power in the United States.

Bowman, a progressive so-called Justice Democrat, is on record as favoring cuts in aid for Israel based on its human rights record. He has attacked Engel for being on the dole financially from defense contractors and also for being an active promoter of a military attack on Iran, even though the Iranians pose no threat to the United States. He has, in fact, made Israel something of an issue in his campaign, pointing out that Engel had been one of the few Democratic members of the House of Representatives to vote against President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. The JCPOA was the major foreign policy achievement of the Obama Administration and it set up a framework to prevent Iran from taking steps to produce a nuclear weapon. It was strongly opposed by Israel and its American lobby even though the agreement enhanced U.S. national security.

In 2016, after the Obama administration abstained on a United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, Engel responded with a House resolution condemning the U.N. Engel often in his career has boasted about his close relationship with Israel. Speaking at the 2018 national convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the U.S.’s principal Israeli lobby, he boasted how“There’s a bunch of legislation coming out of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I want to tell you that I sit down with AIPAC on every piece of legislation that comes out. I think it’s very, very important. In the past 30 years I have attended 31 consecutive AIPAC conferences in March, I haven’t missed one.” Some might suggest that serving in one country’s legislature and working for the interests of another country amounts to treason.

The other good news coming out of New York was that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her district with 72.6% of the vote. AOC, controversial to be sure but no friend of the Israel Lobby, was running against Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a CNBC reporter. As is often the case, there is considerable back story to the two races and that back story is Jewish money, lots of it, intended to re-elect Engel and get rid of Ocasio-Cortez. Engel received more that $1.5 million from one group alone, the so-called Democratic Majority for Israel and also obtained large sums bundled by the AIPAC-tied group Pro-Israel America as well as from other Jewish groups. AOC was opposed by the not surprisingly well-funded Caruso-Cabrera, whose money largely came from pro-Israel and Jewish affiliated organizations

And more bad news appears to be coming from the Hudson Valley district currently held by yet another Israel-first congresswoman Representative Nita Lowey, who is retiring. Mondaire Jones, a gay Harvard-educated lawyer, has the lead based on early returns. Jones calls himself a progressive and he is unlikely to emerge as a cheerleader for Israel if he is elected.

Representing parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan in New York City, Carolyn Maloney, who chairs the Oversight and Reform Committee, is meanwhile maintaining a small lead over Democratic challenger Suraj Patel. Maloney describes herself on her website as a strong supporter of Israel and Jewish issues. In fact, she goes far beyond that, actively sponsoring and otherwise promoting legislation favorable to Israel and the Jewish community, most recently being the sponsor of the waste of taxpayer money in promoting the holocaust myth through H.R.943, the Never Again Education Act. Maloney is hanging on to a slim lead against Patel, though numerous postal and absentee votes have not yet been counted and the outcome could go either way. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly a shock to the Israel Lobby that a completely reliable Maloney might be in danger of losing her seat.

To be sure, Congress continues to be Israeli occupied territory, as Pat Buchanan once put it. Last week 116 out of 198 Republican congressmen signed a letter to President Donald Trump asserting their support for Israel’s annexation of much of the West Bank, due to start shortly. The letter stated that the annexation was justified “based on the critical premise that Israel should never be forced to compromise its security,” indicating very clearly that actual U.S. national interests had nothing to do with it.

What is surprising about the Republican letter is that it was not unanimous, and the loss of Engel, replacement of Lowey and possible defeat of Maloney could be indications of a real shift among voters regarding what has been an assiduously cultivated overwhelmingly positive view of the Jewish State. Recent opinion polls suggest that a majority of Americans do not support either Israeli expansion or its form of apartheid.

Israel is feeling somewhat vulnerable. Its Lobby stalwarts in the media and in politics are working hard to disengage the current anti-racism turmoil in the U.S. from any mention of Israel, which trained American police in their “anti-terror” tactics. The Jewish state also practices a far more virulent and brutal racism than anything prevailing in America, something that is becoming increasingly clear to the public. It is early days to be hopeful, but the New York primary election results, coming as they do from a state where Jewish groups wield enormous power, just might be an indication that some things are about to change.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Eliot Engel. Credit: Wilson Center Maternal Health Initiative/ Flickr

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Washington is concerned by the growing Russian influence in Libya as Turkish-led forces are preparing to storm the port city of Sirte, controlled by the Libyan National Army.

On June 26, the US embassy in Libya released a statement claiming that it condemns a “foreign-backed campaign to undermine Libya’s energy sector and prevent the resumption of oil production.”

The statement said that the US shares the “deep concern” of the National Oil Corporation affiliated with the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord about “the shameful interference” of foreign private military contractors against “NOC facilities and personnel at the al-Sharara oil field, which constitutes a direct assault against Libya’s sovereignty and prosperity.”

According to the NOC, on June 25 a convoy of vehicles of Russian private military contractors and other foreign personnel entered the Al-Sharara oilfield and met with representatives of the Petroleum Facilities Guard, a local armed organization allied with the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. The NOC’s chairman Mustafa Sanalla claimed that foreign forces work to “prevent the resumption of oil production” there.

Al-Sharara is the largest Libyan oil field with total proven reserves of 3 billion barrels and an average output of 300,000 barrels per day. It indeed briefly resumed its work in early June when Syrian militants and forces of the Government of National Accord supported by the Turkish military reached the western countryside of the LNA stronghold of Sirte.

However, then, the production there was once again stopped as the LNA stabilized the frontline and demonstrated that it’s still the main power in the east and south of the country.

Earlier, Field Marshal Haftar ordered to block the export of Libyan oil saying that the GNA uses oil revenues to pay Turkey for mercenaries and weapons. The LNA also controls Sirte, the main Libyan port facility for oil exports. So, even in the case of the resumption of the oil output at the frozen oil fields, it’s still able to keep most of its export ban.

The LNA’s prolonged effort against the usage of the country’s natural resources to fund the Turkish intervention of Libya signals that its leadership is still committed to its project of uniting the country and restoring its sovereignty.

LNA forces are preparing to defend Sirte from the large attack for which Turkish-led forces are currently preparing.

Recently, GNA forces and Syrian militant groups deployed west of Sirte received a large batch of weapons and equipment from Turkey. According to photos appearing online, these weapons even included Chinese-made MANPADs of the QW-1 series.

Photos of these MANPADs appeared amid the wave of reports that the LNA Air Force received new combat jets from Russia. While the usage of these mysterious warplanes is still yet to be documented, MANPADs in the hands of Turkish-backed fighters are a confirmed fact.

The Turkish naval group deployed near Libyan shores in the Mediterranean conducts regular readiness drills. In its own turn, the LNA has reportedly prepared Gaddafi-era Scud tactical ballistic missiles for the upcoming battle. Trucks with ballistic missiles moving in the countryside of the city were spotted on June 27.

Pro-GNA sources also claimed that the LNA was deploying additional troops and 2 Pantsir-S air defense systems to Sirte on June 28 and June 29. Without direct military support from abroad the LNA has no resources to overcome the current status quo and deliver a devastating blow to GNA forces assisted by the Turkish military.

However, without larger Turkish involvement in the conflict, GNA forces and Syrian militant groups also lack the needed resources to capture Sirte in the near future.

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“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”—Thomas Paine

“When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”—Marquis De Lafayette

Had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

In fact, Attorney General William Barr recently announced plans to target, track and surveil “anti-government extremists” and preemptively nip in the bud any “threats” to  public safety and the rule of law.

It doesn’t matter that the stated purpose of Barr’s anti-government extremist task force is to investigate dissidents on the far right (the “boogaloo” movement) and far left (antifa, a loosely organized anti-fascist group) who have been accused of instigating violence and disrupting peaceful protests.

Boogaloo and Antifa have given the government the perfect excuse for declaring war (with all that entails: surveillance, threat assessments, pre-crime, etc.) against so-called anti-government extremists.

Without a doubt, America’s revolutionary founders would have been at the top of Barr’s list.

After all, the people who fomented the American Revolution spoke out at rallies, distributed critical pamphlets, wrote scathing editorials and took to the streets in protest. They were rebelling against a government they saw as being excessive in its taxation and spending. For their efforts, they were demonized and painted as an angry mob, extremists akin to terrorists, by the ruler of the day, King George III.

Of course, it doesn’t take much to be considered an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) today.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched by the police, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you’re at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Indeed, under Barr’s new task force, I and every other individual today who dares to speak truth to power could also be targeted for surveillance, because what we’re really dealing with is a government that wants to suppress dangerous words—words about its warring empire, words about its land grabs, words about its militarized police, words about its killing, its poisoning and its corruption—in order to keep its lies going.

This is how the government plans to snuff out any attempts by “we the people” to stand up to its tyranny: under the pretext of rooting out violent extremists, the government’s anti-extremism program will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

The danger is real.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

For example, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists

Incredibly, both reports use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably

That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.

These reports indicate that for the government, anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—can be labeled an extremist.

Fast forward a few years, and you have the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Congress has continually re-upped, that allows the military to take you out of your home, lock you up with no access to friends, family or the courts if you’re seen as an extremist.

Now connect the dots, from the 2009 Extremism reports to the NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies

Add in tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that are beginning to blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the circle, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.

Hopefully you’re getting the picture, which is how easy it is for the government to identify, label and target individuals as “extremist.”

And just like that, we’ve come full circle.

Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off chance you’re doing something illegal.

Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any kind (or anything that resembled a firearm) while in this country, it may get you arrested and, in some circumstances, shot by police.

If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

However, the scenario described above took place more than 200 years ago, when American colonists suffered under Great Britain’s version of an early police state. It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters

No document better states their grievances than the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free.

Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated.

Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don’t bear a startling resemblance to the abuses “we the people” are suffering at the hands of the American police state.

If you find the purple prose used by the Founders hard to decipher, here’s my translation of what the Declaration of Independence would look and sound like if it were written in the modern vernacular:

There comes a time when a populace must stand united and say “enough is enough” to the government’s abuses, even if it means getting rid of the political parties in power. Believing that “we the people” have a natural and divine right to direct our own lives, here are truths about the power of the people and how we arrived at the decision to sever our ties to the government:

All people are created equal. All people possess certain innate rights that no government or agency or individual can take away from them. Among these are the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s job is to protect the people’s innate rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s power comes from the will of the people.

Whenever any government abuses its power, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and replace it with a new government that will respect and protect the rights of the people. It is not wise to get rid of a government for minor transgressions. In fact, as history has shown, people resist change and are inclined to suffer all manner of abuses to which they have become accustomed. However, when the people have been subjected to repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the purpose of establishing a tyrannical government, people have a right and duty to do away with that tyrannical Government and to replace it with a new government that will protect and preserve their innate rights for their future wellbeing.

This is exactly the state of affairs we are suffering under right now, which is why it is necessary that we change this imperial system of government. The history of the present Imperial Government is a history of repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the intention of establishing absolute Tyranny over the country.

To prove this, consider the following:

The government has, through its own negligence and arrogance, refused to adopt urgent and necessary laws for the good of the people. The government has threatened to hold up critical laws unless the people agree to relinquish their right to be fully represented in the Legislature.

In order to expand its power and bring about compliance with its dictates, the government has made it nearly impossible for the people to make their views and needs heard by their representatives. The government has repeatedly suppressed protests arising in response to its actions.

The government has obstructed justice by refusing to appoint judges who respect the Constitution and has instead made the Courts march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

The government has allowed its agents to harass the people, steal from them, jail them and even execute them. The government has directed militarized government agents—a.k.a., a standing army—to police domestic affairs in peacetime. The government has turned the country into a militarized police state.

The government has conspired to undermine the rule of law and the Constitution in order to expand its own powers.

The government has allowed its militarized police to invade our homes and inflict violence on homeowners. The government has failed to hold its agents accountable for wrongdoing and murder under the guise of “qualified immunity.”

The government has jeopardized our international trade agreements. The government has overtaxed us without our permission.

The government has denied us due process and the right to a fair trial. The government has engaged in extraordinary rendition. The government has continued to expand its military empire in collusion with its corporate partners-in-crime and occupy foreign nations.

The government has eroded fundamental legal protections and destabilized the structure of government. The government has not only declared its federal powers superior to those of the states but has also asserted its sovereign power over the rights of “we the people.”

The government has ceased to protect the people and instead waged domestic war against the people. The government has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, and destroyed the lives of the people.

The government has employed private contractors and mercenaries to carry out acts of death, desolation and tyranny against other nations, totally unworthy of a civilized nation. The government through its political propaganda has pitted its citizens against each other. The government has stirred up civil unrest and laid the groundwork for martial law.

Repeatedly, we have asked the government to cease its abuses. Each time, the government has responded with more abuse.

An Imperial Ruler who acts like a tyrant is not fit to govern a free people.

We have repeatedly sounded the alarm to our fellow citizens about the government’s abuses. We have warned them about the government’s power grabs. We have appealed to their sense of justice. We have reminded them of our common bonds. They have rejected our plea for justice and brotherhood. Thus, our fellow citizens are equally at fault for the injustices being carried out by the government.

Thus, for the reasons mentioned above, we the people of the united States of America declare ourselves free from the chains of an abusive government. Relying on the Creator’s protection, we pledge to stand by this Declaration of Independence with our lives, our fortunes and our honor.

See what I mean? The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.

Two hundred and forty-four years after a group of anti-government extremists declared their independence from tyranny, the American people have once again managed to work their way back under the tyrant’s thumb.

“We the people” are still being robbed blind by a government of thieves. We are still being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and monsters. We are still being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We are still being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. We are still being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers.

We are still being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and corporate pirates. And we are still being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army in the form of a militarized police.

The bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight. It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests and by American citizens who failed to heed James Madison’s warning to “take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”

For too long now, we have suffered the injustices of a government that has no regard for our rights or our humanity.

We’ve suffered in silence for too long.

Frankly, what this country desperately needs is more anti-government extremists willing to take the government to task for its excesses, abuses and power grabs that fly in the face of every principle for which America’s founders risked their lives.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The Kafkaesque Imperium has taken yet another absurd step towards mean absurdity with another superseding indictment against Julian Assange.  This move by the US Department of Justice seems to have surprised those involved in his extradition proceedings.  Mark Summers QC, one of the members of the Assange legal team, did not conceal his astonishment at the call over hearing at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court.  “We are surprised by the timing of this development.  We were surprised to hear about it in the press.”

What is baffling about this latest act of brutish pantomime is that the spruced up indictment does not contain new charges so much as added flesh.  WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson could only remark upon this fact with consternation.  We already know the sinister import of the charges, the lion’s share of 17 focused on alleged violations of the US Espionage Act, and one of conspiring to commit computer intrusion. US prosecutors evidently felt that the latter charge required bulking.

On June 24, the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs made mention of a federal grand jury’s return of “a second superseding indictment […] charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” No additional counts are added, but the new document is not immaterial in what it builds upon.  It seeks to draw out the character of Assange as the enterprising “hacker” who also sought to recruit his fellow kind, a move that transparently seeks to undermine any journalistic or publisher credentials. It also casts a wider net against WikiLeaks, its associates and those who gave it a lending hand, while expanding the time line of alleged nefarious acts (no longer restricted to March 2010, it targets alleged activities between 2009 and 2015).  “According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.” 

The document makes mention, for instance, of Sarah Harrison, former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and digital activist Jacob Appelbaum.  It also hones in on Assange on the conference circuit, noting how he, along with “a WikiLeaks associate”, participated at the “Hacking at Random” conference in the Netherlands.  Assange “sought to recruit those who had or could obtain authorized access to classified information and hackers to search for, steal, and send to WikiLeaks the items on the ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ list that was posted on WikiLeaks’s website.” 

Assange is described as encourager and provocateur, suggesting to potential recruits that, “unless they were ‘a serving member of the United States military,’ they would have no legal liability for stealing classified information and giving it to WikiLeaks because ‘TOP SECRET’ meant nothing as a matter of law.” 

Image on the right: Thordarson with Assange

The WikiLeaks Mole: How Siggi Thordarson Betrayed Julian Assange ...

This indictment does little to improve on previous defects.  As Kevin Gosztola writes in the indispensable Shadowproof, the DOJ draws heavily on statements from FBI informants, namely Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson and Hector Xavier Monsegur (“Sabu”) of the LulzSec hacker group.  Thordarson was fired from WikiLeaks in November 2011 after his embezzlement ventures amounting to $50,000 were discovered.  According to WikiLeaks,

“In light of the relentless ongoing prosecution of US authorities against WikiLeaks, it is not surprising that the FBI would try to abuse this troubled young man and involve him in some manner in the attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks staff.” 

The Bureau’s pieces of silver for Thordarson’s services amounted to $5,000.   

Image below: Monsegur (Public Domain)

Monsegur’s part in the whole business was, according to activist Jeremy Hammond and key figure in the hacking of the intelligence firm Stratfor, to entrap WikiLeaks in a cash-for-leaks scheme.  It was also Monsegur who gave the hacker collective AntiSec access to the company’s information trove.  Hammond was duly entrapped in transferring, without his knowledge, confidential data to an FBI server.  Monsegur’s rather smelly pride of place in the indictment is that of allegedly fielding requests from Assange “to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and pdfs.”

Another protagonist also makes an appearance in the prosecutorial show. 

“To encourage leakers and hackers to provide stolen materials to WikiLeaks in the future, Assange and others at WikiLeaks openly displayed their attempts to assist [Edward] Snowden in evading arrest.” 

Harrison, tagged “WLA-4”, is noted as assisting Snowden make his exit from Hong Kong to Moscow in 2013.  The assistance provided by WikiLeaks is deemed conspiratorial; vocalised support for Snowden given by Assange at the Chaos Computer Club conference on December 31, 2013, is trotted as an example of incitement to theft.

Gosztola notes the purposeful mutilations by the prosecutors regarding statements made by Assange regarding radical transparency.  Assange, for instance, is noted as claiming “that ‘the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations’ showed that ‘it was possible now for even a single system administrator to…not merely wreck[] or disabl[e] [organizations]…but rather shift[] information from an information apartheid system…into the knowledge commons”.  The actual quote is more qualified in its philosophical belligerence, emphasising such liberated knowledge as “a disciplining force” and “constructive constraint” upon “those with extraordinary power and information” while also being “used to construct and understand the new world that we’re entering into.”

Assange’s stance on information, and his encouragement to the young to rush into the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency, is taken as an exhortation of bad faith, encouraging the theft of classified information and the ruination of secrecy.  A better reading of this, urges Gosztola, is to see this as a call “to young people to help the public address a crisis of corruption in government by forcing transparency at a time when the government abuses the classified information system to conceal waste, fraud, abuse, and other illegal actions.” 

The new indictment has made something of a mockery of the London extradition proceedings.  Judge Vanessa Baraitser conceded to being informed of the superseding document by email, but still awaits its official receipt.  Prosecution barrister Joel Smith merely remarked that both parties were still pouring over its contents and implications.  “If we need to involve the court … then we will inform the court at the appropriate time.” Summers was less sanguine, suggesting that the expansive larding of the new indictment would affect future management hearings. 

“This shows,” stated Hrafnsson, “how they are abusing due process in the UK and flaunting the legal system’s rules.”

During the hearing, Judge Baraitser was again her merry self, suggesting that Assange had no good reason to avoid attending the call-over session.  According to word from Belmarsh prison officials, he was refusing to attend for fear of contracting COVID-19, which was no reason at all.  Medical evidence had to be supplied for any absence at the next call-over session on July 27.  Another entry into the book of travesty that is this entire affair has been made.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from HoweStreet.com

The Age of Chatham House and the British Roots of NATO

June 30th, 2020 by Matthew Ehret-Kump

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s recent announcement of a NATO 2030 anti-nation state vision to extend the spheres of NATO’s jurisdiction into the Pacific to contain China demonstrates a disturbing ideology which can lead nowhere but World War III if not nipped in the bud soon.

In my previous article NATO 2030: Making a Bad Idea Worse, I promised to shed light on the paradoxical situation of NATO’s unabashed unipolar agenda on one hand and the many examples of President Trump’s resistance to NATO witnessed by his removal of 9500 American personnel from Germany announced on June 11, his cutting of American participation in NATO military exercises, and his recent attacks on the military industrial complex.

The paradox: If NATO is truly a wholly owned tool of the American Empire, then why would the American Empire be at odds with itself?

Of course, this only remains a paradox to the degree that one is committed to the belief in such a thing as “The American Empire”.

Please do not get me wrong here.

I am in no way saying that America has not acted like an empire in recent decades, nor am I romantically trying to whitewash America’s historic tendencies to support colonization and defend systemic racism.

What I am saying is that there are demonstrably now, just as there have been since 1776, TWO opposing dynamics operating within America, where only one is in alignment of the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of independence while the other is entirely in alignment with the ideals of the British Empire and hereditary institutions from which it supposedly broke away.

One America has been defended by great leaders who are too often identified by their untimely deaths while in office, who consistently advanced anti-colonial visions for a world of sovereign nations, win-win cooperation, and the extension of constitutional rights to all classes and races both within America and abroad. The other America has sought only to enmesh itself with the British Empire’s global regime of finance, exploitation, population control and never-ending wars.

Lord Lothian and the White Man’s Burden

These two Americas frustrated Round Table controller Sir Philip Kerr (later “Lord Lothian”) in 1918 who wrote to his fellow Round Tabler Lionel Curtis explaining the “American problem” with the following words:

”There is a fundamentally different concept in regard to this question between Great Britain … and the United States …. as to the necessity of civilized control over politically backward peoples…. The inhabitants of Africa and parts of Asia have proved unable to govern themselves … because they were quite unable to withstand the demoralizing influences [i.e. their desire for modernization and independence–ed.] to which they were subjected in some civilized countries, so that the intervention of an European power is necessary in order to protect them from those influences. The American view… is quite different… The extent of this work after the war, sometimes known as the white man’s burden, will be so vast that it will never be accomplished at all unless it is shared… Yet America not only has no conception of this aspect of the problem but has been led to believe that the assumption of this kind of responsibility is iniquitous imperialism. They take an attitude towards the problem of world government exactly analogous to the one they [earlier] took toward the problem of the world war…. “If they are slow in learning we shall be condemned to a period … of strained relations between the various parts of the English-speaking world. [We must] get into the heads of Canadians and Americans that a share in the burden of world government is just as great and glorious a responsibility as participation in the war” (1)

At the time of Kerr’s writing, the British Roundtable, led by Lord Milner had just orchestrated a British coup in 1916 ousting Labour’s Herbert Asquith in order to bring Milner’s Round Table group into dominance as a shaper of imperial foreign policy at a pivotal moment in history. This coup allowed this group to define the terms of the Post-war world at Versailles).

These imperialists were obsessed with ending the dangerous spread of anti-colonial feelings from India, Ireland, Africa and other nations who firmly believed their sacrifices in WWI merited their independence. Most dangerous of all was that their sentiments were very much shared by many leading members of the American government who rejected the evil philosophical roots of the “white man’s burden”.

Sir Philip Kerr (who later took on the name Lord Lothian before becoming ambassador to America during WWII) and his Round Table gang did everything they could to control the terms of Versailles in 1919 which involved the creation of the League of Nations as a new global political/military hegemon powerful enough to destroy sovereign nation states forever under a new British-run empire.

American resistance to this agenda was so strong that Lothian, Milner and the other leaders of the Round Table soon established a new organization called the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) in 1919 with branches soon set up across what later became the Five Eyes Anglo-Saxon nations. This network would coordinate and adapt 19th century British Imperial policy using new 20th century techniques.

In America, the Round Table decided that the name “American Institute for International Affairs” was a bit too conspicuous and chose instead the name “Council on Foreign Relations” (CFR) in 1921. Canadian, and Australian Institutes for International Affairs were created in 1928 and 1929 accordingly known as the CIIA and AIIA, but for all their efforts, the pro-nation state dynamic within America could not be broken, and the League of Nations soon collapsed along with its ambitions for a global military and banking monopoly (the latter attempt having been officially destroyed by FDR who sabotaged the London Economic Conference of 1933).

The rise of NATO in the wake of WWII and the death of anti-colonialist Franklin Roosevelt can only be understood by keeping this historical dynamic in mind.

NATO’s Birth was August 1947… NOT April 1949

It is popularly believed that NATO was set up on April 4, 1949 as a tool of the American colonialism. The truth is a bit different.

As Cynthia Chung reported in her recent paper “The Enemy Within: A Story of the Purge of American Intelligence”, 1947 was a very bad year for America as a new intelligence agency was created with the birth of the CIA, now purged of all pro-FDR influences who had formerly dominated the OSS. National Security Council paper 75 (NSC-75) was drafted calling for America to defend the possessions of the British Empire under the new Cold War operating system, leading to a new era of Anglo-American assassinations, wars and regime change.

On March 4th, 1947, the Anglo-French Treaty of Dunkirk established a collective defense pact extending itself the next year to include Belgium, France, Luxemourg and the Netherlands under the guise of the Brussels Pact. Both collective defense pacts operated outside of the UN structure but lacked the military teeth needed to give them meaning- all nations of the time having been crippled by the devastation of WWII. Only America had the military might to make this new alliance meaningful as global military force capable of subduing all resistance and usher in world government.

Escott Reid’s NATO Vision of 1947

In a memorandum called “The United States and the Soviet Union” written in August 1947, a highly influential Oxford Rhodes Scholar and radical promoter of global governance named Escott Reid, then Deputy Undersecretary of External Affairs of Canada “recommended that the countries of the North Atlantic band together, under the leadership of the United States, to form ‘a new regional security organization’ to deter Soviet expansion.”

The motive for this memorandum was to escape the Soviet Union’s veto power in the U.N. Security Council, which prevented the British Great Game from moving forward. The goal was to establish an instrument powerful enough to bring about an Anglo-American Empire as desired by Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill and which the League of Nations failed to accomplish.

Escott Reid extrapolated upon his thesis for the creation of such an institution at an August 13, 1947 Canadian Institute of Public Affairs (2) Conference at Lake Couchiching when he stated:

“The states of the Western world are not…debarred by the Charter of the United Nations or by Soviet membership in the United Nations from creating new international political institutions to maintain peace. Nothing in the Charter precludes the existence of regional political arrangements or agencies provided that they are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations, and these regional agencies are entitled to take measures of collective self-defence against armed attack until the Security Council has acted.”

This new anti-Soviet military organization would have the important feature of creating a binding military contract that would go into effect for all members should any individual member go to war. Reid described this intention as he wrote:

“In such an organization each member state could accept a binding obligation to pool the whole of its economic and military resources with those of the other members if any power should be found to have committed aggression against any one of the members.”

It was another year and a half before this structure gained the full support of External Affairs Minister Lester B. Pearson, and British Prime Minister Clement Atlee. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would be formed on April 4, 1949 with its headquarters on 13 Belgrave Square in London.

Image on the right: Escott Reid and Lester B. Pearson: Both Roundtable Oxford Men

Reid had made a name for himself serving as the first Permanent Secretary of the Canadian Institute for International Affairs (CIIA), also known as the Canadian Branch of Chatham House/Roundtable Movement of Canada under the direction of CIIA controller Vincent Massey. Massey was the protégé of racist imperialist Lord Alfred Milner and the controller of the Rhodes Scholar groups of Canada throughout a career that saw him act as Canadian Ambassador to Washington (1926-1930), Liberal Party President (1930-1935), Ambassador to Britain (1935-1945) and Head of State (aka: Governor General of Canada (1952-1959). Reid himself was the founder of the self-professed “Canadian Fabian Society” alongside four other Rhodes scholars known as the eugenics-promoting technocratic League of Social Reconstruction (LSR) in 1932, whose name changed to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1933 and again later to the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961 (3).

Reid spent years working closely with fellow Oxford Massey Scholar Lester B. Pearson, who himself was Vincent Massey’s assistant in London before becoming a controller of the Liberal Party of Canada.

The Racist Agenda Behind the Rhodes Trust

It is vital to remind ourselves that these networks were driven by the design outlined by genocidal diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, who wrote the purpose for the Scholarship that was to receive his name in his First Will (1877):

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object – the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”

Later in that will, Rhodes elaborated in greater detail upon the intention which was soon to become official British foreign policy.

“The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy land, the valley of Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British empire. The consolidation of the whole empire, the inauguration of a system of colonial representation in the Imperial parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the empire”

The “recovery of the United States” should seriously resonate with anyone with doubts over the role of the British Empire’s ambition to undo the international effects of the American Revolution and should also cause honest citizens to reconsider what nationalist Presidents like John F. Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle were actually struggling against when they stood up to the power structures of NATO and the Deep State. This should be kept in mind as one thinks of the British-steered networks that ran the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, as well as the attempted Russia-Gating of Donald Trump in our modern day.

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Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. The author can be reached at [email protected]

The author wrote a larger series of studies on this Round Table-driven world history under the title “Origins of the Deep State in North America parts 1-3 and an even fuller picture is told in volume 4 of The Untold History of Canada.

Notes

(1) Lothian to Lionel Curtis, Oct. 15, 1918, in Butler, Lord Lothian, pp. 68-70.

(2) The Canadian Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) was created in 1935 as an affiliate to the Canadian Round Table in order to shape national internal policy while the CIIA focused upon Canada’s foreign policy. Original featured speakers were the CIIA’s Norman Mackenzie, and the eugenicist leader of the newly created CCF Party J.S. Woodsworth. It would be another 20 years before both organizations began to jointly host conferences together. Today, CIPA exists in the form of the Couchiching Conferences and their regular brainwashing seminars have been broadcast across the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for over 70 years.

(3) Reid’s other Rhodes Scholar co-founders of the LSR were Eugene Forsey, F.R. Scott, and David Lewis. Frank Underhill was a Fabian Society member. Rhodes Scholar F.R. Scott became a leading mentor of a young recruit of the Fabian Society named Pierre Elliot Trudeau upon the latter’s 1949 return from the London School of Economics in order to work in Ottawa’s Privy Council Office. This Trudeau went on to groom himself as a CCF member before being selected to take over the Liberal Party after the ouster of pro-nationalist forces who had led the Liberals from 1935-1958.

All Reid quotes are taken from Escott Reid, Couchiching and the Birth of NATO by Cameron Campbell, published by the Atlantic Council of Canada.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

US anti-China legislation dates from the mid-19th century, including measures to prohibit or limit emigration of its nationals to America.

Today, US war on China by other means rages with no end of it in prospect, things worsening, not improving, a situation fraught with dangers.

Measures introduced or adopted by Congress since late 2019, including what’s signed into US law, include:

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, wrongfully blaming China for months of made-in-the-US violence, vandalism, and chaos in the city.

The Uygher Human Rights Policy Act: The world’s leading human rights abuser USA calls for sanctioning China over alleged mistreatment of these people.

Credible evidence backing claims about its alleged detention of millions of Uyghurs in so-called  Xinjiang “re-education camps” is sorely lacking.

The measure also requires the director of national intelligence (DNI) to report regularly on the alleged threats of Chinese hegemony over the global 5G wireless infrastructure buildout, falsely claiming it poses a threat to US national security.

The Chinese Government COVID-19 Accountability Act — wanting Beijing falsely blamed for spreading outbreaks worldwide.

The China Hong Kong Autonomy Act, calling for sanctions on Chinese entities that allegedly violate Beijing’s “obligations” to the city, along with secondary sanctions on banks doing business with sanctioned entities.

The Trump regime imposed visa restrictions on current and former Chinese officials — on the phony pretext of undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy, “human rights and fundamental freedoms…”

Earlier in June, Pompeo falsely claimed Europe is being “forced to choose between the United States and China (sic).”

No either or choice exists. Yet he tried to pressure EU countries away from normal relations with China, wanting US interests served at Beijing’s expense.

In May, the Senate passed the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act by unanimous consent.

With overwhelming or unanimous House adoption virtually certain, it’s heading toward becoming US law.

The measure calls for delisting Chinese firms from US exchanges.

Introduced by Senators John Kennedy and Chris Van Hollen, their press release falsely claimed the measure aims “to protect American investors and their retirement savings from foreign companies (that flout SEC) oversight (sic),” adding:

“(W)e’re giving Chinese companies the opportunity to exploit hardworking Americans…because we don’t insist on examining their books (sic).”

“China is on a glide path to dominance and is cheating at every turn (sic).”

The measure is one of numerous US anti-China actions that jeopardize bilateral relations, risking confrontation between both countries.

If adopted as US law ahead, what’s highly likely, the measure to delist Chinese firms with market values of around $1.3 trillion from US exchanges will deprive them of access to the world’s largest capital markets.

It’ll give all Chinese companies pause about listing on US exchanges ahead, including privately owned ones that consider going public in the US.

They’ll be more likely to list on the Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges instead.

The measure calls for foreign firms listed on US exchanges to be audited for certification by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

If the Board is unable to audit a company for three consecutive years, it’ll be delisted from a US exchange.

Chinese firms on US exchanges must disclose whether Beijing officials have a financial interest in them.

According to US-China Business Council director of government affairs Anna Ashton, the measure is “another instance among many (that the US) approach (toward) China wasn’t completely thought through.”

US investment firms and individuals with large-scale Chinese holdings will be adversely affected if these firms are delisted.

Economist Rory Green noted that it’ll be “almost impossible for fund managers to match or outperform the MSCI China (Index) if they do not own companies like Alibaba, and to a lesser extent Baidu, NetEase and JD.”

Morningstar explained that Chinese American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) represent 35% of emerging market funds.

Only three large Chinese firms are listed on both New York and Hong Kong exchanges.

With this measure likely to become US law ahead, it’ll widen the breach between both countries more than already — more congressional anti-China actions likely to follow.

Last week, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) cited “Chinese experts” who warned of a growing “risk of a military confrontation between” both countries.

According to National Institute for South China Sea Studies president Wu Shicun, Sino/US political distrust led to shutting down “intergovernmental communication channels.”

Communications between the Pentagon and China’s military have been “in sharp decline since 2018.”

Wu noted that “the risks of conflict are rising, especially after the near-collision between the USS Decatur guided-missile destroyer and China’s destroyer the Lanzhou in September in the South China Sea.”

So-called US freedom of navigation exercises are provocative intrusions in parts of the world not its own.

Instead of going all-out to reduce tensions with China, Russia, Iran, and other sovereign independent countries, provocative US actions heighten them.

According to commander of US Naval Forces in Europe, Africa, and NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Admiral James Foggo:

“NATO can no longer ignore China’s activities in Europe.” Citing no credible evidence, he falsely claimed Beijing aims to undermine the international rules-based order.

Claiming as well that it maintained peace throughout the post-WW II era ignored endless US preemptive wars against invented enemies.

Is US conflict with China inevitable — given the country’s growing prominence on the world stage while the US declines?

Does Washington’s drive for unchallenged dominance risk unthinkable nuclear war if it pushes things too far??

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Video: UN Agenda 2030 Exposed

June 29th, 2020 by Rosa Koire

This video first published in May 2019 brings to the forefront an incisive and carefully documented understanding of the current corona crisis and its aftermath in the wake of the lockdown.

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UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the action plan implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world. INVENTORY AND CONTROL.

It is a plan that was agreed to by 179 nations back in 1992, it’s the United Nations plan called the Agenda for the 21st century.

It is about moving populations into concentrated city centers and clearing them out of rural areas.

-Rosa Koire

Watch the interview below to learn more about the UN Agenda 2030.

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Selected Articles: US War Crimes: The Massacre at My Lai

June 29th, 2020 by Global Research News

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Сriminal Roots of Kosovo Further Exposed by Thaçi’s Indictment in The Hague

By Paul Antonopoulos, June 29, 2020

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić was due to meet Kosovo leader Hashim Thaçi on Saturday at the White House. This was at the behest of US envoy for Kosovo-Serbia negotiations, Richard Grenell, after his much-publicized success in organizing the meeting. However, his success was short lived after Thaçi became indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity on June 24 by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office.

EU Parliament Members Expose 5G Safety Authority Being Influenced by Telecom Industry

By Environmental Health Trust, June 29, 2020

A new report released by European Members of Parliments Michèle Rivasi (Europe Écologie) and Dr. Klaus Buchner (Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei) accuses the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), an organization many governments consider an authority on the safety of 5G and cell phone radiation, of being under the influence of the telecommunications industry and ignoring the science showing their harmful effects.

How a False Hydroxychloroquine Narrative Was Created. “Dangerous” When Used for Covid-19

By Dr. Meryl Nass, June 29, 2020

It is remarkable that a series of events taking place over the past 3 months produced a unified message about hydroxychloroquine, and produced similar policies about the drug in the US, Canada, Australia, NZ and western Europe.  The message is that generic, inexpensive hydroxychloroquine is dangerous and should not be used to treat a potentially fatal disease, Covid-19, for which there are no (other) reliable treatments.

First You Bomb and Starve a Country. Then You’re Praised for Sending in Aid.

By Sarah Lazare, June 29, 2020

The United Nations describes itself in its charter as an international moral authority created to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” But activists who are trying to end the U.S. war on Yemen say that, in a dark twist on this mission, the international body is withholding criticism from the U.S.-Saudi military coalition, and effusively praising its leaders, to avoid jeopardizing donations to humanitarian funds aimed at helping ease the suffering created by that war. As Jehan Hakim, the chair of the Yemeni Alliance Committee, puts it, “The same hand we’re asking to feed Yemen is the same hand that is helping bomb them.”

US War Crimes: The Massacre at My Lai

By Seymour M. Hersh, June 29, 2020

Early on March 16, 1968, a company of soldiers in the United States Army’s Americal Division were dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam. A hundred G.I.s and officers stormed the hamlet in military-textbook style, advancing by platoons; the troops expected to engage the Vietcong Local Force 48th Battalion—one of the enemy’s most successful units—but instead they found women, children, and old men, many of them still cooking their breakfast rice over outdoor fires. During the next few hours, the civilians were murdered. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, others were flung into a drainage ditch at one edge of the hamlet and shot, and many more were shot at random in or near their homes.

While the World Burns, the Road Map to War with Iran Continues

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, June 29, 2020

Let’s face it, the long prediction held by many all agree on one thing, the US empire is on the way into the dustbins of history, but not without a fight to the end.  Geopolitically speaking, the US military-industrial complex is still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq and is seeking to increase tensions with China, Iran and Venezuela.  It will cost the US taxpayers trillions of dollars more on top of the trillions already spent on war, covert actions involving intelligence gathering, targeted assassinations and regime change operations. There is also the fact that several major powers including Russia, China, Iran and several others are dumping US dollars to reduce their exposure to sanctions constantly imposed by Washington.

Sudan: Popular Struggles, Elite Compromises, and Revolution Betrayed

By John Young, June 29, 2020

After more than six months of sustained and growing demonstrations across Sudan demanding the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir, on 11 April 2019  the military placed him under arrest and attempted to rule the country for an indeterminate period before national elections would be held.  This was the course taken by a previous generation of military officers in 1985 after similar country-wide demonstrations to remove President Jafaar Nimeiri, who like al-Bashir had come to power by overthrowing an elected government.  After a one-year transitional military government dedicated to advancing the interests of Islamists and quashing the demands of the protestors an election was held in 1986 that brought Sudan’s traditional elites under Sadiq el-Mahdi to power.

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Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić was due to meet Kosovo leader Hashim Thaçi on Saturday at the White House. This was at the behest of US envoy for Kosovo-Serbia negotiations, Richard Grenell, after his much-publicized success in organizing the meeting. However, his success was short lived after Thaçi became indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity on June 24 by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office.

The US meeting has been put on hold until further notice, but as Vučić revealed, the EU will take over discussions between Belgrade and Pristina at a later date. It appears that France and Germany specifically will spearhead these meeting with the French Embassy in Kosovo saying on Thursday that “France and Germany expect Dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia to resume soon. Together with Chancellor Merkel, President Macron remains ready to host a Summit in Paris.” German Ambassador to Kosovo Christian Heldt tweeted:

“Our governments stand ready to be helpful with [a] proposed meeting in July.”

Due to prosecutors in The Hague indicting Thaçi’s alleged war crimes during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, Kosovo’s new prime minister, Avdullah Hoti, said he could not travel to Washington to conduct talks with Serbia.

“Thank you, Prime Minister Hoti. We understand your decision and we look forward to rescheduling the meeting soon,” Grenell wrote on Twitter.

US President Donald Trump was hoping for a foreign policy victory just before the upcoming elections, but rather, the Kosovo experiment created by Bill Clinton in the 1990’s is beginning to crack. Thaçi in 1993 became a prominent member of the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) and became responsible for the finances and armaments of the terrorist organization. The KLA financed its activities by turning Kosovo into a drug smuggling hub to distribute heroin and cocaine throughout Europe.

A 2008 report by German intelligence service BND accuses Thaçi of having deep involvement in organized crime, saying that

“The key players (including Thaçi) are intimately involved in inter-linkages between politics, business, and organised crime structures in Kosovo,” and that Thaçi is leading a “criminal network operating throughout Kosovo.”

The charges laid against him by the prosecutor’s office in The Hague include murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture. He has also been accused of organ harvesting and drug trafficking by other reports and institutions. Although he has not been found guilty, it is well established that the KLA engaged in such activities, putting a mockery to the Albanian and Serbian Caucuses of US Congress suggestion in 2014 that Thaçi be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Geneva School of Diplomacy giving him a Doctor Honoris Causa degree as a Doctor of International Relations, and the Montenegrin town of Ulcinj giving him the title of Honorary Citizen of Ulcinj.

Before the scheduled meeting, Vučić said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov informed him about worrying information concerning various Western plans and ideas regarding the solution to the Kosovo crisis. Vučić pointed out that he exchanged opinions with Lavrov on a number of issues but that the key topic was the relationship between the two countries and Russia’s support for the integrity of Serbia and the situation in Kosovo.

“We received certain assessments from the Russian Federation […] which worried me. They concern various plans and ideas regarding the solution to the Kosovo crisis. I do not want to deceive anyone and hide from the public: obviously we are facing a difficult period, in which we will face great pressure to realize some plans that we did not officially or unofficially get, but based on the assessments of our Russian friends, it seems that we will have to be very careful in following every idea that is presented to us,” Vučić said at the press conference after their meeting.

Thanking Russia for supporting Serbia in the United Nations and in all international forums, Vučić said that it had been agreed that Serbia would consult with Russia on an almost daily basis, emphasizing that one thing was clear:

“If at any time and in any place a solution is reached, any solution requires the consent of Russia. We do not want everyone else to be consulted without anyone asking Russia anything.”

He added that Russia supported the dialogue under the auspices of the EU, while Serbia is ready to listen to all other political actors and their ideas. He emphasized that Serbia will be able to protect its vital national interests, regardless of the price it will have to pay.

It begs the question whether the Trump administration now has the willingness to come up with a solution for Kosovo, especially as it is evident that the Albanians are connected with the Democrats in the U.S. and the criminal roots of Kosovo’s independence are being further exposed. The indictment against Thaçi is a major embarrassment for Washington as they have been the main backers of the illegal separation of Kosovo from Serbia. If Thaçi’s allegations are proven true by The Hague, it would mean Washington would have always known about the criminal activities of the KLA and the ongoing criminality in Kosovo’s government, but chose to ignore them to carve out a pro-US state from a pro-Russia Serbia.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

After the coronavirus crisis, the state will likely play a much larger role in the economy. But its interventions will serve the interests of the wealthy – unless the Left gets organised, argues Richard Burgon.

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As the coronavirus death toll mounts, the failings of particular states have come into even sharper focus. The UK, Brazil and the USA are three of the worst performing countries in the world. It’s no coincidence that all three have neoliberal governments.  Our government has overseen the needless deaths of tens of thousands of citizens already – a heartbreaking 40,000 excess deaths could have been avoided, according to the former Chief Scientific Adviser. This tragic death toll was not inevitable but the result of woeful public policy responses. 

To highlight how different it could have been, we need only compare our death toll with that of South Korea, a nation not that different to ours in population size or GDP. Had we matched its much lower coronavirus death rate, the UK would have suffered fewer than 400 fatalities. 

Our government, the institution that is meant to defend its people, has failed us. But why did this happen? 

Neoliberal Failure

As demoralising as it is to be led by such a blundering Prime Minister during the most serious crisis in recent history, this is not simply the fault of one incompetent. A decade of austerity and a 40-year period dominated by neoliberalism left us woefully underprepared for this crisis. As George Monbiot put it, “privatisation, commercialisation, outsourcing and offshoring have severely compromised the UK’s ability to respond to a crisis”. 

The new track and trace system is a case study illustrating everything wrong with the UK’s failed neoliberal state. Serco, a company notorious for defrauding the state by charging for tagging people who were either dead, in jail, or had left the country and which had to pay tens of millions in fines, has been awarded the contract.

A sensitive and skilled area of public health intervention is in the hands of a corporate giant that is employing non-experts working from call centres reportedly on not much more than the minimum wage. While other nations got robust tracking and tracing systems up and running in weeks, the UK’s system won’t be at full speed until the autumn. Scientists are warning it is doomed to fail. But for Serco, this is a chance to “cement the position of the private sector in the NHS supply chain”. 

Such decisions are, of course, driven by profit and the all-too-cosy relationship between politics and big business interests. But they also reflect a political culture warped by decades of ideological adherence to the view that government intervention is inherently bad and things are best left to the market. 

Perhaps this instinctive aversion to state intervention also partly explains Boris Johnson’s catastrophic delay in bringing in lockdown? The Sunday Times estimates the number of coronavirus cases soared from around 14,000 to 1.5 million in a three-week period when the government dithered and delayed before locking down, even though other countries had already done so.

Many have speculated that the Prime Minister’s reluctance for government to put any limits on individuals and markets was one the reason for this delay. 

End of Business as Usual

Forty years of neoliberal dogma means there is virtually no area of our society which is not now treated as a marketplace. But faced with the obvious failings of the coronavirus catastrophe and the greatest economic downturn in 300 years, how will neoliberal states respond to the economic crisis set to follow hot on the heels of the public health disaster? ‘Business as usual’ simply won’t do when the Bank of England forecasts the UK economy will plunge by almost 30 percent in the first half of the year. Just as we saw initially with the banking crisis, the scale of the downturn will mean huge state intervention – at least in the short term. 

Will that mean that neoliberalism is dead? That there’s now a Keynesian consensus? Will it mean that socialists have won the argument that the government should intervene to protect the economic interests of the majority? It would be a big mistake to think so. 

The key question we will have to address in the coming months is not whether the state will play a greater role, but in whose interests will it act? 

State and Market

A greater role for the state in the economy should not be confused with the socialist perspective of an economy that serves the majority. In our capitalist society, a key function of the state has always been to intervene to boost corporate incomes – through direct handouts, awarding contracts, privatisations or securing the market conditions that maximise profits. While advocating the retreat of the state from areas which are necessary to protect the interests of the majority, neoliberalism has always simultaneously used the state as a weapon to advance and protect the interests of the privileged minority it exists to serve. In fact, from the inception of neoliberalism, in the testing grounds of Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship, a strong state was used to deliver market conditions that enriched the elites.

Likewise, the tens of billions handed to British banks after the 2008 crash and the huge amounts spent on militarising the US police force (at the expense of funding other essential public services) underlines how much increased state spending can be used against the interest of the working class. 

We already seen this so-called “socialism for the rich” during the current crisis with, for example, Trump delivering the largest corporate bailout in history while providing barely a few crumbs for the working class.

And in the UK, while a number of welcome temporary measures such as the furlough scheme have aided both companies and workers, the government has refused to implement simple measures which would have benefitted the working class, including proper sick pay, rent cancellations or even securing minimum wage payments for furloughed workers.  

Intensified Class Struggle

With the scale of the economic collapse to come, huge economic and social questions will be posed. We should not for a moment believe that this crisis will in and of itself create a new left-wing consensus around the state and the economy. Such a shift in direction will only ever be the result of the Left waging a political struggle. But a new settlement will emerge from this crisis. It’s our job to determine what that new settlement is and whose interests it serves. Anyone familiar with Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine will know that free-market ideologues will be intending to reshape society out of this crisis in the interests of the 1 percent. Of course that may be – as some Tories are pushing for – in the form of austerity, perhaps cutting back key social services at the same time as other parts of the state are expanded in the interest of capital.

But it could take other forms of boosting the interests of the capitalist class such as corporate giveaways, tax cuts or using the threat of mass unemployment as an opportunity for further anti-worker employment deregulation. British Airways’ scandalous plans to sack tens of thousands of employees only to re-employ many on worse terms and conditions cannot be allowed to become a blueprint for the wider economy. 

Just as the elites will be planning how to reshape the economy post-coronavirus, we need to define our agenda. Had we won the election, we would now have a socialist-led government not simply seeking to manage the state but to fundamentally reform it by redistributing wealth, power and control. This, of course, explains the ferocity of the onslaught to prevent a Corbyn government coming to pass. 

But even if there is no likelihood of any such shift without a huge socialist electoral advance, we can still win important concessions over the next period. The instincts, culture and ideology of the state will be to shore up corporate interests but we can still push for a better path, as the US protests to move resources from militarising the police and into essential public services have shown. 

That means intensifying the struggle both inside and outside parliament. With a Conservative majority of 80 seats in parliament, focusing solely on parliamentary procedures would doom ourselves to defeat after defeat in the crucial battles for the future of our society that are coming our way. We need to renew the links between the parliamentary socialist Left, socialist activists, the trade union movement and wider grassroots movements.

A State that Serves People and Planet

On the Left, we need to take advantage of any shift in the narrative around a greater role for the state to fight for this to serve the 99% and not the 1%. That means we need to be calling for state interventions that transition the economy into the industries we need for the future, not providing more life-support for a broken economy that for decades has failed people and planet. 

Most obviously that means demanding a Green New Deal, building on the work that Labour undertook ahead of the last general election to focus on radical carbon reduction alongside local economic regeneration. 

[GR Editor’s Note: The Green New Deal is controlled by the financial establishment. It is not a solution]

It also means huge investment in public works to kick-start the economy, to prepare us for the next crisis – whether it be social, health or environmental – and to rebuild our public services, housing and social care, the weaknesses of which have been badly exposed by the shock of coronavirus. Given the failings in the state’s response to Coronavirus, we can win widespread public backing for such change.

Likewise, we need to demand that the state invests to address the huge structural inequalities in healthcare, housing, education and employment which especially affect black communities so that the words of support from politicians for Black Lives Matter are translated into real longstanding change. 

Where corporations do receive bailouts, these need to be conditional on wider social, environmental and labour demands such as workers’ representation on boards and workers’ stake in the companies, restrictions on dividend payments, better pay for workers and action to close pay differentials. 

And we need to be demanding part state ownership of any bailed-out companies so that these can form part of an active government economic plan that serves the public interest into the future. 

As economist Mariana Mazzucato has explained, governments have the upper hand in negotiating with the private sector. We must ensure it uses it. 

The unprecedented public health crisis has now created an unprecedented economic crisis. The neoliberal model has no solutions to any of this. Socialists have a duty to ensure that its days are numbered and that it is replaced by policies that can deal with the mounting crises our communities face.

That means making the case for an interventionist state, but one whose role is to radically reform society for the benefit of the vast majority. Not one that rescues powerful profiteers and an economic model designed to serve the interests of the privileged few.

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Richard Burgon is the Labour Party member of parliament for Leeds East. He is the Secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs.

Featured image is from Tribune

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Video: The Concept of Social Distancing in Schools

June 29th, 2020 by Leigh Dundas

Many educators and parents are struggling with the concept of social distancing in schools. Here are some lesser known facts about social distancing and isolation:

• It was developed 70 years ago by the CIA to break down enemies of state.

• It is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day AND being an alcoholic.

• It doubles the risk of death, and destroys the part of the brain responsible for learning.

To learn more about the secret military meeting in Canada in the 1950’s that gave rise to social distancing and isolation techniques – and to learn the basis for the “six foot distance rule” during times of COVID — watch this video.

Bottom line? The CA Department of Education has no business deploying CIA protocols — still used to this day to break down enemies because they are more effective than physical torture — against kindergardeners in classrooms.

Particularly since adoption of the 6 foot rule will force CA schools into a hybrid “remote learning” model – where students will only be able to be on-campus part time – which will unfairly disadvantage the 43% of California’s students who are from lower socio-economic families. By fifth grade, these children are already testing 2-3 years behind their counterparts. Because they are poor, they often do not have any parent home with them during the day, and further lack computers and consistent internet connections.

To deploy remote learning against these children is an educational death sentence – simply put, they will never catch up to their peers.

Call and email California State Department of Education and Superintendent Tony Thurmond (916-319-0800 and [email protected]) — and do the same with your County Board of Education, your local school district and your child’s principal — and tell them: NO SOCIAL DISTANCING, and NO REMOTE LEARNING.

PS: For those concerned about sending kids to school this Fall, there is good news:

• A child’s risk of dying from COVID is 0.0%, per the CDC.

• No child has passed on COVID to a family member or third party (they do not transmit).

Visit www.Citizens-Rights.org (resource tab) for more data.

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A new report released by European Members of Parliments Michèle Rivasi (Europe Écologie) and Dr. Klaus Buchner (Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei) accuses the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), an organization many governments consider an authority on the safety of 5G and cell phone radiation, of being under the influence of the telecommunications industry and ignoring the science showing their harmful effects. 

The report written by Hans van Scharen and edited by Tomas Vanheste and Erik Lambert is entitled, “The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection: Conflicts of Interest, Corporate Capture and the Push for 5G.”

“We applaud European Members of Parliment Michèle Rivasi and Dr. Klaus Buchner, who bravely sponsored a new report exposing the corruption of the science of 5G and cell phone radiation. The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, is a small, private organization found to be  ‘a closed circle of like-minded scientists,’ who have turned ICNIRP into a ‘self-indulgent science club, with a lack of biomedical expertise, as well as a lack of scientific expertise’ in specific risk assessments,” said Theodora Scarato, Executive Director of Environmental Health Trust.

Scarato continued,

“Although  ICNIRP is recognized by the World Health Organization as an ‘independent scientific commission,’ the report concludes that it is a ‘closed, non-accountable and one-sided organization’ and ‘for really independent scientific advice, we cannot rely on ICNIRP. ‘ We agree that ‘The European Commission and national governments from countries like Germany should stop funding ICNIRP.  It is high time that the European Commission creates a new, public and fully independent advisory council on non-ionizing radiation.’”

Investigative research by Environmental Health Trust, Mona Nielsson, the Bioinitiative, Investigate Europe, Microwave News, Don Maisch PHD, AVAATE, the Oceania Radiofrequency Scientific Advisory Association, and Dr. Lennart Hardell were referenced in the 98-page report.

The Major French newspaper Le Monde published an article on the investigation “5G: the impartiality of the committee which guides Europe to protect the population from the waves in question.” 

Download the new report, “The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection: Conflicts of Interest,  Corporate Capture and the Push for 5G” issued by Klaus Buchner and  Michèle Rivasi.

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The Dutch Government has devised an evidence-proof scheme for ensuring the trial of the Russian government for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 will end in a conviction.

This scheme will work without evidence to prove that the four men accused of the crime of shooting down the aircraft, killing the 298 passengers and crew on board on July 17, 2014, intended to kill; or even intended to fire the missile which allegedly brought MH17 down.

The Dutch scheme is evidence-proof because no evidence will be needed, not from US satellite photographs which are missing; nor NATO airborne tracking which shows no missile; nor Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) evidence which has proved to have been fabricated, and in the case of Ukrainian witnesses for the prosecution, threatened, tortured or bribed.

The scheme is also evidence-proof because the Dutch Prime Minister has told the Dutch Minister of Justice to order the state prosecutors to tell the state-appointed judge that he must convict the Russians if he finds as proven that MH17 crashed to the ground in eastern Ukraine; that everyone on board was killed; and that the four soldiers accused – three Russians and one Ukrainian – were on the ground fighting.

International war crimes lawyers are calling this a legal travesty. It was presented in court near Amsterdam by Dutch state prosecutor Thijs Berger on June 10. It has gone unnoticed in the mainstream western media. Russian reporters following the trial have missed it. The scheme was first reported in English and Russian by a NATO propaganda unit on June 12.

As a prosecutor of the Dutch War Crimes Unit, a state entity, Berger has been employed in the past to prosecute the targets of wars fought by the Dutch, alongside NATO and the US, in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. In Europe his group prosecuted war crimes alleged by the NATO alliance in its war on Serbia from March to June of 1999.  A recent report [2] to which Berger contributed, entitled Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review 2019,  identifies a case which Berger pursued of war crimes in Afghanistan; those alleged crimes were not of the US and allied forces in Afghanistan, but of the local Afghans defending themselves.

Prosecutor Thijs Berger announces [3] the evidence-proof scheme of Article 168.  The legal loophole is spelled out over six minutes – Min 3:31:00 to 3:37:00.

For his presentation to presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis, Berger read from a multi-page script authorized by his superiors in the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. They and he  repeatedly made the mistake of calling the charges in the prosecution’s indictment – Articles 168, 287 and 298 – provisions of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure. This is the procedure code; its provisions are called articles in the original Dutch, but sections in the English version. [4]

The charges of the indictment are from the Dutch Criminal Code. They are called articles in court; they are called articles in the Dutch statute [5]  but sections in the official English translation.

Source: The Dutch Criminal Code [6]

For analysis of how the prosecution has manipulated both the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure in the MH17 trial preliminaries, read this [7].

“The scope of the indictment,” Berger began his legal argument, is that together, the four defendants — Igor Girkin (Strelkov),  Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov,  who are Russians, and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian – played “a steering, organizing,  and supporting role in deploying the BUK-Telar [missile and radar unit]” to shoot down MH 17 (Min 3:25:22). They were members of an “armed group” engaged in “armed struggle, the purpose being to shoot down an aircraft” (Min 3:27:20-21). Note the indefinite article – an aircraft.  The prosecution is charging the four with capital crimes for defending themselves from attack by the Ukrainian Air Force. This, however, is not mentioned by the prosecution.

“They are not being prosecuted,” Berger went on, “as the persons who actually carried out the firing process” (Min 3:38:22). “We do not need evidence as to the exact cause of events in order to be able to judge the accused” (Min 3:28:27). Homicide or murder, Berger conceded, is in Dutch law “death caused intentionally” (Min 3:29:15).  But the crimes which must be judged by Steenhuis and his panel of The Hague District Court, he claims aren’t homicide in the usual  legal sense. “The exact course of events need not be established” (Min 3:30:43), Berger told Steenhuis. So the prosecution does not need to prove what happened. “That the missile which hit the MH17 could possibly have been meant and intended for a military aircraft doesn’t change these facts” (Min 3:31:17).

“None of the charges in the indictment requires intention concerning the civilian nature of the aircraft or the occupants. The crimes in the indictment forbid the downing of any aircraft; this is Article 168 of the Code of Criminal Procedure [sic]; and also forbid causing the deaths of others under Articles 287 and 289 irrespective of whether the aircraft has a military or civilian status, and an error in the target doesn’t really make a difference for the evidence that these crimes have been committed.  So no evidence is required that the accused should have had the intention to shoot down a civilian aircraft” (Min 3:32:00).

“It was their intention to down a military aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force” (Min 3:32:28), Berger claims his evidence of the SBU telephone tapes and witnesses proves.  “Those who intend to shoot down a military aircraft and subsequently,  accidentally,  hit a civilian aircraft are guilty of causing an aircraft to crash according to Article 168 of the Code of Criminal Procedure [sic];  but also guilty of murder of the occupants according to Article 289 of the Code of Criminal Procedure [sic]” (Min 3:33:04).

In a regular court of law in England, Australia, Canada or the US, a prosecutor’s legal argument is always presented with explicit references to the case law. That’s the accumulation of judgements by courts going back as far as the history of the crime and of the statute can be traced. These are the precedents which, in international law and in Dutch law too, must be followed by judges hearing cases to which these precedents apply.  This reflects the accepted notion that law is cumulative, and that judges administer and interpret that law; they don’t issue personal opinions or preferences.

Berger didn’t identify any Dutch case law or provide the court with precedents in previous cases decided by the Dutch courts.

The reason is that there are none , explains a veteran Dutch judge who was asked this week to identify the case law on Article 168. The judge replied: “It’s sufficient to establish that the defendant had the intention to take down some aircraft and that he should have seriously taken into consideration the chance that he would hit an aircraft such as the MH-17. That’s called conditional intent — voorwaardelijk opzet in Dutch… Answering this question [of precedents] took a bit more time. I couldn’t find any case law that would be relevant to the issue. Article 168 is not used very often.”

Conditional intent doesn’t exist in Anglo-American law. But in Dutch law, the concept has not (repeat never) been applied to cases of warfare, or in situations of military engagement where men are attacking and defending themselves. For a Dutch review of the court precedents for application of voorwaardelijk opzet to deaths caused by a drunk driver and a poisoning, read this   [8]– Sect. 3.3.1.  Fatal traffic offences committed by drunken drivers are the typical homicides in which Dutch prosecutors apply the doctrine of conditional intent; the case law and precedents are reviewed here [9].   No Dutch lawyer, judge or court has ever applied this to warfare.

Berger knows this; so does Steenhuis. They also know there is voluminous case law in the international courts dealing with similar facts to those of the MH17 case and of the combat in which the four defendants were engaged; for a sample Dutch law review, read this [10].

Again,  Berger ignored what no prosecutor outside The Netherlands would attempt in front of a judge. “We are aware,” Berger told Steenhuis, “of academic comments that imply that Article 168 would require intention in killing civilians [Min 3:33:04]. But this is incorrect. Article 168 does not require any intention for the death of the occupants” (Min 3:33:34).

The NATO propaganda unit Bellingcat repeated this claim in a publication [11] two days after Berger’s presentation. The Article 168 argument, repeated from Berger’s script, will prove to be a “boomerang” for the Russian government, NATO officials are now claiming. “It is only a question of time, therefore, that the Dutch prosecution brings murder charges against Russian top military commanders.  Unlike the case with the 4 defendants, they would easily have obtained combatant immunity, if only they – and their supreme commander – had admitted to being part of the war. But they – and he – continuously denied, and this alone makes immunity impossible. Also unlike the 4 defendants, the political price that Russia will pay such indictments will be much higher. It is one thing for 3 Russian ‘volunteers’, forgotten by most, to spend the rest of their life holed up at home and afraid to take any trip abroad.  It’s an altogether different story when top Mod [Ministry of Defence]  and FSB officials – and maybe even a minister – are charged with murder of 298 civilians and end up on the Interpol red-notice list.”

International lawyers already before the European Court of Human Rights are arguing that the “boomerang” strikes the government in Kiev first, because it was ordering combat in eastern Ukraine, including orders for bombing and strafing by the Ukrainian Air Force, and at the same time refusing to close the airspace to civilian aircraft. The case of Denise Kenke, on behalf of her father,  MH17 victim Willem Grootscholten, explains [12].

Canadian war crimes attorney Christopher Black (right) says the Dutch prosecution is deliberately ignoring Dutch law,  as well as international law. “What Berger is stating is a case of criminal negligence, not murder. The general principles of criminal law apply to this case as much as to any
case. As for the burden of proof, the court has to be convinced on the basis of the lawful evidence presented that the accused has committed the crime he is accused of.” Black is pointing out that the prosecution’s evidence from the Ukrainian SBU is unlawful. For analysis of evidence tampering by the SBU,  read more [13].

“’Any person who intentionally and unlawfully’— that’s the key phrase in the wording of Article 168. Its use there means specific intent. Specific intent. A general intent to use missiles on something is not good enough in this case. It is telling that [Berger] does not make the distinction between specific intent versus general intent. That indicates the prosecutors don’t think they can prove the necessary specific intent. And if the plane had been shot down by the accused thinking it was engaged in an attack on them or masking [a Ukrainian Air Force] attack on them, then the court cannot convict. That’s because the facts would show an accident or a justifiable act of self-defence.”

In Dutch courts, there are several of what are called “full defences” to indictments for murder. One is insanity; another [14] is duress. Self-defence is the third full defence; it is spelled out in Article 41 of the Criminal Code:

Source: http://www.ejtn.eu/ [6]

European lawyers observing the MH17 trial have noted that Berger failed to mention that. They interpret this as an indication the prosecution already believes Judge Steenhuis has decided on conviction.

“The term ‘unlawfully’ is used in Article 168”, Black continues, “because there may be situations where at sea, for example, a vessel has to be grounded or sunk because it is a danger to other shipping or to the crew — or to save the crew. It’s harder to think of a plane that must be crashed for a comparable reason. But one can anticipate the scenario – for example, when men on the ground believe on reasonable grounds that an aircraft was about to bomb them – when attacking the plane would not be considered unlawful because it is self-defence.”

“So the Dutch prosecutors are trying to prove there was an intent [to fire at an aircraft] and therefore they did it, even if there is no evidence they did. I didn’t realise courts dealt in smoking guns. They ought to be dealing in hard evidence. The fact that someone fantasizes about a woman and she ends up getting pregnant and then she has a miscarriage can’t be turned into the accusation against the man of intent to make her pregnant, and then of causing her miscarriage, and so guilty of bodily harm.”

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Notes

[1] @bears_with: https://twitter.com/bears_with

[2] report : https://trialinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Universal_Jurisdiction_Annual_Review2019.pdf

[3] announces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKJcJuT_5jc

[4] English version.: http://www.ejtn.eu/PageFiles/6533/2014%20seminars/Omsenie/WetboekvanStrafvordering_ENG_PV.pdf

[5] Dutch statute: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001854/2020-01-01

[6] The Dutch Criminal Code: http://www.ejtn.eu/PageFiles/6533/2014%20seminars/Omsenie/WetboekvanStrafrecht_ENG_PV.pdf

[7] this: http://johnhelmer.net/the-face-of-dutch-justice-launches-a-thousand-slips/

[8] this  : http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=142091

[9] here: https://www.rug.nl/research/portal/files/28372553/Criminal_Liability_for_Serious_Traffic_Offences_final.pdf

[10] this: https://www.utrechtjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ujiel.368/

[11] publication : https://theins.ru/uncategorized/225534?lang=en

[12] explains: http://johnhelmer.net/european-court-of-human-rights-fires-secret-ukraine-missile-to-down-mh17-victims-case/

[13]  read more: http://johnhelmer.net/ukraine-secret-service-telephone-tapes-witness-tampering-hatred-for-russians-dutch-prosecutors-wind-up-presentation-of-kievs-mh17-show-trial/

[14] another: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=qNEFDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA327&lpg=PA327&dq=conditional+intent+in+dutch+law&source=bl&ots=ME7EVN7C3A&sig=ACfU3U01bqYN1no3V_o3mPy9ttDyfE9TCA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXisW_7JbqAhU77XMBHdGrDhwQ6AEwA3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=conditional%20intent%20in%20dutch%20law&f=false

Featured image is from @bears_with[1]

The United Nations describes itself in its charter as an international moral authority created to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” But activists who are trying to end the U.S. war on Yemen say that, in a dark twist on this mission, the international body is withholding criticism from the U.S.-Saudi military coalition, and effusively praising its leaders, to avoid jeopardizing donations to humanitarian funds aimed at helping ease the suffering created by that war. As Jehan Hakim, the chair of the Yemeni Alliance Committee, puts it, “The same hand we’re asking to feed Yemen is the same hand that is helping bomb them.”

On June 15, UN Secretary-General António Guterres removed the U.S.-Saudi military coalition, which has been waging war in Yemen for more than five years, from an international blacklist of states and armed groups responsible for killing and maiming children, in a huge P.R. win for Saudi Arabia. He cited a supposed decrease in child killings, even as he acknowledged the coalition was responsible for killing 222 children last year, 171 of them from bombings—a number that certainly does not include the toll of famine and disease outbreaks (including Covid-19) worsened by the war and blockade. The UN’s move provoked instant rebuke from anti-war and humanitarian organizations, particularly as it coincided with reports that, the same day the report came out, the U.S.-Saudi coalition had bombed a vehicle in northern Yemen, killing 13 civilians, four of them children.

Hassan El-Tayyab, lead lobbyist on Middle East policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a progressive lobby organization, tells In These Times that the move has a simple explanation.

“To me,” he says, “it’s really clear what they’re trying to do: They’re trying to curry favor so that Saudi Arabia will pony up more money for Yemen to keep humanitarian aid going.”

El-Tayyab’s theory is supported by a number of indicators. In June 2016, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon publicly admitted that he removed Saudi Arabia from the same “child-killer list” in the UN’s 2015 report in response to unspecified threats to pull funding from UN programs. (Media outlets found these threats came from Saudi Arabia, one of the largest UN donors in the Middle East.)

“The report describes horrors no child should have to face,” Ban said at a press conference in 2016. “At the same time, I also had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would defund many UN programs.”

Despite this admission, Ban did not immediately restore the U.S.-Saudi coalition to the blacklist, although it was eventually returned.

But there are more recent indicators to draw on. On June 2, the UN co-hosted a virtual donors’ summit with Saudi Arabia to raise money for humanitarian relief in Yemen, which is being devastated by Covid-19, in large part because the U.S.-Saudi coalition has decimated its hospital system, and a Saudi-led blockade is cutting off critical medical supplies. Guterres, who made the recent decision to scrub Saudi Arabia from the blacklist, gave the opening remarks for the event.

“I thank the Government of Saudi Arabia for co-hosting this pledging event, and for your continued commitment to humanitarian aid to the people of Yemen,” he said.

Saudi Arabia was the highest donor at the event, pledging a token $500 million in aid, the exact amount of money Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, spent on his personal yacht. The United States pledged $225 million, or less than the cost of three of the numerous F35 fighter jets the U.S. military has purchased from Lockheed Martin.

These numbers also pale in comparison to the value of the arms the United States ships to Saudi Arabia—amounting to at least $3 billion in 2019—despite calls for a global embargo due to Saudi atrocities in Yemen. Yet the event, the global equivalent of a GoFundMe campaign for Yemen aid, fell $1 billion short of its goal, or roughly the equivalent of only two of the Leonardo Da Vinci paintings bin Salman bought for himself in 2017.

El-Tayyab says he is concerned about whether the U.S. aid that was pledged will be sent to Houthi-held areas, where a majority of Yemen’s population lives.

“We don’t know if the aid is going to get to north Yemen,” he said. “A major sticking point is what is actually happening to Houthi-held territory. Is the aid getting to where the majority of the country lives?”

Shireen Al-Adeimi, Yemeni-American anti-war activist, board member of Just Foreign Policy, and frequent contributor to In These Times, agreed with El-Tayyab’s explanation for why the coalition was removed from the UN blacklist. According to Al-Adeimi, the UN lives in fear that the very countries responsible for unleashing humanitarian crises will withdraw funding for humanitarian aid. “Anytime the UN has held any kind of fundraiser for Yemen, they go out of their way to thank the coalition countries for whatever aid they pledge,” she says. And indeed, on April 9, Mark Lowcock, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, tweeted, “Thank you to KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] for announcing another major contribution to humanitarian aid in Yemen! Your generosity will benefit millions of people who need help.” This echoes similar effusive praise he’s given the coalition for its humanitarian donations to Yemen (see here and here).

An April 2018 exchange between Guterres and a reporter at a press event for a Yemen fundraising conference sheds light on this dynamic. The reporter asked Guterres about the event, at which both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, also part of the military coalition against in Yemen, were significant donors, “How do you see the contradiction of one country presenting itself as a main donor and a main helper of Yemen while it is striking since three years the country, including civilian areas?” Guterres replied, “This country is giving money to repair what it is destroying. Well, we all know that there is a war, we all know who are the parties to the war, but the two things need to be seen separately. Independently of the fact that there is a war, there are humanitarian obligations that are assumed by countries, and today we were exactly registering a very strong support of the international community to the people of Yemen.”

One could argue that the UN is forced to perform ethical gymnastics, due the Trump administration’s abrupt withdrawal of tens of millions of dollars in assistance from USAID, the World Food Programme’s 50% cut to aid in Houthi-held areas, and threats to close critical UN-run food aid programs in Yemen, all as Covid-19 is battering the country. The UN has no choice, therefore, but to do what any fundraiser must do: cavort with unsavory donors, and flatter the wealthy in hopes that they will keep the organization afloat.

But the UN is not just a passive observer of the Yemen war: By shielding the United States and Saudi Arabia from even the most modest political consequences for a war that has unleashed the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, it has used its institutional power to enable this onslaught. In 2015, just six months into the war, Saudi Arabia launched a diplomatic campaign to prevent the UN from launching a human rights investigation, abetted by the silence of the Obama administration. This effort was ultimately successful. What if it had not been: Imagine if, more than five years ago, the war had been roundly denounced on the global stage.

Even activists who acknowledge the tragic irony of relying on the perpetrators of a war to provide aid to victims of that war are themselves forced to call on the United States to restore aid. In late May, more than 80 progressive and anti-war organizations signed a letter calling on chairs and ranking members of Congress to “do everything in your power to press USAID to reverse its suspension.” The letter warns, “Millions more are needed, in particular, for emergency stocks of personal protective equipment, ventilators, ICU beds, and other vital supplies for Yemen’s battered health care system.”

Hakim, who is part of a coalition of activist groups that is fighting to restore this aid, says the effort brings up difficult political questions. “It really feels like a violation of us, calling on this agency [USAID] that is part of the system that is profiting off of this war with arms sales and all this military support.” But, she says, U.S. activists face a stark reality: Abrupt withdrawal of aid in the midst of a pandemic will certainly kill numerous Yemenis. “People ask us, ‘Why are you calling on USAID? They’re problematic.’ And I’m like, I know, but what about the people who need the food right now? We’re doing it for the people.”

Unlike the UN, Hakim and her fellow organizers do not flatter the military coalition. And most importantly, they are working to end the war—the root of the suffering, even after the Trump administration in 2019 vetoed an effort to end U.S. participation in the war.

“We’re in talks right now with a few other organizations to draft a fresh War Powers Resolution,” says Hakim. “This is the strongest vehicle we have to check U.S. involvement. Without arms, military support, intelligence sharing and targeting assistance the U.S. is providing, the coalition cannot continue to aggress in Yemen in the same way.”

“We’re going to keep pushing,” Hakim says.

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Sarah Lazare is web editor at In These Times. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including The Intercept, The Nation, and Tom Dispatch. She tweets at @sarahlazare.

Featured image is from Yemen Press

Modern Slavery and Woke Hypocrisy

June 29th, 2020 by Judith Bergman

The news has been filled with reports about Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters vandalizing and tearing down statues of slave traders, slave owners, and anyone who they perceive as having been historically involved with slavery. In Bristol, England, a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown into the harbor. In Belgium, statues of King Leopold were defaced.

The actions have caused some local authorities to consider whether all statues perceived as offending current sensibilities should be removed. The London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced a commission to examine the future of landmarks, such as statues and street names, in the UK capital.

What is not apparent is how attacking old statues of people who have been long dead is supposed to help anyone, especially millions of black and non-black people, who are still enslaved today. It would appear that the woke activists of BLM and their many kneeling supporters do not care about the plight of modern slaves, of which there are an estimated whopping 40 million today. Evidently, it is far easier, and presumably more pleasurable, to destroy Western historical monuments than to embark on the difficult work of actually abolishing modern slavery.

In the UK itself, there is a shocking range of modern slavery, something that the local wokesters are happy to ignore as they bravely attack statues of stone and metal. According to the UK government’s 2019 Annual Report on Modern Slavery, there are at least 13,000 potential victims of slavery in the UK, although as that number dates back to 2014, it is questionable. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, there are an estimated 136,000 people living in modern slavery just in Britain.

Slavery in the UK takes the form of forced labor, and domestic and sexual exploitation. Albanians and Vietnamese are among the groups that constitute the majority of slaves. British news outlets have run several stories about the estimated thousands of Vietnamese, half under the age of 18, who are kidnapped and trafficked to the UK where they are forced to work as slaves on cannabis farms. There, they form a small part of the “vast criminal machine that supplies Britain’s £2.6bn cannabis black market”. Those who are not forced to work in the cannabis industry are enslaved in “nail bars, brothels and restaurants, or kept in domestic servitude behind the doors of private residences”. In January, BBC news ran a story about a Vietnamese boy named Ba, who was kidnapped by a Chinese gang and trafficked to the UK, where his Chinese boss starved him and beat him whenever one of the cannabis plants failed.

BLM may not care much about Vietnamese lives in the UK — after all, they are all about black lives, so how about black slaves in Africa? There are currently an estimated 9.2 million men, women and children living in modern slavery in Africa, according to the Global Slavery Index, which includes forced labor, forced sexual exploitation and forced marriage.

“According to the U.N.’s International Labor Organization (ILO), there are more than three times as many people in forced servitude today as were captured and sold during the 350-year span of the transatlantic slave trade”, Time Magazine reported in March 2019.

According to the ILO, modern slavery has seen 25 million people in debt bondage and 15 million in forced marriage.

Modern slavery earns criminal networks an estimated $150 billion a year, just slightly less than drug smuggling and weapons trafficking.

“Modern slavery is far and away more profitable now than at any point in human history,” Siddharth Kara, an economist at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, told Time. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, “G-20 countries import some $354 billion worth of products at risk of being produced by modern slavery every year”.

In 2017, shocking footage emerged from actual slave auctions in Libya: CNN documented an incident in which Arabic-speaking men sold off twelve Nigerians. In 2019, Time Magazine interviewed an African migrant, Iabarot, who had been sold into slavery on his way to Europe:

“When Iabarot reached Libya’s southern border, he met a seemingly friendly taxi driver who offered to drive him to the capital city, Tripoli, for free. Instead, he was sold to a ‘white Libyan,’ or Arab, for $200. He was forced to work off his ‘debt’ on a construction site, a pattern that repeated each time he was sold and resold.”

Sex trafficking forms a considerable part of modern slavery. The Nigerian mafia, for instance, according to a 2019 report by the Washington Post, is trafficking women by the tens of thousands:

“Some experts say that as many as 20,000 Nigerian women, some of them minors, arrived in Sicily between 2016 and 2018, trafficked in cooperation with Nigerians in Italy and back home.”

According to a July 2017 report by the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM):

“Over the past three years, IOM Italy has seen an almost 600 per cent increase in the number of potential sex trafficking victims arriving in Italy by sea. This upward trend has continued during the first six months of 2017, with most victims arriving from Nigeria”. In its report, IOM estimated that 80 per cent of girls, often minors, arriving from Nigeria — whose numbers soared dramatically from 1,454 in 2014 to 11,009 in 2016 — were “potential victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation”.

In parts of the African continent, especially in the Sahel, slavery is still ingrained in traditional culture, even though, officially, slavery has been outlawed. In countries such as Mali and Mauritania, so-called descent-based slavery or “caste-based” slavery — in which slavery is passed down from generation to generation, so that slaves are born into their predicament — is still practiced by some.

In 2013, it was estimated that around 250,000 people were living in slave-like conditions in Mali, where slavery is not illegal. One Malian slave, Raichatou, told the Guardian in 2013 that she became a slave at the age of seven when her mother, also a slave, died. “My father could only watch on helplessly as my mother’s master came to claim me and my brothers,” she said. She worked as a servant for the family without pay for nearly 20 years, and was forced into a marriage with another slave whom she didn’t know, so that she could supply her master with more slaves.

In Mauritania, it is estimated that up to 20% of the population is enslaved, even though slavery was officially outlawed in 1981. The slaves are mostly from the Haratine minority, who are black Africans, as opposed to the nearly half of the population who are Arabs or Berbers. According to a report by the Guardian from 2018:

“Slavery has a long history in this north African desert nation. For centuries, Arabic-speaking Moors raided African villages, resulting in a rigid caste system that still exists to this day, with darker-skinned inhabitants beholden to their lighter-skinned “masters”. Slave status is passed down from mother to child, and anti-slavery activists are regularly tortured and detained. Yet the government routinely denies that slavery exists in Mauritania, instead praising itself for eradicating the practice.”

The report also described a few of the horrific fates of the Haratine slaves:

“Aichetou Mint M’barack was a slave by descent in the Rosso area. Like her sister, she was taken away from her mother and then given to a member of the master’s family to be a servant. She got married in the home of her masters and had eight children, two of whom were taken away from her to be slaves in other families. In 2010, Aichetou’s older sister was able to free her… after she herself fled her masters when they poured hot embers over her baby, killing it.”

BLM and the many corporate executives, university professors, media, sports and cultural personalities who are bending their knees to the movement seem totally unconcerned by the fates of the likes of Aichetou. More likely than not, they have never heard of her or her many fellow sufferers. They are apparently black lives that do not matter — to anyone except the courageous people working in the local anti-slavery organizations.

Instead, BLM and its sycophants endlessly debate changing the names of streets and universities, and removing statues, all of which do not amount to anything more than infantile virtue signaling. They waste time debating whether people who were never themselves slaves, should receive reparations from people who never owned a slave.

To engage in all this posturing, while ignoring the staggering 40 million current victims of actual slavery, not only represents the immeasurable depths of woke hypocrisy, but constitutes an extreme insult to those who are suffering their slavery in silence, while slowly dying from the physical, sexual and emotional abuse that they are being forced to endure. If anything is “offensive,” it is that.

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Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

According to the World Health Organization, seasonal influenza viruses spread throughout the world in a year or two, infecting 10 to 25 percent of the world’s population and causing some 290,000 to 650,000 deaths. With a world population of about 8 billion, the fatality rate is between 0.0036 percent to 0.0081 percent.  No wonder seasonal influenza does not seem particularly dangerous to many of us. It is likely that none of us or our close acquaintances will die. On the other hand, if the influenza virus were instead lab-created, somehow released outside the lab into the community, spread worldwide, and caused 290,000 to 650,000 deaths, we would be outraged that some lab caused these deaths.

Why consider the risk of lab accident that releases an influenza virus into the community? Because scientists in various countries continue to make so-called enhancements to these viruses in laboratories. While not all influenzas affect humans, some labs have conducted experiments to modify avian (or bird) influenza viruses in order to make them transmissible to mammals.

Each facility that carries out research on dangerous lab-created pathogens must bear the consequences of any pandemic sparked by their release into the community. There are at least three ways this could happen:

(1) An undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infection where the infected lab worker leaves the lab and goes into the community at the end of the workday. This is the one release scenario for which there is considerable data, so it is possible to estimate the probability of release from a lab.

(2) Mischaracterization of a virus as harmless, so it is removed entirely from biocontainment or removed to labs with lower biosafety levels (e.g., from biosafety level 3 to biosafety level 2) for further research.

(3) Purposeful release into the community by a mentally unstable lab worker or by someone with evil intent.

Why create dangerous pathogens in a lab? Research on lab-created or lab-enhanced viruses isn’t rare. In fact 14 institutions in the United States, the Netherlands, China, and elsewhere conduct research on lab-created highly pathogenic avian influenzas that have been made airborne or contact-transmissible to mammals or on pandemic human influenza strains such as the 1918 flu, to which people may no longer have immunity.

Since 2012, when researchers in the Netherlands and at the University of Wisconsin published two studies involving the creation of live H5N1 avian viruses transmissible in mammals through the air, there’s been a debate about whether research involving lab-enhanced viruses–sometimes called gain-of-function research–is too dangerous to conduct. In 2017, the US government issued new rules for how the Department of Health and Human Services decides whether or not to fund these studies, but the rules only apply to research funded by the National Institutes of Health and are ambiguous enough that even risky research can still win government backing.

Ron Fouchier, the professor at Erasmus University in the Netherlands who published one of the controversial studies in 2012, claims that creating these viruses will allow for the advance creation of a vaccine if we see the viruses in nature moving toward human transmission.

But making a vaccine to an influenza that isn’t naturally transmissible among mammals may be premature. A recent study by Kaiser Permanente shows us that influenza vaccines lose effectiveness during the flu season. The risk of contracting the flu climbs about 16 percent for every 28 days after vaccination. The fact that effectiveness diminishes over time in a flu season calls into question the idea of making vaccines in advance to protect against highly pathogenic avian influenzas in nature.

Lab-enhanced avian influenzas are among the most worrisome pathogens, as they could seed a world-wide pandemic with high fatalities. In some countries, scientists who do gain-of-function research may not be subject to proactive oversight and regulation, increasing the risk. Even in the United States, the 2017 review process is insufficient.

Avian influenzas are highly deadly viruses. The H5N1 avian flu virus has killed nearly 53 percent of people infected between 2003 and mid-2019 (454 fatalities in 860 cases) from close contact with poultry, but it is rarely transmissible among humans. Over the last year or so, human H5N1 fatalities have almost disappeared, but this may not continue. There remains a concern over a release into the community of the older lab-created strains still retained in labs.

As of October 2018, there had been 1,567 laboratory-confirmed human cases and 615 deaths (39 percent fatality rate) from H7N9 infections since March 2013, when the strain was detected in people. There are also many fewer H7N9 infections in chickens at present compared to the recent past, likely due to a successful chicken vaccination program in China.

According to my research, statistical data from two sources show that human error was the cause of 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents that lead to potential exposures in US biosafety level 3 labs. These are labs designed for research on microbes that can cause serious or even deadly diseases through respiratory transmission, for instance, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. These statistics on lab incidents come from analysis of years of incident data from the Federal Select Agent Program, which regulates the use of certain biological agents and toxins, and from the National Institutes of Health.

A way to think about pandemic risks. A good way to assess the risks of enhancing highly pathogenic avian influenzas in the lab is to consider so-called likelihood-weighted consequences. These calculations involve multiplying the probability of a given event—such as the probability that a pathogen is released from a lab and causes an outbreak—by the consequences of that event, e.g., the number of deaths that the ensuing outbreak might cause. Plugging in figures based on the 1918 pandemic flu as well as those from much milder seasonal flu paints a picture of unacceptable risk for pandemic influenza research.

I believe this is a superior way to assess risk and should be at the center of the potential pandemic influenza research debate. Let’s take a look at how to calculate likelihood-weighted consequences. This is the basic calculation:

Likelihood-weighted consequences = (probability of an event) x (consequences).

If we consider the consequences of a disease outbreak to be the number of fatalities, we can use the term “fatality burden” instead of likelihood-weighted consequences. The calculation remains the same.

Fatality burden = [(probability of a release) x (probability release leads to a pandemic)] x (number of fatalities)

First let’s get a figure for the number of potential fatalities. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed 50 million to 100 million people according to the journal Nature.

Each facility in an organization that conducts research on enhanced avian influenzas must bear the burden of its contribution to potential fatalities. For a single facility in a single year the probability of a release of an avian influenza virus that has been altered to be airborne transmissible among mammals is 0.246 percent. This number comes from the detailed data, analysis, and theory in a large unpublished study of mine.

Fatality burden = [0.00246) x (0.15)] x (50 million to 100 million) = 18,450 to 36,900, where 0.15 is the estimate from my unpublished study of the likelihood of a pandemic from a release into the community through an undetected or unreported lab-acquired infection.

Fatality burden calculation.

Credit: Bulletin/Pixabay

From this illustrative calculation, each year that a single facility conducts research, it carries with it the burden of some of the 50 to 100 million fatalities that a flu as deadly as the 1918 flu would cause. Fouchier suggests that his enhanced biosafety level 3 labs are at least ten-fold safer than typical biosafety level 3 labs. Fouchier’s 10-fold safer lab would then yield a fatality burden of 1,845 to 3,690 per year of operation.

Avoiding a worst-case scenario. Readers, of course, will not have seen frantic news reports about such a large-scale crisis emanating from one of the labs conducting research on enhanced avian influezas. There hasn’t been one. But if in the future, a lab-created avian influeza escapes and kills the same number of people as did the 1918 influeza, each year a lab operated it will have carried with it the burden of these 18,450 to 36,900 deaths (or 1,845 to 3,690 deaths, if you accept Fouchier’s claims of enhanced lab safety).

 No one can be sure how virulent or airborne transmissible in humans these potential pandemic viruses would be if released into the community. In the best-case scenario, they would soon die out with little to no sickness and no fatalities; however, just the possibility of a pandemic dictates that we must proceed with the utmost caution. Given the frequency with which incidents happen at even highly secure labs, and given the questionable value of gain-of-function research on avian influenzas, it’s worth considering whether we want to even entertain the possibility of a catastrophic pandemic.

Should we be willing to risk a likelihood of a pandemic from 14 labs for five years of research in each facility? Other than alerting us that these avian viruses can be made mammalian airborne transmissible, a useful fact to know, creating highly pathogenic avian influenzas that are airborne transmissible among mammals may yield few practical results.

Fouchier points to several mechanical safety features that led him to the 10-fold-safer conclusion. But most incidents at labs are caused by human error. This fact calls into question claims that state-of-the-art design will prevent the release of dangerous pathogens. Given the many ways by which human error can occur, it is doubtful that Fouchier’s enhanced biosafety level 3 lab can eliminate the release of airborne-transmissible avian flu into the community through undetected or unreported lab-acquired infections.

As another example: Suppose the released virus is no more deadly than a typical seasonal influenza virus? Using the minimum figure of 290,000 fatalities for seasonal influenza, the fatality burden for a single lab in a single year is the following:

Fatality burden = [0.00246 x 0.15] x 290,000 = 107 fatalities, where the 0.15, again, is the probability of a pandemic.

Fatality burden calculation.

Credit: Bulletin/Pixabay

To help put fatality burden in perspective, no institutional review board—the committees tasked with assessing and approving human-subject research at universities and other organizations— would approve a research project with a potential for perhaps tens to thousands of fatalities. Maybe an institutional review board could approve the research if it could be assured with almost absolute certainty that there will never be a release into the community or that the released virus would not be airborne-transmissible, virulent, or fatal. The key phrase is “almost absolute certainty.”

That’s a standard that’s almost certainly absolutely impossible to achieve.

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Klotz is Senior Science Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a longtime member of the Scientists’ Working Group on Chemical and Biological Weapons. He is co-author with Ed Sylvester of Breeding Bio Insecurity: How U.S. Biodefense is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less Secure, The University of Chicago Press, October 2009.

Featured image: A duck receives a vaccination as part of USAID’s efforts to combat bird flu in Vietnam. Credit: USAID.

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US War Crimes: The Massacre at My Lai

June 29th, 2020 by Seymour M. Hersh

This article was originally published on The New Yorker in January 1972.

Early on March 16, 1968, a company of soldiers in the United States Army’s Americal Division were dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam. A hundred G.I.s and officers stormed the hamlet in military-textbook style, advancing by platoons; the troops expected to engage the Vietcong Local Force 48th Battalion—one of the enemy’s most successful units—but instead they found women, children, and old men, many of them still cooking their breakfast rice over outdoor fires. During the next few hours, the civilians were murdered. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, others were flung into a drainage ditch at one edge of the hamlet and shot, and many more were shot at random in or near their homes. Some of the younger women and girls were raped and then murdered. After the shootings, the G.I.s systematically burned each home, destroyed the livestock and food, and fouled the area’s drinking supplies. None of this was officially told by Charlie Company to its task-force headquarters; instead, a claim that a hundred and twenty-eight Vietcong were killed and three weapons were captured eventually emerged from the task force and worked its way up to the highest American headquarters, in Saigon. There it was reported to the world’s press as a significant victory.

The G.I.s mainly kept to themselves what they had done, but there had been other witnesses to the atrocity—American helicopter pilots and Vietnamese civilians. The first investigations of the My Lai case, made by some of the officers involved, concluded (erroneously) that twenty civilians had inadvertently been killed by artillery and by heavy cross fire between American and Vietcong units during the battle. The investigation involved all the immediate elements of the chain of command: the company was attached to Task Force Barker, which, in turn, reported to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, which was one of three brigades making up the Americal Division. Task Force Barker’s victory remained just another statistic until late March, 1969, when an ex-G.I. named Ronald L. Ridenhour wrote letters to the Pentagon, to the State Department, to the White House, and to twenty-four congressmen describing the murders at My Lai 4. Ridenhour had not participated in the attack on My Lai 4, but he had discussed the operation with a few of the G.I.s who had been there. Within four months, many details of the atrocity had been uncovered by Army investigations, and in September, 1969, William L. Calley, Jr., a twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant who served as a platoon leader with Charlie Company, was charged with the murder of a hundred and nine Vietnamese civilians. No significant facts about the Calley investigation or about the massacre itself were made public at the time, but the facts did gradually emerge, and eleven days after the first newspaper accounts the Army announced that it had set up a panel to determine why the initial investigations had failed to disclose the atrocity. The panel was officially called the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident, and was unofficially known as the Peers Inquiry, after its director, Lieutenant General William R. Peers, “who was Chief of the Office of Reserve Components at the time of his appointment. The three-star general, then fifty-five years old, had spent more than two years as a troop commander in Vietnam during the late nineteen-sixties, serving as commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division and later as commander of the I Field Force. As such, he was responsible for the military operations and pacification projects in a vast area beginning eighty miles north of Saigon and extending north for two hundred and twenty miles.

Peers and his assistants, who eventually included two New York lawyers, began working in late November, 1969, and they soon determined that they could not adequately explore the coverup of the atrocity without learning more about what had actually happened on the day the troops were at My Lai 4. On December 2, 1969, the investigating team began interrogating officers and enlisted men in each of the units involved—Charlie Company, Task Force Barker, the 11th Brigade, and the Americal Division. In all, four hundred witnesses were interrogated—about fifty in South Vietnam and the rest in a special-operations room in the basement of the Pentagon—before Peers and a panel of military officers and civilians that varied in size from three to eight men. The interrogations inevitably produced much self-serving testimony. To get at the truth, the Peers commission recalled many witnesses for further interviews and confronted them with testimony that conflicted with theirs. Only six witnesses who appeared before the commission refused to testify, although all could legally have remained silent; perhaps one reason that Peers got such coöperation is that the majority of the witnesses were career military men, and few career military men can afford to seem to be hiding something before a three-star general.

By March 16, 1970, when the investigation ended, the Peers commission had compiled enough evidence to recommend to Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor and Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland that charges be filed against fifteen officers; a high-level review subsequently conducted by lawyers representing the office of the Judge Advocate General, the Army’s legal adviser, concluded that fourteen of the fifteen should be charged, including Major General Samuel W. Koster, who was commanding general of the Americal Division at the time of My Lai 4. By then, Koster had become Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, at West Point, and the filing of charges against him stunned the Army. One other general was charged, as were three colonels, two lieutenant colonels, three majors, and four captains. Army officials revealed shortly after the charges were filed that the Peers commission had accumulated more than twenty thousand pages of testimony and more than five hundred documents during fifteen weeks of operation. The testimony and other material alone, it was said, included thirty-two books of direct transcripts, six books of supplemental documents and affidavits, and volumes of maps, charts, exhibits, and internal documents. Defense Department spokesmen explained that, to avoid damaging pre-trial publicity, none of this material could be released to the public until the legal proceedings against the accused men were completed, and officials acknowledged that the process might take years. In addition, it was explained, when the materials were released they would have to be carefully censored, to insure that no material damaging to America’s foreign policy or national security was made available to other countries. In May, 1971, fourteen months after the initial Peers report, officials were still saying that “it might be years” before the investigation was made public. By then, charges against thirteen of the fourteen initial defendants had been dismissed without a court-martial.

Over the past eighteen months, I have been provided with a complete transcript of the testimony given to the Peers Inquiry, and also with volumes of other materials the Peers commission assembled, including its final summary report to Secretary Resor and General Westmoreland. What follows is based largely on those papers, although I have supplemented them with documents from various sources, including the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which had the main responsibility for conducting the initial investigations into both the My Lai 4 massacre and its coverup. In addition, I interviewed scores of military and civilian officials, including some men who had been witnesses before the Peers commission and some who might have been called to testify but were not. I also discussed some of my findings with former members of the Army who had been directly connected with the Peers commission.

Unquestionably, a serious concern for the rights of possible court-martial defendants does exist at all levels of the Army. A careful examination of the testimony and documents accumulated by the Peers commission makes equally clear that military officials have deliberately withheld from the public important but embarrassing factual information about My Lai 4. For example, the Army has steadfastly refused to reveal how many civilians were killed by Charlie Company on March 16th—a decision that no longer has anything to do with pre-trial publicity, since the last court-martial (that of Colonel Oran K. Henderson, the commanding officer of the 11th Brigade) has been concluded. Army spokesmen have insisted that the information is not available. Yet in February, 1970, the Criminal Investigation Division, at the request of the Peers commission, secretly undertook a census of civilian casualties at My Lai 4 and concluded that Charlie Company had slain three hundred and forty-seven Vietnamese men, women, and children in My Lai 4 on March 16, 1968—a total twice as large as had been publicly acknowledged. In addition, the Peers commission subsequently concluded that Lieutenant Calley’s first platoon, one of three that made the attack upon My Lai 4, was responsible for ninety to a hundred and thirty murders during the operation—roughly one-third of the total casualties, as determined by the C.I.D. The second platoon apparently murdered as many as a hundred civilians, with the rest of the deaths attributable to the third platoon and the helicopter gunships. Despite the vast amount of evidence indicating that the murders at My Lai 4 were widespread throughout the company, only Calley was found guilty of any crime in connection with the attack. Eleven other men and officers were eventually charged with murder, maiming, or assault with intent to commit murder, but the charges were dropped before trial in seven cases and four men were acquitted after military courts-martial. In addition, of the fourteen officers accused by the Peers commission in connection with the coverup only Colonel Henderson was brought to trial. Even more striking was evidence that the attack on My Lai 4 was not the only massacre carried out by American troops in Quang Ngai Province that morning. The Army Investigators learned that Task Force Barker had committed three infantry companies to the over-all operation in the My Lai area. Alpha Company had moved into a blocking position above My Lai 4, where it would theoretically be able to trap Vietcong soldiers as they fled from the Charlie Company assault on the hamlet. Bravo Company, the third unit in the task force, was ordered to attack a possible Vietcong headquarters area at My Lai 1, a hamlet about a mile and a half northeast of My Lai 4. The men of Bravo Company were also told to prepare for a major battle with an experienced Vietcong unit. But, as the Peers commission later learned, there were no Vietcong at My Lai 1, either.

Bravo Company was told about the planned assault on My Lai 1 at a briefing on the night of March 15th. The men of Task Force Barker were called together by their officers that night and told (so one G.I. recalled), “This is what you’ve been waiting for—search and destroy—and you got it.” Captain Earl R. Michles, the company commander, outlined the mission and its objective to his artillery forward observer, the platoon leaders, and other selected members of his command group. The key target, he said, was My Lai 1, a small, often attacked hamlet that was thought to be the headquarters and hospital area of the Vietcong 48th Battalion. Army maps showed that My Lai 1 and the neighboring hamlets of My Lai 2, My Lai 3, and My Lai 4 were part of the village of Son My—a heavily populated area, embracing dozens of hamlets, that was known to the G.I.s as Pinkville, because Son My’s high population density caused it to appear in red on Army maps. To the Americans who operated in the area, Pinkville meant Vietcong guerrillas and booby traps. More than ninety per cent of the Americal Division’s combat injuries and deaths in early 1968 resulted from Vietcong booby traps and land mines. Bravo Company was to be flown into the area by helicopter to engage the Vietcong at My Lai 1, and was then to move south into other supposed Vietcong hamlets along the South China Sea. Precisely what information Michles and his platoon leaders gave their men is impossible to determine, but their briefings—like a similar briefing by Captain Ernest L. Medina, the commander of Charlie Company, at another Task Force Barker fire base, a few miles away—left the soldiers with the impression that everyone they would see on March 16th was sure to be either a Vietcong soldier or a sympathizer.

Michles’s radio operator, Specialist Fourth Class Lawrence L. Congleton, recalled that after the briefing “there was a general conception that we were going to destroy everything.” Only a few of more than forty former Bravo Company G.I.s who were interviewed by members of the Peers commission or who talked with me recalled hearing a specific order to kill civilians. Larry G. Holmes, who was a private first class at the time of the operation, summed up the recollections of many G.I.s when he told the commission, “We had three hamlets that we had to search and destroy. They told us they . . . had dropped leaflets and stuff and everybody was supposed to be gone. Nobody was supposed to be there. If anybody is there, shoot them.” No specific instructions were given about civilians and prisoners, the men told the commission. “We were to leave nothing standing, because we were pretty sure that this was a confirmed V.C. village,” former Private First Class Homer C. Hall testified. One ex-G.I., Barry P. Marshall, told the Peers commission that he had overheard a conversation between Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker, Jr., the commander of the task force, and Michles (both of whom were killed in a helicopter crash three months after the operation). “I don’t want to give the idea that Colonel Barker wanted us to kill every blankety-blank person in here,” Marshall said. “They were just talking. . . . Colonel Barker was just saying that he wished he could get in here and get rid of the V.C. . . . I know Captain Michles’s own personal feeling was that he wanted to take every civilian out of there and move them out of the area to a secure place, and then go in and fight the V.C. It’s so hard, when you’ve got all these people milling around in there, to really conduct an operation of any significance.”

On the morning of the assault, nine troop-transport helicopters, accompanied by two gunships, began ferrying the men of Charlie Company from their assembly point, at Landing Zone Dottie. From Dottie, which also was the site of the task-force headquarters area, the helicopters ferried the men about seven miles southeast to their target area, just outside My Lai 4. The helicopters completed that task by 7:47 a.m., according to the official task-force journal for the day, and then flew a few miles north to Bravo Company’s assembly point to begin shuttling the men of Bravo Company to My Lai 1 for the second stage of the assault. It is not clear why Charlie Company’s assault took place first. Large numbers of Vietcong were thought to be in both hamlets, and, according to the official rationale for the mission, surprise was a key factor. As it was, the first elements of Bravo Company did not reach their target area until 8:15 a.m., and it then took twelve minutes for the full company to assemble. The men were apprehensive, and nothing at their target area soothed them. As they jumped off the aircraft, their rifles at the ready, they heard gunfire in the distance.

The shots were coming from My Lai 4, a mile and a half to the southwest, where by this time Charlie Company was in the midst of massacre. Specialist Fourth Class Ronald J. Easterling, a former machine gunner in Bravo Company’s third platoon, told the Peers commission, “When we landed we had to take cover . . . because we thought we were getting shot at. We found out later, well, about fifteen minutes or so, it was Charlie Company from over in the other direction. Some of their bullets were coming our direction unintentionally . . .” Although the sounds were frightening, there was no immediate threat to Bravo Company; no enemy shots were fired at the G.I.s as they left the helicopters. The men milled around for a few moments and then began to move out.

The first platoon, headed by First Lieutenant Thomas K. Willingham, marched a few hundred yards east. Its mission was to cross a narrow bridge to a small peninsula—a spit of land on which the small hamlet of My Khe 4 was situated—in the South China Sea. The second platoon, headed by First Lieutenant Roy B. Cochran, was to systematically search My Lai 1 and destroy it. But My Lai 1 was screened by a thick hedge and heavily guarded by booby traps. “Within minutes, a mine hidden in the hedgerow was tripped and the men of Bravo Company heard screams. In the explosion, Lieutenant Cochran was killed and four G.I.s were seriously injured. Helicopters were called in to evacuate the wounded men. The platoon was hastily reorganized, with a sergeant in command, and ordered to continue its mission. Another booby trap was tripped; once more there were screams and smoke. This time, three G.I.s were injured, and the unit was in disarray. The surviving G.I.s in the platoon insisted that they were not going to continue the mission, and said as much to Captain Michles. Colonel Barker flew in himself to see to the evacuation of the wounded, and then, rather than call on the first or the third platoon to complete the mission, he cancelled Bravo Company’s order to search and destroy My Lai 1. “[He] told them not even try to go in there,” Congleton, the radio operator, recalled to the Peers commission. “Just sort of forget about that part of the operation.” Relieved at not having to enter My Lai 1, the second platoon began a rather aimless and halfhearted movement through huts and hamlets to the south, across the water from My Khe 4 and the first platoon.

My Khe 4 was a scraggly, much harassed collection of straw-and-mud houses, inhabited by perhaps a hundred women, children, and old men. After carefully crossing the bridge, some of the G.I.s in the first platoon could see the unsuspecting villagers through heavy brush and trees. Lieutenant Willingham, according to many witnesses, ordered two machine gunners in his platoon to set up their weapons outside the hamlet. And then, inexplicably, one of the gun crews began to spray bullets into My Khe 4, shooting at the people and their homes. A few G.I.s later told the Peers commission that a hand grenade had been thrown at them; others said that some sniper shots had been fired. But no one was shot, and none of the G.I.s said they had ever actually seen the grenade explosion; they had only “heard about it.”

By now, it was about nine-thirty, and the men in the rear of the first platoon were ordered to pass forward extra belts of machine-gun ammunition and hand grenades. When the gun crew stopped, the platoon, led by four point men, or advance scouts, walked into the hamlet and began firing directly at Vietnamese civilians and into Vietnamese homes. The gunfire was intense. Former Private Terry Reid, of Milwaukee, recalled that he was standing a few hundred feet below the hamlet when it began. He knew that civilians were being shot. “As soon as they started opening up, it hit me that it was insanity,” he told me during an interview in May, 1971. “I walked to the rear. Pandemonium broke loose. It sounded insane—machine guns, grenades. One of the guys walked back, and I remember him saying, ‘We got sixty women, kids, and some old men.’ ”

After the shootings in My Khe 4, a few of the G.I.s in the first platoon started systematically blowing up every bunker and tunnel. Some Vietnamese attempted to flee the bunkers before the explosives were thrown in. They were shot. “Try and shoot them as they are coming out,” one member of the first platoon was instructed. Another ex-G.I. told me what happened to those who stayed in the bunkers: “You didn’t know for sure there were people in them until you threw in the TNT, and then you’d hear scurrying around in there. There wasn’t much place for them to go.” A helicopter flew extra supplies of dynamite and other explosives to the men, apparently at Willingham’s request. More than a hundred and fifty pounds of TNT was used, one ex-G.I. said, and between twenty and thirty homes were blown up. At some point that morning, according to several members of the platoon, word was passed along to stop the killing, and many of the surviving residents of the hamlet were allowed to flee to a nearby beach. They lived to tell Army investigators about the massacre. Others remained huddled in the family shelters inside their homes.

South Vietnamese women and children in Mỹ Lai before being killed in the massacre, 16 March 1968. According to court testimony, they were killed seconds after the photo was taken. The woman on the right is adjusting her blouse buttons following a sexual assault that happened before the massacre.  (Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle/Public Domain)

Precisely how many residents of My Khe 4 were slain will never be known. The Army later charged Lieutenant Willingham with involvement in the death of twenty civilians, but the charges were dismissed by an Army general a few months later without a hearing. Some survivors told military investigators early in 1970 that from ninety to a hundred women, children, and old men were slain. One ex-G.I. who kept a count said he knew of a hundred and fifty-five deaths; other estimates ranged from sixty to ninety. The official log of Task Force Barker for March 16th shows that Bravo Company claimed an enemy kill of thirty-eight in three separate messages to the task force during the day. At 9:55 a.m., it reported killing twelve Vietcong; at 10:25 a.m., it claimed eighteen more; and it claimed eight more at 2:20 p.m., some two hours after the massacre. At 3:55 p.m., it reported that none of its victims were women or children.

Early in 1968, the 11th Infantry Brigade had established a standard procedure for making body counts, which required an on-site identification of a dead enemy soldier before the body could be reported. All the officers of Task Force Barker interviewed by the Peers commission indicated an awareness of this regulation, and claimed that the task force adhered to it. Yet an ex-G.I., one of the first men to enter My Khe 4, gave me this version of how the totals of twelve and eighteen were arrived at: “I had this little notebook that I used to mark down the kills of the point men in. This day—well, this was a red-letter day. Seems like for about fifteen or twenty minutes there all I was doing was recording kills. Willingham got on the radio asking how many kills we got. Old Jug [the nickname of one of the point men] said he got twelve, and we called in what we had. Willingham checked with us a couple times in the early part of the day.” Another ex-G.I. testified before the Peers commission that some of his fellow-soldiers had counted thirty-nine bodies and had then told Willingham that “the biggest part of them was women and children.” Willingham’s reports were relayed by Michles, without challenge, to the task-force headquarters, although Congleton, the radioman, later told me, “When the first platoon started turning in kill counts, I figured they were destroying everything over there. At the time, I didn’t think that it was anything exceptional—maybe just a little more killing than usual.”

Dead bodies outside a burning dwelling (Photo by Ronald Haeberle/Public Domain)

The first platoon spent the night near My Khe 4, but the rest of Bravo Company joined Charlie Company to set up a defense near a cemetery along the South China Sea. In the morning, the first and second platoons of Bravo Company reunited and spent the next day marching south along the coast to the Tra Khuc River, burning every hamlet along the way. Again there was an element of revenge. A popular member of the first platoon had lost a foot early in the morning while he was probing for a mine along the bridge leading from the My Khe 4 peninsula to the mainland. The Peers commission subsequently determined that the platoon had failed to post guards on the bridge overnight, although the bridge provided the only access to the peninsula. A few men testified that the wounded G.I. was in fact attempting to defuse the mine with his bayonet when it went off, wounding him. But most of the G.I.s saw the mine as another example of treacherous enemy tactics, and this renewed their anger at anyone Vietnamese. That day, Task Force Barker provided a team of demolition experts, who blew up bunkers after the hamlets along the route were razed by fire. The techniques used in destroying the houses along the coast apparently amazed the Peers investigators. One G.I. testified that it was not his responsibility, as a demolition man, but that of the infantry to make sure no civilians were inside any of the bunkers he destroyed. He generally dropped two or three pounds of TNT into each bunker, he said, without checking for occupants. Another demolition man told of using as much as thirty pounds of dynamite to destroy each bunker, also without inspecting inside. Asked by a member of the Peers commission whether any effort was made to determine “if there were people inside,” one G.I. responded, “Not that I know of.”

Again, it is impossible to determine how many Vietnamese citizens were killed as they huddled inside their bunkers during Bravo Company’s march to the south. The G.I.s burned and destroyed almost every home they came to. Terry Reid, the private who told me that the My Khe 4 shooting seemed “insane” to him, had been considered a malcontent by his fellow-G.I.s, because he often criticized Bravo Company’s killing tactics. Of the march, he told me that he almost broke into tears as it continued. “We’d go through these village areas and just burn,” he said. “You’d see a good Vietnamese home—made with bricks or hard mud, and filled with six or seven grandmothers, four or five old men, and little kids—just burned. You’d see these old people watching their homes.” The Army’s practice of destroying bunkers and tunnels after burning the homes had always baffled him anyway, Reid said. “They call them bunkers and tunnels, but you know what they are—basements. Just basements.”

On March 18th, the third day of the operation, Bravo Company’s mission suddenly changed. Task Force Barker called in medical units, and the men were ordered to round up the civilians for baths, examinations, and in some cases interrogation by intelligence officials. Between five hundred and a thousand civilians were treated for diseases or were given food and clothing by the G.I.s. “It seemed like we just changed our policy altogether that day,” Congleton later told the Peers commission. “We went from a search-and-destroy to a pacification, because we went to this village and we washed all the kids. Maybe somebody had a guilty feeling or something like that.” Talking with me about this change a year after his testimony, Congleton said, “We reversed the whole plan just like we were going to redeem ourselves.” Former Private First Class Morris G. Michener thought that “most of the people were a little ashamed of themselves, and I was very ashamed of even being part of the group.”

On March 19th, Bravo Company was lifted by helicopter from the peninsula. A few of the Bravo Company soldiers later heard about the excesses committed by Charlie Company and about impending investigations there, but somehow there was little concern about the atrocities they themselves had committed. Only one G.I., Ronald Easterling, the machine gunner with the third platoon, considered reporting the My Khe 4 massacre to his superiors, but, as he later told the Peers commission, he quickly dropped the idea. “I guess I just let it go when I shouldn’t have,” Easterling explained. “I thought the company commander knew these things were going on. . . . it was all general knowledge through the whole company, and I didn’t see any sense in talking it over with the company. . . .”

By the time the Army’s charges against Lieutenant Calley became known in the United States, most of the men of Bravo Company were back home and out of the Army. Only a few associated their activities in Bravo Company on March 16th with the operation that Calley was accused of participating in. One who did was Reid. He walked into a newspaper office in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in November, 1969, a few days after the Calley story broke, and gave an interview about the atrocities he had observed while he was serving with the 11th Brigade. He told of one operation in which, after some G.I.s had been wounded by a booby trap, his company responded by killing sixty women, children, and old men. Reid told me not long ago that he didn’t realize until months later that what had happened in his outfit was directly connected with Task Force Barker’s mission in Son My on March 16th. “Sometimes I thought it was just my platoon, my company, that was committing atrocious acts, and what bad luck it was to get in it,” Reid said. “But what we were doing was being done all over.”

The incident at My Khe 4 would perhaps be just another Vietnam atrocity story if it weren’t for four facts: its vital connection with the My Lai 4 tragedy; the American public’s ignorance of it; the total, detailed knowledge of it among the Peers investigators, the Department of the Army, and higher Pentagon officials; and the failure of any of these agencies to see that the men involved were prosecuted.

On March 16, 1968, Major General Koster, the commander of the Americal Division, was near the peak of a brilliant Army career. At the age of forty-eight, he was a two-star general whose next assignment would be as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy. After that would probably come a promotion to lieutenant general, and perhaps an assignment as a corps commander in Germany, or even in South Vietnam again. Another promotion, to the rank of full general, would quickly follow, along with an assignment, possibly, as commander of one of the overseas United States Armies. By the middle or late nineteen-seventies, then, he would be among a group of ambitious, competent generals seeking Presidential appointment as Army Chief of Staff. Like most future candidates for the job of Chief of Staff, Koster had been earmarked as a “comer” by his fellow-officers since his days at West Point. In 1949, he had served in the high-prestige post of tactical officer at the Point, assigned to a cadet company as the man responsible for their training. By 1960, he had served in the operations office—the sensitive planning and coordinating post known to the military as G-3—of the Far East Command, in Tokyo, and also as Secretary of Staff of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers, Europe, in Paris. His career was patterned after that of his chief patron and supporter, General Westmoreland, who in 1968 headed all military operations in South Vietnam. Westmoreland and Koster had served together in the Pentagon during the nineteen-fifties, both in key staff jobs, and Westmoreland had later become Superintendent of West Point.

Koster’s assignment in the fall of 1967 as commanding general of the Americal Division could be underestimated at first by outsiders: the Americal, a hastily assembled conglomeration of independent infantry units, was far from an élite outfit. But the job, as the Peers investigation learned, was extremely important to the young general; he had been handpicked by Westmoreland after a sharp debate inside military headquarters in Saigon over the future combat role of the division. As the Americal was initially set up, it was composed of three separate five-thousand-man combat infantry brigades, each with its own support units, such as artillery and cavalry. Within a year, the division was restructured to make it more conventional and to provide more centralized control. But when Koster took over, it was a new kind of fighting unit, highly endorsed by Westmoreland, and pressure on the new commander was inevitable. Adding to the pressure was the low calibre of some of the officers initially assigned to the Americal by headquarters units. Lieutenant Colonel Clinton E. Granger, Jr., who served briefly in the G-3 office of the new division late in 1967 , told the Peers commission about his personnel problems. “In the G-3 section the quality of the personnel was not what one would ask in a division, to be perfectly honest,” he said. “Among the field-grade officers, there was only one major in the entire section who graduated from Leavenworth [the Army command-and-staff school, in Kansas], and of all of them there were only two who had not been passed over for promotion to lieutenant colonel. That would indicate that in some cases not the highest calibre of people were being provided.”

Koster responded to the staff problems by running a virtual one-man show. He trusted no one else to make decisions on the division’s operations and maneuvers. Every military engagement or tactic, including such details as the allotment of helicopters for combat assaults, had to be personally approved by him. He filled the two most important positions in his headquarters, chief of staff and head of G-3 operations, with artillery officers—highly unusual assignments for such men in a combat infantry division. Both men, however, were West Pointers—the only ones in key headquarters jobs. Colonel Nels A. Parson, Jr., the chief of staff of the Americal Division, was inhibited by his inexperience in infantry tactics; he spent much of his time, according to testimony other officers gave the Peers commission, seeing to it that fences were painted and grass was kept closely cropped. Lieutenant Colonel Jesmond D. Balmer, Jr., the operations officer, was bolder than Parson, but he had no greater success. He told the Peers commission, “I was not a textbook G-3, either as taught at Leavenworth or throughout the Army or practiced at any other divisions. The commanding general was in fact his own G-3. . . . I was not operating that division. I was doing certain planning and trying to keep the T.O.C. [tactical-operations center] going. . . . I can’t visualize that any staff officer there would visualize Balmer, even now, as being a key mover in that division. I was far from it.” Balmer indicated that Colonel Parson had an even worse relationship with General Koster, explaining, “It was very evident to all concerned that General Koster had no confidence or did not trust much responsibility, except answering the telephone in the headquarters and doing the normal headquarters chief-of-staff job, to Colonel Parson, and to a similar degree this went down to the staff. . . . It was the most unhappy group of staff officers and unhappy headquarters I have ever had any contact with and certainly ever heard tell of it.”

Koster’s relationship with his second-in-command, Brigadier General George H. Young, Jr., one of two assistant division commanders, was less frosty, but it was still far from warm. Young, who was about a year younger than his superior, had graduated from the Citadel military academy, in Charleston, South Carolina. He, too, could exercise only a limited degree of command authority, although he had been placed in administrative control of the division’s maneuver battalions, including the aviation and artillery units. He could recommend decisions but not carry them out. Most of the other headquarters officers were either “non-ring knockers”—men who had begun their careers as enlisted men or as graduates of college reserve programs—or graduates of military schools, such as the Citadel, that many West Pointers consider second-rate.

For most of the officers and men, the commanding general was a cold figure who compelled respect—and a touch of fear. “General Koster was so smart he was too smart for the rest of us,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anistranski told me during an interview several months ago. Anistranski, who served as the Americal Division’s G-5 (in charge of pacification and civil affairs) early in 1968, told me that he particularly remembered the General’s crisp method of barking orders. “Koster would say, ‘I don’t like that, and I want you to do this and that.’ ” The General wouldn’t take part in after-dinner drinking bouts at the Officers’ Club, the former colonel said, but chose to return to his quarters instead. James R. Ritchie III, who served as an administrative sergeant at Americal Division headquarters in 1967-68, remembered Koster as being very cold. “I worked near him in that office for over five months, and I was never introduced to him,” he told me. “I passed notes to him but really I never knew the man” Ritchie said of the headquarters staff, “They were all afraid. They were all afraid of Koster.”

The normal work schedule of General Koster and his aides seemed to have little relationship to the realities of the guerrilla war going on a few miles away. Koster lived in an air-conditioned four-room house on a hill at division headquarters, in Chu Lai; he was served by a full-time enlisted man and a young officer. A few yards away was a fortified bunker with full communications, in case of attack. He spent most of his workday in a helicopter, visiting the brigades and battalions under his command. Every morning, he would give a short speech to new soldiers arriving at the division replacement center. Usually, his aides told the Peers commission, he tried to be where the action was—to monitor his troops in combat. For, just like a young company commander, Koster was being judged largely on the basis of how many enemy soldiers his men claimed to have killed.

General Koster’s arrival by helicopter at local units would cause as much of a flurry—and as much fear—as a visit from Westmoreland caused at division headquarters. And, these visits notwithstanding, Koster remained remote from the problems and fears of the “grunts”—ground soldiers—assigned to his command. When complaints arose, they were often deliberately withheld from the General by his aides. Sergeant Ritchie, as one of the chief administrative clerks in division headquarters, worked directly for Colonel Parson. He recalled that he was ordered to screen all the mail personally addressed to Koster. “Parson wanted to know anything that was on Koster’s desk other than routine stuff,” Ritchie said. “A lot of stuff I know never got to Koster.” Instead, it was handled by Parson. Most of the senior staff officers at headquarters knew of the practice, but they did not complain, even when letters they had addressed to Koster brought replies from Colonel Parson, because Parson was their rating officer, and for an ambitious lieutenant colonel who had not attended West Point one bad rating could be the end of a career. This kind of reasoning went up the chain of command. In May, 1968, for example, a Special Forces camp in the Americal Division’s area of operations was overrun by North Vietnamese troops, with heavy losses to an Americal battalion that attempted to relieve the camp. Koster ordered an investigation, but, as the Peers commission was told by Colonel Jack L. Treadwell, who became division chief of staff in late 1968, it was not filed with higher headquarters, “because it made the division look bad.”

The ultimate effect of such practices was a form of self-imposed ignorance: few things were ever “officially” learned or reported. By March, 1968, murder, rape, and arson were common in many combat units of the Americal Division—particularly the 11th Brigade, in hostile Quang Ngai Province—but there were no official reports of them at higher levels. Most of the infantry companies had gone as far as to informally set up so-called Zippo squads—groups of men whose sole mission was to follow the combat troops through hamlets and set the hamlets on fire. Yet Koster, during one of his lengthy appearances before the Peers commission, calmly reported, “We had, I thought, a very strong policy against burning and pillaging in villages. Granted, during an action where the enemy was in there, there would be some destruction. But I had spoken to brigade commanders frequently, both as a group and personally, about the fact that this type of thing would not be tolerated. I’m sure that in our rules of engagement it [was] emphasized . . . very strongly.” The rules of engagement, a seven-page formal codification of the division’s “criteria for employment of firepower in support of combat operations,” were formally published March 16, 1968—the day of the massacre. They imposed stringent restrictions on the use of firepower and called for clearance before any firing on civilian areas. The rules, unfortunately for the Vietnamese, had little to do with the way the war was being fought.

Image on the right: SP4 Dustin setting fire to a dwelling (Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle/Public Domain)

Ironically, the publication of the rules of engagement allowed commanders to treat brutalities such as murder, rape, and arson as mere violations of rules, and in any event such serious crimes were rarely reported officially. Lieutenant Colonel Warren J. Lucas, the Americal Division’s provost marshal, or chief law-enforcement officer, told the Peers commission that most of the war-crimes investigations conducted by his unit involved the theft of goods or money from civilians or, occasionally, a charge that G.I.s had raped a prisoner of war at an interrogation center. The concept of murder during a combat operation simply wasn’t raised. Sometimes, Lucas said, he or his men would hear rumors or reports of serious incidents in the field, but, he added, “if it was declared a combat action, I did not move into it at all with my investigators.” Of course, the men who could report such incidents were the officers in charge; in effect, their choice was between a higher body count and a war-crimes investigation. Murder during combat and similarly serious violations of international law were never “reported through military-police channels,” Colonel Lucas told the Peers commission. Even if they had been, he could not have begun an investigation of such incidents without the approval of Chief of Staff Parson or General Koster. During his one-year tour of duty with the Americal, Lucas apparently never conducted such an investigation. What happened was that after the publication of the rules the military honor system went into effect. Under that system, as it was applied in the Americal Division, violations of the rules of engagement simply did not take place.

Lieutenant Colonel Anistranski, the officer in charge of the Americal’s civil-affairs and pacification program, explained in his interview with me how the system worked. “Every time a hamlet would burn, it was reported to me,” he said. “If it was in a friendly area, we’d go back and rebuild it. Sometimes it would come up at the nightly briefing. General Koster would come up to me and say, ‘Check it out.’ I’d get the S-5 [the lower-ranking officer in charge of civil affairs of the unit in question] and say, ‘You’d better get on it; the old man wants to know what happened out there.’ They’d come back after a little while and say it was set on fire during a fire fight. I’d go and tell the old man that.”

Some soldiers could, of course, have been court-martialled for committing war crimes. This might have limited the number of violations, but it would also have signalled to higher headquarters that violations did occur. Koster’s efficacy as a commander would have been questioned, and the name of the division would have been sullied by the inevitable press reports. Thus, talk of war crimes simply wasn’t heard at Americal Division headquarters. The men there took their jobs at face value. Father Carl E. Creswell served as an Episcopal chaplain at Chu Lai and resigned from the Army soon after his tour with the division. He later told the Peers commission, “I became absolutely convinced that as far as the United States Army was concerned there was no such thing as murder of a Vietnamese civilian. I’m sorry, maybe it’s a little bit cynical. I’m sure it is, but that’s the way the system works.”

The freedom to kill with impunity inevitably led to the inadvertent murder of many civilians in violation of both the Geneva conventions and the division rules of engagement. The statistics tell the story: A consistent problem for the military throughout the war has been the great disparity between the number of Vietcong soldiers that have been reported killed and the number of weapons that have been captured. Although the obvious answer seemed to be that Vietcong were not the only victims of American gunfire, artillery, and gunship strikes, officers at the top headquarters commands simply could not—or would not—accept that answer. Thus, commanding officers in the Americal Division were always urging their troops to “close with the enemy” instead of relying on helicopter or artillery support, and thereby increase their chances of capturing enemy weapons. Often, the rationale for the statistical imbalance was strained. Brigadier General Carl W. Hoffman, who served as chief operations officer of the III Marine Amphibious Force early in 1968, agreed with General Peers that Task Force Barker’s March 16th report of a hundred and twenty-eight Vietcong deaths and three captured weapons represented “a ratio that we would not normally like to see,” and went on, “However, we had experienced other reports in which we later found that the attacking troops had found a graveyard with fresh graves, and they determined then that these deaths had occurred on previous days because of artillery fire or gunship fire. Therefore, the total on a given day could be quite high and the weapons invariably would be very low. . . . we did see other instances in which we had very few weapons captured and quite a number of enemy bodies counted.”

“It’s like a game,” Colonel Anistranski, the division’s pacification-and-civil-affairs officer, remarked during my interview with him. “Everybody come on, we’re going to have a bonfire. The way Koster used to look at me, he knew they [the brigades] were lying. He tried to stop it, but there’s . . . so much going on.” Anistranski remembered that on occasion Koster would storm out of the nightly briefing, obviously angered, after hearing reports of large numbers of Vietcong killed by his troops and no captured weapons. “He’d get mad,” Anistranski said. “But me? I used to look at it and laugh. ‘There’s another battalion commander who’s pushing the full-colonel list,’ I’d say.” He could laugh, Anistranski added, but the General was trapped by his position. “Koster had bird colonels working for him; he had to accept their word.”

In early 1968, the Americal Division consisted of three combat infantry brigades. One of them, the 11th, was commanded by Colonel Oran K. Henderson. Henderson had at that time been in the Army twenty-five years, and, like most colonels, he had made it clear that he wanted very much to become a general. A non-West Pointer, he had failed during a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964 to get the command assignments necessary for promotion; he spent nearly two of the next four years in subordinate roles with the 11th Brigade in Hawaii, moving with the unit to Vietnam in late 1967 as deputy commander. On March 15, 1968, the Army gave him a chance: on that day, he took command of the brigade’s three infantry battalions and one artillery battalion. During formal ceremonies at the brigade’s headquarters area, at Duc Pho, Henderson accepted the unit’s colors from the outgoing commander, Brigadier General Andy A. Lipscomb, who was retiring from the service. Lipscomb had recommended Henderson for the job, and was delighted when General Koster approved the choice. Henderson “was completely loyal to me,” Lipscomb later told the Peers commission. “When I left, and I made out an efficiency report on Colonel Henderson, I recommended him for promotion to brigadier general, which I didn’t do to too many colonels along the way.”

At the time of his appointment, Henderson had seen little combat in Vietnam. He told the Peers commission that Task Force Barker’s attack on My Lai 4 “was the first combat action I had been involved in or observed,” and explained, “As the brigade executive officer up to this point and time, I was pretty well limited to Due Pho. Occasionally, I could get an H-23 [observation helicopter] and get out on the periphery or something. But as a general rule I was stuck at Duc Pho. I had not participated in a C.A. [combat assault], nor had I observed any combat action except that at the Duc Pho Province.” He was referring to occasional Vietcong mortar attacks on the brigade headquarters area. Upon taking over the top job in the brigade, Henderson immediately began acting like every other commander in Vietnam. Each day, he would assemble a few personal aides and fly all over his area of responsibility, observing the infantry battalions in action. The new commander was formal and crisp with his staff; he had what military men call “command presence.” In other officers he inspired nothing less than fear. Captain Donald J. Keshel, the brigade civil-affairs officer, told the Peers investigators, “I’m scared to death of Colonel Henderson. . . . He’s just got to be the hardest man I’ve ever worked for.” But Henderson himself feared at least one man—General Koster, whose rating of him as a brigade commander would make or break his chances of becoming a general. Koster had doubts about Henderson’s intellectual ability, and these were known to the Colonel. He got along easily with General Young, Koster’s assistant division commander, but his relations with the division commander himself seemed to be tense. “You could always distinguish rank when they were talking,” Michael C. Adcock, a former sergeant who served as one of Colonel Henderson’s radio operators, told me.

Henderson, and Lipscomb before him, also followed the usual commander’s practice of emphasizing body counts, so competition for enemy kills was constant among the battalions and companies of the 11th Brigade. There were three-day passes for the men who achieved high body counts; sometimes whole units would be rewarded. At one point, Henderson personally ordered a program set up offering helicopter pilots three- to five-day passes for bringing in military-age Vietnamese males for questioning. The program, which was initiated because the brigade was unable to develop reliable intelligence information on the Vietcong, was known informally among 11th Brigade air units as Operation Body Snatch. Within weeks, the operation had degenerated to the point where the pilots, instead of “snatching” civilians, were deliberately killing them, sometimes by running them down with their helicopter skids. Other pilots devised even more macabre forms of murder, one of which involved the use of a lasso to stop a Vietnamese peasant who was attempting to flee. Helicopter crewmen would then jump out, strip the victim, and replace the rope around his neck, and the helicopter would begin to move at low speed, with the Vietnamese running along. When the victim could no longer keep up, he would fall, snapping his neck.

Many witnesses told the Peers commission of having received no meaningful instruction in the Geneva conventions or in the proper treatment of prisoners of war during training in Hawaii or in South Vietnam. “In Hawaii, the emphasis was on tactical combat operations throughout,” Specialist Fifth Class James E. Ford, a public-information clerk for the brigade, told the Peers investigators. “I think perhaps during that time . . . they might have said something about pacification and about the S-5’s function, civil affairs. But I don’t think it was an active part of the tactical training, though.”

Although Army manuals state that a brigade civil-affairs official should hold the rank of major, the 11th Brigade’s S-5, Keshel, was only a captain. The Army is loath to say so in public, but the job of division G-5 or brigade S-5 is considered a lowly one—a position for anyone who desires rapid promotion to avoid. Captain Keshel was in charge of making cash payments to Vietnamese victims of accidental American shootings. He made about thirty such solatium payments, as they were called (at that time, they amounted to about thirty-three dollars for each adult and half as much for children fifteen years of age or under), over a period of eight or nine months, ending in the fall of 1968. The total seemed high to him, Keshel told the Peers commission, and he mentioned his concern to Colonel Henderson. Henderson, in turn, “mentioned it to the battalion commanders at one of his briefings,” Keshel said, and he continued, “And all of the battalion commanders, boy, they really got down on me, now, they said, ‘Well, you know we got lieutenants out there with the platoon, or rifle-company commanders out there with the companies, he’d get fire from a village, he’s got to return fire to protect his command, and when this happens, perhaps a civilian will get shot.’ ”

The concept of a battlefield war crime just did not exist in the 11th Brigade. Major John L. Pitttman, the provost marshal of the unit, testified before the Peers commission that he could not recall giving the military policemen under his command any instructions or training in their obligations to report war crimes. On two or three occasions, Pittman said, he did report instances of prisoner mistreatment to both Lipscomb and Henderson. At a staff meeting, Lipscomb or Henderson always responded the same way—not by ordering an investigation but by putting out instructions against such practices.

Even if Henderson and some of his staff officers remained largely uninformed about the war taking place a few miles from their headquarters, the Colonel did meet the other basic requirements of a Vietnam commander: he had a superior mess hall and a rebuilt officers’ club, and there was considerable emphasis on being an officer and a gentleman. G.I.s who served in the 11th Brigade frequently talked to me with bitterness about the life style of the senior officers. “They had a fantastic mess hall,” former Specialist Fifth Class Jay A. Roberts, who worked in the public-information office, near headquarters, recalled. “The officers would have cocktail hour for an hour every night before dinner.” Other G.I.s talked about the ice cream, the shrimp, and the steak that were often on hand for the officers. Also frequently noted was the fact that the headquarters’ allotment of air-conditioners was utilized for Henderson’s mess hall and his personal quarters. Plans to blow up the mess hall—perhaps only half serious—were constantly being developed by the headquarters clerks. Some G.I.s boasted of having devised ways to appropriate bottles of whiskey and cold beer from the officers’ walk-in cooler. Former Specialist Fourth Class Frank D. Beardslee served as driver for Colonel Barker, the commander of Task Force Barker, and often took him to the Duc Pho Officers’ Club at five-thirty in time for the cocktail hour. “It was just like they were in Washington,” Beardslee said of the officers. “They would talk about promotions and all that stuff—just like a cocktail party back in the world.”

Shortly before Lipscomb, a West Pointer, retired, the brigade public-information office presented him with a scrapbook of photographs and news clippings highlighting his service with the 11th Brigade. Similar scrapbooks were made up for most senior officers who left the unit. Former Sergeant Ronald L. Haeberle, who served as a photographer for the brigade’s public-information office, considered such work routine at the time, and later, when criticized by the Peers panel for not turning photographs he had made of the My Lai 4 massacre over to higher authorities, he said he had never considered such a step, explaining, “You know something . . . ? If a general is smiling wrong in a photograph, I have learned to destroy it. . . . My experience as a G.I. over there is that if something doesn’t look right, a general smiling the wrong way . . . I stopped and destroyed the negative.”

F or a non-West Pointer, Colonel Barker had everything going for him. In January, 1968, General Koster had pulled him out of his job as operations officer of the 11th Brigade and given him command of a three-company task force of four hundred men that had been put together to find and destroy the enemy in the Batangan Peninsula area, in the eastern part of Quang Ngai Province. The peninsula was “Indian country” as far as American and South Vietnamese soldiers were concerned. Few operations had ever been mounted against the village of Son My, which was widely considered to be the staging and headquarters area for the Vietcong 48th Battalion, one of the strongest units in Quang Ngai. The area was heavily booby-trapped, and the men of Task Force Barker—the Colonel followed a custom by naming the unit after himself—suffered as a result. By March 15th, about fifteen G.I.s in the three companies had been killed and more than eighty had been wounded—a high percentage of casualties but not one that necessarily reflected much direct confrontation with the enemy. For example, four men in Charlie Company were killed and thirty-eight were wounded in those ten weeks, but the Peers commission determined that only three of the casualties, including one death, had resulted from direct contact with the enemy. But “Barker’s Bastards,” as the men of the task force were quickly dubbed by the brigade public-information office, were seemingly able to do what no other unit in the brigade could—find and destroy the enemy. “We devoted quite a bit of coverage to Task Force Barker,” Ford, the brigade public-information clerk, told the Peers commission. “Up until Task Force Barker deployed, we hadn’t been seeing too much action. As a result, our public-information coverage was kind of slim. . . . They were getting contact, and we were getting good copy out of it.” Barker’s men had the highest body count by far of any unit in the 11th Brigade, other officers would speak admiringly of the commander’s “luck” in getting solid contact. Specialist Fourth Class Donald R. Hooton, one of the Bravo Company infantrymen, had a different point of view. “Everybody said, ‘He’s got the most phenomenal luck,’ ” Hooton told me recently. “What they meant is that we’d go out and gun down a lot of people.”

But the G.I.s—even Hooton—admired Barker. He wasn’t afraid to land his helicopter in a battle area, and he would often join in the fray, firing his .45-calibre pistol at Vietnamese when his helicopter was flying low. He made sure that his troops received at least one hot meal a day in the field. There were other reasons for the widespread admiration of Barker. He was “lean and mean,” in the military tradition; handsome, with neatly chiselled features; friendly to the “grunts,” always accessible and always making it clear that he understood their problems. “Barker, in my estimation, seemed to have his finger in and was pretty well in tune with what was going on,” General Koster told the Peers commission. Barker’s responsibilities as a commander were total; he was in charge of the intelligence, the planning, and the initiation of all task-force operations—and always had the approval of his superiors.

Barker’s promotion to head the task force left a crucial administrative gap in the brigade headquarters—one that Colonel Henderson, then acting as deputy brigade commander, tried to fill himself. Then, when Henderson assumed control of the brigade, on March 15th, he was still not assigned a new administrative aide, so he was forced to do his paperwork at night. Such treatment undoubtedly galled Henderson, and so did the relationship between Koster and Barker. There were fifteen thousand lieutenant colonels in the Army in 1968 and fewer than three hundred battalions to command. Without battalion-command experience in Vietnam, a young lieutenant colonel could not expect promotion. Because the pressure for the jobs was so intense, the Army limited battalion commanders’ tours to six months. Normally, Henderson could have expected to have a powerful hold over Barker, because Barker would have needed Henderson’s approval before commanding a battalion; the bargaining and negotiating for such jobs goes on daily in the Pentagon and elsewhere. But by the time Henderson took over the brigade, General Koster had promised the next battalion command to Barker. In effect, Henderson’s potential patronage—an important part of a commander’s job—was diminished, and a protégé, if he had had one, would have had to wait longer for a battalion commander’s spot.

There was no fancy officers’ club at the task-force headquarters, at Landing Zone Dottie, a few miles from the city of Quang Ngai, the provincial capital. Barker, like all commanders, spent most of his working day in a helicopter, and he tried to catch up on his paperwork at night. The administration of the task force therefore fell to the operations officer, Major Charles C. Calhoun, who was serving his second tour of duty in Vietnam. The task-force headquarters was severely underequipped and understaffed; it had only one typewriter assigned to it, and one clerk to do its typing. As a result, there was neither the staff nor the time to prepare the required task-force version of the rules of engagement or to instruct the troops about the Geneva conventions. The unofficial task-force rule seemed to be simply not to commit any illegal actions directly in front of the commanding officer. Speaking of Captain Michles, of Bravo Company, Congleton, the Captain’s radio operator, told me, “If something wasn’t done in front of him, nothing happened. But if he’d ever caught you smoking pot, he’d have gone wild.” Michles was similarly offended if the killing of civilians was brought directly to his attention. Congleton, after recalling that the officer “wanted kills,” said, “By the first time we actually killed anybody who was a Vietcong with a weapon, we had reported twenty or thirty confirmed kills, and I said, ‘Hey, we just got our first kill.’ He really got mad.”

Both of Task Force Barker’s February missions into Son My were officially described as unqualified successes, although the disparity between Vietcong killed and weapons captured—a hundred and fifty-five to six—was extreme. After the second mission, Colonel Barker gave his superiors a glowing report. It said, “This operation was well planned, well executed, and successful. Friendly casualties were light and the enemy suffered a hard blow. However, many enemy soldiers were able to escape with their weapons and the weapons of the enemy dead. This was caused by several factors. . . . Although the air strikes were timely and effective . . . time was lost waiting for aircraft. . . . Air evacuation of wounded was a contributing factor in allowing the enemy time to escape, since supporting fire had to be stopped each time a medevac helicopter was brought in. The ground units were not as aggressive later in the battle as they were earlier. . . . Aggressiveness increased again at the insistence of the Task Force commander, but during the lull several V.C. had escaped with weapons.

It was probably inevitable that Barker would decide to conduct another operation in Son My. He talked about it sometime early in March with General Lipscomb and got the General’s approval. “Barker said to me on one or two occasions that he was going back into Pinkville,” Lipscomb told the Peers commission. “This 48th Battalion was a thorn in his side there, and he was going to go back in there. . . . It just was something that had to be done before the area would be under control.” Cecil D. Hall, the task-force communications sergeant, recalled that Barker had unsuccessfully sought permission from brigade headquarters to use Rome plows, monstrous twenty-two-ton bulldozers capable of levelling hundreds of acres per day, to destroy the area. “I heard him mention many times,” Hall told me during an interview in October, 1971, “that it’d sure be nice if we could get some bulldozers and clear that place once and for all.”

General Koster acknowledged to the Peers commission that though he was assured that the forthcoming task-force assault would be even more successful than the two previous operations (Barker reported that he expected to find four hundred Vietcong in the area), he really knew very little about the plan for it. He was consulted about the mission, he said, simply because he was the only one who could authorize the use of helicopters, which Barker considered necessary. As Barker initially explained it to Koster, the main target was the village of My Lai 1, the center of the Pinkville area, where intelligence said the 48th Battalion had its headquarters. Although Koster approved the mission, he did not attempt to analyze it. He told the Peers commission, “I’m reasonably sure that he probably outlined the fact that there would be two blocking companies—one would get there overland, and the other two were air assaulted. . . . But I don’t recall that I even focussed as to exactly where it was on the map, one of these little villages as opposed to another one. The one that had been the primary target was the one on the coast [My Lai 1], and the only time I really heard ‘Pinkville’ used was for that one right on the coast as opposed to any of the others. . . . Of course, that place was nothing but a bunch of rubble anyway. I knew they had gone in there on many occasions and tried to blow the dugouts and tunnels, and I knew that this was a continuing thing. Every time we went through there we tried to blow a few more of them.”

At no point was there any formal, written plan outlining the tactical aspects of the operation. Barker’s plan for the mission was not seen in any form by any top-level Americal Division officers, such as Lieutenant Colonel Tommy P. Trexler, the division intelligence chief. In addition, Major Calhoun, the task-force operations officer, couldn’t recall any specific concern about the citizens of Son My before the March 16th operation, and he told the Peers commission that he thought there were only a hundred people living in My Lai 4, Charlie Company’s main target. (The population was at least five hundred.) The Major did say, “On a continuous basis leaflets were dropped in the area advising the civilians to move into the refugee centers. . . . they [task-force personnel] had advised the civilians that it was an area they should move out of, and some of them, I understand, left.” Although some officers at the division level were aware that the civilians, even if they wanted to leave, had no place to go, because the refugee camps were already overflowing, it is not clear whether anyone at Task Force Barker headquarters really understood that fact. It was a hopeless situation for the civilians in Son My, whatever their political affiliations, if any. Captain Charles K. Wyndham, who served until March 16th as the civil-affairs officer for Task Force Barker, told the Peers commission that he had never participated in any planning for the handling and safety of civilians before any operation with the task force. He added, “It’s kind of useless to go out there [into the field, with an infantry company] and try to do civil affairs.”

At one point in the planning for the operation, some unchallenged intelligence information about the civilians in My Lai 4 was received at the task-force headquarters: the residents would leave their hamlet about 7 a.m. on the day of the operation, a Saturday, to go to market. Since none of the planning details of the operation had been presented to higher headquarters, it was impossible for staff officers there to evaluate the intelligence information with any degree of sophistication. However, amid all the conflicting testimony before the Peers commission, a consensus did emerge that there was no basis for assuming that all the residents of My Lai 4 would leave the village about seven in the morning to go to market. In fact, former First Lieutenant Clarence E. Dukes, an intelligence officer at Americal Division headquarters, testified later that precisely the opposite might have been expected. “I would say that normally by sunrise if there were V.C. soldiers in a populated area they’d be moved out before dawn,” he told the Peers commission. “Your women and children would be around town. Most of your male population would have moved out to their daily work.” Colonel Trexler had a similar opinion. He testified, “An occupied village with any reasonable number of people, I would expect some of them to be there at any time of the day or night unless there was some other reason that they had been alerted to get out.” He was then asked, “There would always be left behind children, toddlers, old women, old men, pregnant women, and persons in these categories?” He said yes.

With concern for possible civilian casualties out of the way, the task force’s attack plan was drawn up. As part of the planning for the attack, Colonel Barker ordered the task force’s four support cannons to fire a three- to five-minute salvo of shells into the hamlet beginning at 7:20 a.m. on March 16th—about ten minutes before the landing of the first helicopter-borne squad of men, led by Lieutenant Calley, of Charlie Company. The process is known in the military as “prepping the area.” Lieutenant Colonel Robert B. Luper was serving then as commanding officer of all the artillery units attached to the 11th Brigade. He told Peers that Barker wanted preparation fire but not on his landing zone, and explained, “This is a little different than we would normally expect, because he felt that the area that he was going to make his combat assault into was open enough that he could see if there was going to be any problem. He wanted the preparation fire north of his landing zone, which would have put it on My Lai, the village of My Lai.” Asked if the entire five-minute attack was to be made against the village, Luper replied, “It was.” The use of artillery on a populated village was considered routine by the officers of Task Force Barker. One justification for such tactics—which are in violation of international law—was offered to the Peers commission by Major Calhoun: “Of course, the most vulnerable time is coming down with the first landing, you have nothing there, no troops on the ground, and the choppers are slow and they are sitting down like ducks on the water. Or he [Barker] could put the fire into the area and, I’m sure, realizing that some civilians might be hurt. There is a difference between the sacrifice of American troops and the sacrifice of some civilians in this area.”

Another justification cited for the shelling of the village was that such action had been cleared by the South Vietnamese authorities responsible for the area of operations. The Vietnamese considered the whole area to be dominated by the Vietcong and had long since declared it a free-fire zone. Captain Wayne E. Johnson, who was a liaison officer for the Americal Division attached to Second arvn’s headquarters, in Quang Ngai, told the Peers commission that he believed the Americans and South Vietnamese serving in Quang Ngai Province “felt that whatever people were out there were enemy,” and explained, “If there was a target worth shooting at, it shouldn’t be cancelled because of the presence of civilians.” Approval was invariably granted by the South Vietnamese. “The district people didn’t hold too many civilians to be in the area,” Johnson said. “It didn’t hold a large population.” This view was tragically wrong, as a subsequent resettlement program demonstrated. American and Vietnamese authorities in Saigon began an uprooting of the people of Son My and neighboring villages in February, 1969, expecting to relocate four thousand civilians; at its end, there were twelve thousand people shifted from the area.

On March 15th, the day before the mission, Colonel Barker, Major Calhoun, and Captain Eugene M. Kotouc, the task-force intelligence officer, scheduled a complete operational briefing on the mission in a small tent just outside task-force headquarters. The session was attended by all the men who were going to play key roles in the attack the next day: Captain Medina, of Charlie Company; Captain Michles, of Bravo Company; Captain Stephen J. Gamble, the commanding officer of the four-cannon artillery battery stationed at Landing Zone Uptight, about five miles north of My Lai 4; and Major Frederic W. Watke, the commanding officer of the aero-scout company of the 123rd Aviation Battalion, which was stationed in the Americal Division headquarters area, at Chu Lai, and which would fly support for the mission. (Alpha Company, the third unit in Task Force Barker, which was headed by Captain William C. Riggs, was assigned no significant role in the operation.) Also present at the briefing was Colonel Henderson, who had formally taken command of the 11th Brigade only hours before.

The briefing itself was professionally crisp. The headquarters staff of Task Force Barker listened inside the crowded briefing tent as Colonel Henderson gave what amounted to a pep talk. It was a short talk, and Captain Gamble was later able to recall much of it before the Peers commission. “He generally reviewed what was going to occur the next day, and he mentioned that it was a very important operation, and the Vietcong unit that was located in that area. They wanted to get rid of them once and for all and get them out of that area. He stressed this point, and he wanted to make sure that everybody and all the companies were up to snuff and everything went like clockwork during the operation.”

Captain Medina later testified that Colonel Henderson wanted the companies to get more aggressive. Medina told the Peers commission, “Colonel Henderson . . . stated that in the past two operations the failure of the operations was that the soldier was not aggressive enough in closing with the enemy. Therefore, we were leaving too many weapons and that the other enemy soldiers in the area, as they retreated, the women and children in the area would pick up the weapons and run and therefore by the time the soldiers arrived to where they had killed a V.C. that the weapon would be gone.” Captain Kotouc testified that Henderson had said that “when we get through with that 48th Battalion, they won’t be giving us any more trouble.”

After Henderson spoke, Kotouc gave a quick summary of the intelligence situation, including the special report that all civilians would have left My Lai 4 by seven in the morning. Major Calhoun next presented a map review. Then Barker stood up. Kotouc recalled Barker’s words vividly. “Colonel Barker said he wanted the area cleaned out, he wanted it neutralized, and he wanted the buildings knocked down,” Kotouc told the Peers commission. “He wanted the hootches [huts] burned, and he wanted the tunnels filled in, and then he wanted the livestock and chickens run off, killed, or destroyed. Colonel Barker did not say anything about killing any civilians, sir, nor did I. He wanted to neutralize the area.”

Captain Medina testified that Barker “instructed me to burn and destroy the village; to destroy any livestock, water buffalo, pigs, chickens; and to close any wells that we might find . . .”

Who told Task Force Barker that all the civilians of My Lai 4 would leave the hamlet and be on their way to market shortly after 7 a.m. on March 16th? From whom did the task force receive information that four hundred members of the Vietcong 48th Battalion would be in the village of Son My on March 16th? These two questions remained unanswered throughout the Army’s lengthy hearings on the massacre at My Lai 4. Witnesses were consistently asked if they knew of any documents or people that had provided such information; the answers were invariably vague. “No, sir, I cannot cite any document,” Captain Kotouc said in response to such a question from a member of the Peers commission. “But it was through interrogation of people, people I had talked to. This was always—this was the part we were trying to figure out, how they moved in the area. They all came and went about the same time. . . . If I recall, part of it [the intelligence] came from Colonel Barker. Information, I think, he received from his contacts or somewhere like that. It is very difficult for me to pin it down.”

Undoubtedly, the men of the task force had some reasons of their own for believing that the 48th Battalion was in the Son My area; evidence of the unit’s presence—old documents, for instance, and civilians who perhaps knew of some of the unit’s recent movements—could be found at any time throughout the Batangan Peninsula, which was, after all, the base of operations for the 48th. Barker made no further attempt to confirm the enemy unit’s location, because he felt that none was needed. If Barker or any of his aides had checked, they would have found that every intelligence desk at the provincial headquarters in Quang Ngai placed the 48th Battalion at least fifteen kilometres, or nine miles, west of the city. They would also have learned that the unit was considered to be in poor fighting condition, because it had suffered heavy losses while attacking Quang Ngai during the Tet offensive. “Whatever was left of them was out in the mountains,” Gerald Stout, who was then an Army intelligence officer with the Americal Division and is now a law student at Syracuse University, told me in an interview. His information was based in part on highly classified reconnaissance flights over mountain areas.

There was no conspiracy to destroy the village of My Lai 4, or to kill the villagers; what took place there had happened before in Quang Ngai Province and would happen again—although with less drastic results. The desire of Colonel Barker to mount another successful operation in the area, with a high enemy body count; the belief shared by all the principals that everyone living in Son My was living there by choice, because of Communist sympathies; the assurance that no officials of the South Vietnamese government would protest any act of war in Son My; and the basic incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army—all these factors combined to enable a group of normally ambitious men to mount an unnecessary mission against a nonexistent enemy force and somehow find evidence to justify it.

The assault on My Lai 4 began, like most combat assaults in Vietnam, with artillery and helicopters. Colonel Barker arrived over My Lai 4 in his command-and-control helicopter just in time to see the first barrage of artillery shells fall into the hamlet. Colonel Henderson’s helicopter—filled with high-ranking officers—flew over the hamlet a few minutes later; trouble with a helicopter had delayed the Colonel’s takeoff from his headquarters, at Duc Pho. General Koster flew in and out of the area throughout the early morning, watching the men of Charlie Company conduct their assault. The task-force log for March 16th, which was submitted to the Peers commission in evidence, shows that Lieutenant Calley’s first platoon landed precisely at 7:30 a.m. at the landing zone outside My Lai 4. There were nine troop-carrying helicopters, and they were accompanied by two gunships from the 174th Aviation Company, which, with their guns blazing, had crisscrossed the landing zone moments before the combat troops landed, firing thousands of bullets and rockets in a fusillade designed to keep enemy gunmen at bay. Of course, there were no enemy gunmen, but it didn’t matter that day: within minutes the statistics began filling the task-force daily log. At seven-thirty-five, Charlie Company officially claimed its first Vietcong; the victim was an old man who had jumped out of a hole waving his arms in fear and pleading. Seven minutes later, the gunships—known as Sharks—claimed three Vietcong killed; the dead men were reportedly seen with weapons and field gear. By eight, seventeen more Vietcong were said to have been killed. At three minutes past eight, Charlie Company said that it had found a radio and three boxes of medical supplies. At eight-forty, Charlie Company notified headquarters that it had counted a total of eighty-four dead Vietcong. By this time, My Lai 4 was in ruins. Lieutenant Calley and a number of the men in his platoon were already in the process of killing two large groups of civilians and filling a drainage ditch with the bodies. The second and third platoons were also committing wholesale murder, and some men had begun to set fire to anything in the hamlet that would burn. Wells were fouled, livestock was slaughtered, and food stocks were scattered.

The two Sharks from the 174th also committed murder that morning. After the artillery shells began falling, hundreds of civilians streamed from the hamlet, most of them travelling southwest toward the city of Quang Ngai. The two gunships flew overhead and began firing into the crowd. The time was about seven-forty-five. It was noted by Captain Brian W. Livingston, a pilot from the 123rd Aviation Battalion, who was also flying in support of the mission. Livingston later flew over and took a close look at the victims; they were women, children, and old men—between thirty and fifty of them. Scott A. Baker, a flight commander with the 123rd, also watched the civilians leaving the village. He told the Peers commission later that the Sharks made a pass over the group with their guns firing and that moments later he saw twenty-five bodies on the road to Quang Ngai. The troops from Charlie Company had yet to move that far south, Baker said.

The killing continued for at least ninety minutes after eight-forty, but no more enemy kills for Charlie Company appeared in the task-force log. Charlie Company’s body count officially ended at eight-forty in the morning on March 16th, with a report that it had killed eighty-four Vietcong and had captured documents, a radio, ammunition, and some medical supplies. The Sharks had reported a total of six enemy kills. Later that day, Bravo Company concluded its operation with an official body count of thirty-eight. (The total number of dead Vietcong allegedly slain by both the ground and air units over My Lai 4—a hundred and twenty-eight—would make the front pages of American newspapers the next morning. It was the most significant operation of the war for the 11th Brigade.

The smoke over My Lai 4 could be seen for miles. First Lieutenant James T. Cooney was flying Colonel Henderson’s helicopter over My Lai 4; he told the Peers commission, “I did notice several hootches burning, several buildings burning, possibly rice stores. I do remember there being burning going on on the ground at that time.” Chief Warrant Officer Robert W. Witham was flying General Koster’s helicopter; he similarly recalled “smoke and things like this, artillery.” Even Captain Johnson—the Americal Division’s liaison officer at Quang Ngai, about five miles to the southwest, saw the smoke. “I remember seeing smoke in the area and knowing that Task Force Barker was in the area,” he told the Peers commission. “I accepted this. I assumed that I knew what was happening.” The pilots saw it, but the officers they were flying claimed they did not. General Koster, asked by the Peers commission if he recalled seeing the village “pretty much up in smoke at that time when you flew over,” responded simply, “No, sir, I don’t.” Colonel Henderson was asked a similar question, and replied, “I did not see My Lai 4 in flames or having been burnt or burning.”

Warrant Officers Jerry R. Culverhouse and Daniel R. Millians were piloting a helicopter that morning in support of Charlie Company. Culverhouse and Millians, who were attached to the 123rd Aviation Battalion, were part of a new concept in the Vietnam air war. B Company of the 123rd was known as an aero-scout company, and its mission that day was to cut off enemy troops attempting to flee Task Force Barker’s trap in My Lai 4. The pilots usually teamed up with a second gunship, and both usually flew above a small observation helicopter. On the morning of March 16th, the observation helicopter was manned by Chief Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson, Jr., of Atlanta. Above the gunships, in turn, were two or three helicopters carrying infantrymen. The concept called for the observation craft to flush out the enemy, so the gunships could force them to halt. If the enemy avoided the gunships, the infantrymen would be landed (the 123rd pilots described this process as “inserting the animals”) to engage the Vietcong. Culverhouse and Millians arrived at their duty station sometime after nine and joined up with Captain Livingston. The hamlet was still aflame. They began flying back and forth across My Lai 4 and the nearby paddy fields, on the prowl for Vietcong. Culverhouse later told the Peers commission, “It appeared to us there it was fairly secure. We heard no shooting and didn’t receive any fire ourselves . . . And we immediately noted the bodies surrounding the village. . . . there were numerous bodies scattered both in the inner perimeters of the village and in the outer perimeters leaving the village. . . . I was especially . . . amazed at one group of bodies encountered . . . over on the east side of the village there was an irrigation ditch, which appeared to me to be about six or seven feet wide. . . . [and] probably five or six feet deep. . . . there were numerous bodies that appeared to be piled up. In some places, I don’t know, maybe four or five or I suppose as high as six deep. . . . For an area about—around thirty to thirty-five yards the ditch was almost completely filled with bodies.”

Image below: Hugh Thompson, Jr. (Public Domain)

Later, at Thompson’s insistence, Culverhouse and Millians landed their helicopter and removed some civilians from a bunker. Thompson was in a rage: he had spent the morning watching Charlie Company commit murder. Finally, observing about ten women and children huddled in fear as Lieutenant Calley and his men approached them, Thompson landed his craft, ordered his two machine gunners to train their weapons on Calley, and announced that he was going to fly the civilians to safety. “The only way you’ll get them out is with a hand grenade,” Calley replied. Thompson radioed to Culverhouse and Millians and asked them to land their helicopter to begin evacuating the civilians. They descended. For combat helicopter pilots, the decision to land was heresy, because the aircraft are exceptionally vulnerable to enemy fire during the slow moments of descent and ascent. As the helicopter landed, Thompson and his door gunner began coaxing the civilians into the craft.

Captain Livingston testified before the Peers commission that he had heard Thompson make three separate radio transmissions about unwarranted killings, beginning sometime after nine. Thompson complained twice about a captain who had shot and killed a Vietnamese woman, and his third complaint was about a black sergeant who had done the same thing.

General Koster habitually kept up with the swirl of action in his area of responsibility by monitoring three or four radio frequencies; he was constantly on the alert for the first signs of trouble or enemy contact anywhere. Such signs can always be heard over the airwaves—calls for reinforcements, medical helicopters, more ammunition, more firepower. The General’s helicopter had an elaborate radio console, and, if he chose, he could tune in on communications between helicopters and ground forces, the task force and the companies, or the brigade and the task force. Despite the information available to him, Koster, in his testimony to the Peers commission, could not recall any details of the My Lai 4 operation. Asked if he had seen the hundreds of Vietnamese civilians fleeing the hamlet that morning, the General replied, “I can’t tie it to this particular operation. I’ve flown over several of them, and this one doesn’t distinguish itself from any other as far as this type of thing is concerned.” Colonel Henderson, however, testified that he saw from six to eight bodies that might be civilians during his early-morning flight over My Lai 4. He recalled checking immediately with Colonel Barker and being told that the victims had been killed by artillery fire. Those were the only bodies he reported seeing, although he flew over My Lai 4 on at least three occasions that day. At least one other passenger aboard his aircraft, however, testified to having seen many more. Sergeant Adcock, Henderson’s radio operator that day, told the Peers commission that he had observed from thirty-five to forty bodies in all during his trips over My Lai 4. The command-and-control helicopter, he said, usually flew at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet—out of the range of small-arms fire—but had travelled much lower during the morning trips over the hamlet, occasionally going “low enough to make the rice wave.” The other passengers on the flight were Major Robert W. McKnight, the 11th Brigade operations officer, who testified that he had seen perhaps five dead bodies; Colonel Luper, the brigade’s artillery commander, who said he had seen from fifteen to twenty bodies; and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William I. MacLachlan, who was assigned to coördinate air strikes, if necessary, and who said he had seen only a few bodies. None of the passengers, including Adcock, specifically recalled hearing anything about Americans’ murdering Vietnamese.

The only known complaints made before nine that morning came from Thompson and other members of the 123rd Aviation Battalion. The helicopter unit, normally stationed at the Americal Division headquarters, at Chu Lai, had set up a special operations van and refuelling station at Landing Zone Dottie, the headquarters area (named after Colonel Barker’s wife) for Task Force Barker, to increase the support it could provide for the task force. Former Specialist Fifth Class Lawrence J. Kubert, who was serving as the operations sergeant for the aero-scout company of the battalion, told the Peers commission that he and others in the van had heard pilots’ complaints early that morning about the excessive shooting of civilians by the Sharks from the 174th Aviation Company. The complaints were relayed to the task-force operations center at Dottie, only three hundred yards away, with a warning that most of the persons fleeing the village were women and children. Kubert recalled that Colonel Henderson, identifying himself by his radio code name, Rawhide Six, subsequently warned the combat units by radio, “I don’t want any unnecessary killing.” A similar statement from Henderson was heard by two aero-scout plots during the morning. Kubert said he assumed that the warning was directed at the gunships.

By 9 a.m., Colonel Henderson was back at the task-force operations center. He had spent more than an hour over My Lai 4, leaving for only a few moments shortly after eight to watch Bravo Company begin its assault on My Lai I—a target it never reached. Within the next thirty minutes, the Colonel was joined by most of the senior officers of the task force and the 11th Brigade. Major Calhoun, the task-force operations officer, and Master Sergeant William J. Johnson were monitoring the radios in the operations center. Captain Charles R. Lewellen, the assistant operations officer, who ran the night shift at the task-force operations center, had stayed up to transcribe center, stayed up the reports of the operation with his tape recorder. A copy of that tape was later made available to the Peers commission, and it provided a minute-by-minute timetable for the first hours of action. The tape also helped prove to the satisfaction of the Peers investigators that a coverup—involving the manipulation of battlefield statistics—had taken place between eight-thirty and nine-thirty at Landing Zone Dottie.

At that time, Colonel Barker was still flying over the combat area; he had been out there for more than an hour. At eight-twenty-eight, according to the Lewellen tape, Barker had radioed Captain Medina, saying, “I’m heading back to refuel. Have you had any contact down there yet?” Lewellen’s tape did not record Medina’s response, but Barker, apparently informed that the company was making a body count, said, “Dig deep. Take your time and get ’em [the Vietcong] out of those holes.” Medina gave him the body count, and Barker asked, “Is that eight—ah, eight-four K.I.A.s?” Having been told that it was, Barker radioed Sergeant Johnson, “Returning to your location to refuel.” A few minutes later, Barker landed at Dottie and rushed to the operations center, arriving just as a clerk was noting in the official task-force log, “Co. C has counted 69 V.C. K.I.A.” The map coördinates for My Lai 4 were listed alongside the entry, which was filed at eight-forty. The log statistics were not cumulative, and the new report of sixty-nine kills, added to the earlier claims of fifteen, gave Charlie Company its total body count of eighty-four.

By this time, the operations center should have been in a state of jubilation, but most of the men there were aware that none of the normal sounds of combat were coming from the radios—just a steadily climbing total of enemy kills. The only American casualties reported by nine o’clock were a lieutenant and some enlisted men from Bravo Company who had triggered land mines. The Peers commission, during one of its interrogations of Colonel Henderson, suggested what really was going on: “They [Charlie Company] went through this place in less than an hour. By the time you were ready to come back [to Landing Zone Dottie], they had been practically through the village. . . . There were dead civilians all over the place. There wasn’t any resistance. There wasn’t a shot fired after that. . . . Hootches were burned by this time.” About nine, Specialist Fifth Class Kubert relayed the reports from the pilots over My Lai 4 to the task force.

Just before nine, Colonel Barker flew from Dottie to the Bravo Company area, near My Lai 1, to evacuate the men wounded by mines and to approve the change in mission for Captain Michles’s men. He returned about forty minutes later—well after the first of Warrant Officer Thompson’s complaints had been received. Captain Kotouc, the task-force intelligence officer, who had spent the morning dashing in and out of the operations center, told the Peers commission that he had heard one of Thompson’s protests over a task-force radio. “There was a report from . . . the helicopter pilot,” he testified. “The report . . . was something about someone getting shot with a machine gun. ‘Looks like they are shooting them with a machine gun. Someone is going across the road and is getting shot with a machine gun.’ The helicopter pilot, whoever he was, said something like ‘He doesn’t have a weapon,’ or words to that effect.” The operations center was chaotic. By the time Thompson made his complaints, Bravo Company had been given permission to forget its main target, My Lai 1, the headquarters base of the V. C. 48th Battalion, and proceed instead to My Khe 4 and other hamlets to the south. Yet Major Calhoun did not know until the Peers commission told him that Bravo Company had not entered My Lai 1 on March 16th.

Under Army regulations, all the task force’s significant actions had to be relayed immediately to the 11th Brigade for inclusion in that unit’s reports to the Americal Division. The brigade daily log for March 16th noted that Task Force Barker had reported the following at nine-thirty: “Counted 69 V.C. K.I.A. as a result of Arty [artillery] fire.” Suddenly and inexplicably, the sixty-nine kills reported by Charlie Company were attributed to artillery. The map coördinates for the engagement were also changed—to an area about six hundred metres north of My Lai 4. The altered information, which was filed with the brigade fifty minutes after the task force received it—an unheard-of delay for such “good” news—became a focal point of the Peers investigation, which was never able to learn who had filed it. The eight-forty entry was the last Charlie Company combat report logged by the task force for the day, although one witness told the Peers commission that he was with Captain Medina when the Captain radioed a body count of three hundred and ten, later that morning. (Medina and all the others involved denied any knowledge of such statistics.)

Peers and his staff closely questioned the artillery officers connected with the My Lai 4 operation in an attempt to determine how they had accepted credit, without question or investigation, for the killing of sixty-nine Vietcong as a result of a three- to five-minute artillery barrage. Captain Dennis R. Vazquez, the liaison officer between the task force and its artillery support, spent that morning aboard Colonel Barker’s helicopter, and later claimed that the report of sixty-nine Vietcong killed by artillery had been provided him by an artillery forward observer assigned to Charlie Company. He said he had accepted the statistic without question.

Captain Medina and former Lieutenant Roger L. Alaux, Jr., the artillery forward observer in Charlie Company, both testified that they knew nothing about large numbers of deaths caused by artillery and that they had no idea how the total of sixty-nine had originated. Alaux told the Peers commission that he had officially learned of the figure after the operation. “I accepted that number,” he said. He added, however, that it did not impress him “as being a particularly valid number.”

The figure similarly went without challenge from any of the senior artillery officers in either the battalion or the division. Colonel Luper, who flew over the area after learning of the sensational body count achieved by his men, did not check on the figure. Asked what he had done during the second ride with Henderson over My Lai 4, Luper responded, “I assume I rode in a helicopter, sir. I must have looked out some, but I’m telling you that I don’t recall anything, sir.”

At nine-thirty-five, General Koster landed at Dottie and was met by Colonel Henderson. According to Henderson, Koster “asked me how the operation was going, and I gave him the result as I knew it at that time.” Henderson’s testimony continued, “I did tell him, or he asked me, about any civilian casualties, and I do recall telling that, ‘Yes, I had observed six to eight,’ but I had no other report from Colonel Barker as to civilians killed, but I had observed these.” In an earlier version of that statement, Henderson testified that he had told Koster that some of the civilians appeared to be victims of artillery fire, but he made no mention of gunfire. Koster’s memory was consistently foggy throughout his interrogations by the Peers commission. He repeatedly denied any recollection of specific conversations. When Koster was told, for example, that Colonel Henderson had suggested that the General initiated the questions about civilian casualties, and was asked why, he said, “Nothing other than this was a populated area and I would have had concern, because, assuming I had been flying over the area of operations and had just seen a lot of civilians moving along the road.” He could not recall if he was over the area that morning, he said, but “assumed” he had been. The two officers agreed that Koster had ordered Henderson to find out how many civilians were killed during the operation.

Henderson then took off for another tour of the My Lai 4 area, again accompanied by his staff. He told the Peers commission that he had radioed Barker and passed along Koster’s demand that civilian casualties be tabulated. Henderson further testified that it was on this trip that he finally had noticed some burning buildings, and had again radioed Barker, “to ask him why those buildings were burning.” Henderson continued, “To the best of my recollection, he told me that the arvn [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] or—not the arvn, the National Police or the company interpreter . . . that was with the companies were setting them afire. And I told him to stop it.” At that point, there were no National Police—South Vietnamese paramilitary police units—on the mission.

Captain Medina testified, however, that he had never received any orders regarding the burning, which continued for some time after the shooting ended. Medina did acknowledge that Major Calhoun, as a result of Warrant Officer Thompson’s complaints about the shooting of civilians, had radioed him, “Make sure that . . . innocent civilians were not being killed. I notified all the platoon leaders . . . to . . . put the word out to their people that if there were any innocent civilians, or any women and children who were not armed, make sure they did not shoot them.” (A similar warning was given to Captain Michles.) Calhoun’s warning was broadcast on the frequency assigned to Charlie Company and not on the task-force frequency, thus eliminating its chances of being monitored at higher headquarters. At this point, Medina testified that he had seen “somewhere between twenty to twenty-eight” dead civilians in My Lai 4, but he claimed nonetheless that Thompson’s complaints were based solely on his killing of a woman in a paddy field outside the hamlet. (Lieutenant Alaux, who was at Medina’s side throughout the operation, told the Peers commission, however, that he had observed sixty to seventy bodies in the hamlet.) Medina said that he had shot the woman, with Thompson’s helicopter overhead, after she made a threatening gesture.

Around eleven that morning, the men of Charlie Company were preparing to have lunch, and Specialist Fifth Class Roberts, of the brigade public-information office, who had landed with Charlie Company and had witnessed the murder of women and children, thought that it was time for him to check in with Bravo Company, near My Lai 1. “I guess I was looking for a story of American heroics in combat,” Roberts told the Peers commission. “Maybe I could go somewhere else and see what was going on.”

Warrant Officer Thompson returned to the improvised helicopter base at Dottie before noon. He and his two crewmen were enraged and frustrated. Their last mission had been to fly a wounded Vietnamese boy to a civilian hospital in the city of Quang Ngai; they had spotted the youth—still alive—amid the bodies in the huge ditch at My Lai 4. Thompson had landed his helicopter near the ditch—the third time he had been on the ground that morning—and his crewmen had rescued the boy. His clothes bloody, Thompson walked into the operations van to describe the scene to Major Watke, the commander of the 123rd Aviation Battalion’s aero-scout company. A few other pilots went with him. Specialist Fifth Class Kubert later told the Peers commission that he had listened closely. “They were white, their faces were drawn . . .” he testified. “They were very tense, very angry. . . . The whole feeling—it wasn’t just one man, it was three or four saying the same thing, the look, the force that they put out—was one of seeing something terrible. And these are men that are used to seeing death.”

Watke, according to his later testimony, did not share his pilots’ rage. He was left with the impression that perhaps twenty or thirty civilians had been killed—“people that obviously could’ve been construed, I guess, as not having been hostile,” he told the Peers commission. He also testified that he did not recall hearing details from Thompson about a ditch filled with bodies. The fact is that Watke was more immediately concerned with Thompson’s having landed at My Lai 4—and having thus interfered with the prerogatives of a ground commander—than with Thompson’s story of a massacre. “In my mind, after I had talked with them, I was left with the impression that it was just in their minds,” he testified. “Maybe there was a little shooting in the area that wasn’t called for. That was the only impression that I went to Colonel Barker on.” Watke spent fifteen minutes debating what would happen to him if he reported the massacre story. He finally decided to go to Barker.

Watke went to the nearby task-force operations center at Dottie and reported the incident to Barker, stressing not the murders but the confrontation between his helicopter pilots and the ground troops. By then, Barker had received the reports of indiscriminate shooting from the radios, and had flown over My Lai 4 to have a look. Recalling Barker’s first reaction, Watke testified, “Colonel Barker didn’t get indignant when I brought it to his attention. His first action was to call out and, as best as I can recall, Major Calhoun was airborne, and he told Major Calhoun, in effect, to look into this.” Major Calhoun testified that after receiving Barker’s request he had checked with Captain Medina and told him “to make sure that there was no unnecessary killing of civilians and no unnecessary burning.” By that time, of course, the warning was far too late. The Major also said that he had flown over Bravo Company’s operational area at roughly the same time to check with the company. Not long after, Lieutenant Thomas Willingham, the leader of the company’s first platoon, ordered his men to cover the slaughtered civilians at My Khe 4 with straw.

By noon, it was clear to most of the men on duty at the 11th Brigade operations center—as it had been for some time at task-force headquarters—that something was seriously wrong at My Lai 4. “Nobody was proud of the body count,” John Waldeck, a former intelligence clerk, told me in an interview. “The officers seemed to kind of restrain themselves.” Waldeck clearly remembered hearing radio reports from Thompson on the morning of March 16th. “They came in for only a few moments,” he said. “I remember him saying that civilians were running all over and they [the men of Charlie Company] were zapping them.” Roy D. Kirkpatrick, the operations sergeant for the brigade, told the Peers commission he had heard Thompson say that Charlie Company was shooting civilians. The Sergeant, a career Army man, indicated that he wasn’t much upset by the report. “We called back to Colonel Barker . . . and asked him what was going on,” he said. “The indication that I took from my position in the T.O.C. [tactical-operations center] would have been to not give credit to this, because the people that we were combatting were dressed as civilians.”

The brigade staff spent much of the day on the telephone to the task-force operations center, urging Major Calhoun and the other men on duty there to pursue the enemy and capture more weapons. Everyone was aware of what was happening in the field, Waldeck said. “We weren’t taking any weapons and had no casualties,” he told me. “And there were no calls for help, medevacs, or gunships—none of that.” At one point, he said, Lieutenant Colonel Richard K. Blackledge, the brigade intelligence officer, had come into the operations center and expressed concern. Yet Blackledge, when he testified before the Peers commission, said, “The only thing I was really aware of was how many casualties we had taken that day. It was quite light and I just attributed this to the fact that we had caught them with their pants down. . . . it appeared to be the case, because we never had this kind of figure in such a short time.”

Colonel Henderson, in a written statement he gave to the Peers commission, said that he had discussed the operations at least twice with Colonel Barker during the early afternoon. He added, “I received a report from him that a total of some one hundred and twenty-eight enemy and twenty-four civilians had been killed in the operation. He was still attempting to secure additional information regarding the manner in which the civilians had been killed.” Specialist Fifth Class Jay Roberts, of the brigade’s public-information office, also saw Barker that afternoon. Roberts returned to Landing Zone Dottie disturbed about what he had seen and unsure about what to write. The truth, he knew, would probably never leave the brigade public-information office. Roberts told the Peers commission that he had interviewed Barker about the mission at the task-force operations center a few hours after returning from the mission. “I asked him for a statement, ‘Give me a quote on your opinion of the operation,’ things like that, and he said something to the effect that it had been highly successful, that we had two entire companies on the ground in less than an hour and they had moved swiftly with complete surprise to the V.C. in the area. . . . And I asked him, of course . . . about the high body count and the low number of weapons, and he just indicated to me that—you know—that I would do a good job writing the story, and said: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ . . . He did . . . indicate to me that he didn’t feel that it was necessary for him to comment on it. It wasn’t part of my story, particularly, anyhow, and I would do a fine job with the information that I had.” Roberts’ story, which was rewritten by Army public-information offices along the chain of command, was the basis of that day’s news about a “victory.”

In addition to starting a chain of events that led to the distortion in news reports of what happened that day, Colonel Barker had taken three other steps that, in effect, obscured the truth about My Lai 4: he had indicated to his artillery liaison officer, Captain Vazquez, that the report of sixty-nine Vietcong deaths resulting from artillery fire should be accepted without question; he had assured Major Watke that Warrant Officer Thompson’s report of the killing of civilians was unfounded; and, going over Colonel Henderson’s head, he had urged General Koster to countermand an order from Henderson that would have sent Captain Medina and Charlie Company back into My Lai 4 to examine the destruction there.

That afternoon, when the pilots from the 123rd Aviation Battalion had completed their assignment at Landing Zone Dottie, they flew back to their home base, at Chu Lai. Captain Gerald S. Walker, a section leader with the aero-scout company, met the men at the flight line. Some of the pilots jumped off their aircraft and threw their helmets to the ground. “They all seemed quite upset,” Walker told the Peers commission. “In fact, some of them seemed disgusted.” Thompson was still complaining about what he had seen as he walked to the operations room to prepare his reports on the action. Major Watke, who had already been told by Barker that Thompson’s story could not be substantiated, was also in the operations room. Walker recalled that Watke “tried to quiet some of the people down to try to keep it within our own group.”

At three-fifty-five in the afternoon of March 16th, this entry was filed in the official Task Force Barker log: “Company B reports that none of V.C. body count reported by his unit were women and children. Company C reports that approximately 10 to 11 women and children were killed either by arty or gunships. These were not included in the body count.” The log noted that the information had been forwarded to the 11th Brigade, but the information did not appear in either the brigade or the division log for the day. Neither Major Calhoun nor Colonel Henderson could explain the entry to the Peers commission. After a series of sharp questions about the entry, Major Calhoun, on the advice of his counsel, decided to exercise his legal right to stop testifying.

In the evening of March 16th, the briefing officers of the Americal Division at Chu Lai reported a total Vietcong body count of a hundred and thirty-eight for the division, all but ten of the deaths having occurred as a result of the Task Force Barker operation. Lieutenant Colonel Francis R. Lewis, the division chaplain, was one of about fifty officers who attended the briefing that night. “We were told a hundred and twenty-eight V.C. were killed in the incident,” Chaplain Lewis told the Peers commission. “And I heard . . . the G-5 . . . say, ‘Ha ha, they were all women and children.’ . . . Somebody else said, ‘Geez, there were only three weapons.’ . . . I think there was a general feeling that this was a bad show, that something should be investigated.” There was no official mention of civilian casualties.

General Koster and General Young, the assistant division commander, left the briefing together, and they discussed the disparity between the number of people killed and the number of weapons captured. Captain Daniel A. Roberts, Koster’s aide, was walking a few feet behind the men. “General Koster made some—there must have been some comment made by General Koster about the disparity,” Roberts told the Peers commission, “and General Young was very annoyed. General Young said he was going to find out, he was going to continue to research the problem and determine what caused this disparity. It was my impression at the time that the 11th Brigade had lied about their body count—that the weapons were correct but the body count was inflated.” Roberts said that the incident had taken place “during the period in which there was a great deal of concern over inflated body counts,” and added, “We’d had many people come down investigating this thing.”

At least three attempts were made that evening to bring some of the truth about My Lai 4 to the attention of higher authorities. Former Captain Barry C. Lloyd, a section leader with the 123rd Aviation Battalion, underlined some of the words in Warrant Officer Thompson’s report and wrote the word “notice” in capital letters beneath a statement about civilians’ being killed at My Lai 4. Such reports, Lloyd testified, were filed after every mission with the battalion intelligence office. He hoped that his small action would make some of the senior officers in the battalion begin asking questions. Kubert, the acting operations sergeant for the aero-scout company, also filed a report. “I wrote that there was approximately one hundred to one hundred and fifty women and children killed,” Kubert told the Peers commission. “And that was about it as far as our action was concerned.” Copies of his report were sent to the aviation headquarters of the Americal Division and also to the division intelligence office. The Peers investigators were unable to find either of the reports or any officer at division headquarters who had any knowledge of them.

Major Watke spent much of the evening in his office at Chu Lai brooding over the discrepancies between what he had learned from his men and what he had been told by Colonel Barker. Around ten, Watke decided to take his story to his immediate superior in the chain of command, Lieutenant Colonel John L. Holladay, the commander of the 123rd Battalion. Much of his worry was over his own future, Watke told the Peers commission. He said, “I still didn’t at the time put all that much significance in the allegation . . . but I told him because I didn’t want someone to come back and surprise him [by saying] that I was out charging people and creating incidents which weren’t founded and he wouldn’t be able to at least halfway come to my defense.” Watke’s greatest concern was over the possible ramifications of Thompson’s interference with the commander on the ground at My Lai 4. He told Holladay about Thompson’s reasons for making the unusual landings on the ground, but he apparently wasn’t convinced himself that the pilot’s actions had been justified. Holladay warned him, Watke recalled, that “my charge was quite something and if it proved to be false . . . that I would just basically be ruined.” But Holladay was more concerned about the reports of indiscriminate killings than about the possible violations of procedure by Thompson. He had sat through the evening briefing at Division, and perhaps he, too, had been wondering about the high body count and the small number of captured weapons reported by Task Force Barker. “At the conclusion of my little story . . . he [Holladay] asked me if I realized what I was doing, and he told me I had better make sure if I was to stand on it,” Watke testified. “I thought about it for a while and I said, ‘Yes, I stand on said.’  ” There was no question in Holladay’s mind after Watke’s visit but that a great many civilians had been murdered—perhaps as many as a hundred and twenty. Holladay told the Peers commission that he had considered waking up his immediate superior, General Young, that night to relay Watke’s account but decided to wait until the next morning. He ordered Watke to meet him sometime after seven o’clock.

Sometime during the evening of the sixteenth, Colonel Henderson telephoned General Koster at his headquarters to report that at least twenty civilians had been inadvertently killed at My Lai 4—something that Koster already knew from Captain Medina. Henderson’s information, however, came from Barker, who had been told to prepare a three-by-five index card for him detailing how each of the twenty victims was killed. Barker’s list would claim that the deaths were caused either by artillery or by helicopter-gunship fire. Henderson’s report should not have surprised Koster, yet the Colonel recalled that the commanding general “evidenced considerable surprise and shock at the number.” He continued, “General Koster was very unhappy, as was I, over this abnormally high number of civilians having been reportedly killed. But there were no further instructions from the General.”

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This is the first of two articles on the Army’s investigation of the Son My massacres.

While the World Burns, the Road Map to War with Iran Continues

June 29th, 2020 by Timothy Alexander Guzman

Let’s face it, the long prediction held by many all agree on one thing, the US empire is on the way into the dustbins of history, but not without a fight to the end.  Geopolitically speaking, the US military-industrial complex is still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq and is seeking to increase tensions with China, Iran and Venezuela.  It will cost the US taxpayers trillions of dollars more on top of the trillions already spent on war, covert actions involving intelligence gathering, targeted assassinations and regime change operations. There is also the fact that several major powers including Russia, China, Iran and several others are dumping US dollars to reduce their exposure to sanctions constantly imposed by Washington. 

Meanwhile, in the land of democracy and freedom, protests have escalated into violence, vandalism and looting by various interests over racism and police brutality. Interestingly, organized groups backed by special interests such as Black Lives Matter and others who seem to made up of many white liberals from Democrat-run blue states who are still pissed off about Hillary losing to Trump along with other criminal elements that are instigating most of the violence.  Then there is a rise in violent crimes, in particular the murder rates in US major cities like Chicago that continue to outpace those in third world cities while protesters are calling for mayors and governors to “defund” the police. With that said, the US is facing a bigger problem overall with an uncertain economic future. To be clear, the US economy was in collapse mode way before the Corona virus pandemic took place. The U.S. is currently experiencing one of the highest-unemployment rates in its recorded history with more than 46 million people out of work leading to a rise in poverty that is increasing by the day.  It is estimated that half of US small businesses will go out of business by 2021.  Major retailers and restaurant chains have filed for bankruptcy and liquidation shedding more jobs in the process.  Mortgage delinquencies are on the rise coupled with an increase of homelessness, a rise in credit card debt has been a major problem along with student loan debts that are not being paid and the list goes on.

The economic downturn and the ongoing protests along with the corona virus pandemic has crippled the entire US population with fear, anxiety and the unknown. So what will happen to the US if it cannot meet the demands of its own citizens when the economy collapses and social unrest begins to spread?  There will be social unrest and the foreign powers who rely on US military and financial support are taking no chances, one of them is Israel.  Netanyahu is pushing Trump into another war that it cannot afford with Iran. Netanyahu and Israel understand very well that they alone cannot take on its Middle Eastern neighbors especially Iran without US support which includes military and financial aid. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is realizing that Trump winning a second-term may be difficult given what is going on in the US.

As of now, it seems that Netanyahu and Trump have influenced France, Germany and the UK to adopt a new resolution to inspect two of Iran’s old nuclear facilities that were shut down since 2003. Headlines by Western and Israeli media including The Jerusalem Post and Reuters ‘Netanyahu: World is Realizing What We Said About Iran Nuclear Threat’ reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is apparently saying that “Iran is lying about its nuclear ambitions.”  Netanyahu spoke before a cabinet meeting last Sunday claiming that “Iran continues to lie to the international community in order to attain nuclear weapons, Netanyahu Warned. “Today, the IAEA understands…what we have said for years.”  The runner up to Israel’s leadership, Benny Gantz declared that “Iran is first of all a problem for the world, then a regional problem, undermining the stability of the whole Middle East, and it is also a challenge for Israel” yet Israel’s history since their creation has caused nothing but problems including major wars with practically all of its Arab neighbors. The report mentioned China’s opposition to the resolution while the three European nations that the US still has under its thumb which are France, Germany and the UK had submitted the new IAEA resolution demanding Iran’s full cooperation:

The IAEA resolution, adopted by its 35-nation Board of Governors on Friday in a vote called after China expressed opposition to it, raised pressure on Iran to let inspectors into the sites mentioned in two International Atomic Energy Agency reports because they could still host undeclared nuclear material or traces of it. 

The text of the resolution submitted by France, Britain and Germany and obtained by Reuters said the board “calls on Iran to fully cooperate with the Agency and satisfy the Agency’s requests without any further delay, including by providing prompt access to the locations specified by the Agency”

US President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal citing that the US got a raw deal and had to give back $150 billion to the Iranian government. “Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with major powers drew a line under what the IAEA and US intelligence services believe was a covert, coordinated atomic weapons program halted in 2003″ the report also mentioned “Israel’s 2018 seizure of an archive of Iran’s past work appears to have yielded new clues on old activities.” Iran’s response to the new accusations that the IAEA is depended on Israeli information as “inadmissible” and that the agency’s file in Iran’s activities at its old sites has been closed.  The Jerusalem Post said that the IAEA suspected Iran of developing nuclear weapons in the early 2000s.  Iran’s online news source Press TVreported what the response was from the Iranian Parliament concerning the IAEA’s demands and criticized the claims made by European powers and the US-Israel Alliance in a recent posting ‘Iran parliament: IAEA resolution proof of structural discrimination within UN nuclear watchdog’ stating the following:

The majority of lawmakers at the Iranian parliament have denounced an anti-Iran resolution recently passed by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors, saying the document is another indication of “structural discrimination” within the UN atomic watchdog. 

In a statement read out on Sunday by Ali Karimi Firouzjaee, a member of the parliament’s presiding board, 240 MPs argued that the IAEA resolution — introduced by the three European signatories to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, namely France, Germany, and Britain — explicitly demonstrated the trio’s “excessive demands”

France, Germany and the UK usually follow their marching orders from Washington and Israel, so they are under pressure to make such demands on the Iranian Republic:

“Iran’s parliament strongly condemns the IAEA Board of Governors’ resolution, which was adopted against Iran’s national interests based on a proposal by three European countries, Britain, France and Germany, under pressure from the US regime and the fake Zionist regime on June 19, 2020,” the statement read, adding that the resolution was “another sign of structural discrimination within the IAEA.”

The Iranian lawmakers also expressed their gratitude to China and Russia for voicing their opposition to the biased resolution, which they called “an obvious attempt at political extortion.”

“In addition to expressing gratitude to the states that did not support the move, the parliament considers the non-binding resolution another sign of the culture dominating the IAEA, which allows nuclear-armed member states not honoring their own NPT commitments to block other states’ access to peaceful nuclear technology”

This past January, Netanyahu gave a holocaust memorial speech at the Yad Vashem memorial institute in Jerusalem comparing Nazi Germany to Iran saying that the Islamic Republic is “the most anti-Semitic regime on the planet” and that “Israel will do whatever it must do to defend our state, defend our people, and defend the Jewish future,”Netanyahu said “there will not be another Holocaust.” Trump’s vice-President Mike Pence attended the Holocaust Memorial speech and said that “In that same spirit, we must also stand strong against the leading state purveyor of anti-Semitism, against the one government in the world that denies the Holocaust as a matter of state policy and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The world must stand strong against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” With that type of rhetoric, peace will never be established.

Israel Cannot Survive a Middle East War and an Economic Downturn Without US Aid

There is an agenda, and that is a calculated war with the oil-rich Iranian nation basically for the security of Israel. A war on Iran will be lead by the US while Israel will have to face their old arch-enemies, Syria and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon dragging in all of their Arab neighbors into a bloody battle that can last years, even decades.  We must also consider the fact that Israel might impose their Annexation plans in the West Bank and that will create another conflict between both Israelis and the Palestinians. Whoever wins the US Presidential election come this November, war is on the table because Israel and the US have an ‘unbreakable alliance and the same common enemy since 1948. In this time of uncertainty, the US and Israel must come to a conclusion that Iran will not fold to their demands, and that means war, a war that can spin out of control. sinking the world’s economy and destabilizing the entire Middle East with US troops stationed all around Iran making them prime targets of retaliation.  Peace is the only solution that can stabilize the Middle East, not another war that will be the mother of all wars. With a pandemic that seems to be here for the long-term, ongoing protests against racism and police brutality and an economy that is on the verge of collapse with a dollar that is slowly losing its reserve status means trouble for the US, but also means trouble for Israel. After all, who will provide Israel with the necessary funds and weaponry to continue its fight against all of their Arab neighbors while attempting to expand its territory in efforts to create their long-term dream of a Greater Israel? Despite the fact that Israel does have one of the top economies in the world with several key sectors with high-technology and industrial manufacturing as their leading economic sectors, they need the US for military and to an extent financial support. There are a number of US multi-national corporations operating in Israel such as Google, Cisco Systems and Facebook among several others who have opened research and development (R&D) facilities and offices.

Israel is also one of the world’s top diamond exporters. In an interesting note, the diamond sector accounts for over 23% of their exports. Israel is known for cutting, polishing and exporting the precious stone since 1937, when Edmond Rothschild, the founder of the first diamond factory in the Petah Tikva settlement in Palestine was established. In 2009, the United Nations has called Israel’s diamond trade in Africa especially in the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and the Congo a “bloody diamond trade.” The UN and a panel of experts accused Israel of being involved in the illegal import of diamonds from Africa in exchange for Israeli made weapons that were used in civil wars that claimed tens of thousands of African lives. Israel is also one of the world’s major exporters of military equipment and policing know-how like those used by the US police forces that rakes in billions per year.

Despite Israel’s economic success, a major war against its neighbors that can go nuclear since Israel has an illegal nuclear weapons arsenal will crash its economy in a matter of weeks, the million dollar question is who will be willing to invest in Israel that will be tied down in a major confrontation with practically all of its Arab neighbors?  The US can’t afford to sustain Israel once its economy collapses, so what will Israel do?

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCN